Rare Set of Six Brass Chiavari Chairs with Green Velvet Seats, Italian Work, Circa 1940

A rare and distinguished set of six brass Chiavari chairs with seats upholstered in green velvet — a refined example of the Italian craft tradition in its most luxurious expression. The Chiavari chair, with its characteristic openwork backrest, tapered legs, and delicate ladder-back structure, is rendered here in polished brass rather than the traditional wood, a transformation that elevates it from a masterpiece of artisanal carpentry into an object of precious metalwork. The green velvet seats provide a chromatic complement of great elegance to the gleaming metal.

The Chiavari chair, first created in 1807 in the Ligurian town of Chiavari by the cabinetmaker Giuseppe Gaetano Descalzi, became one of the most celebrated and widely imitated chair forms in the world. Its extraordinary lightness and formal elegance made it the preferred seating for the grandest events of the 19th and 20th centuries — from coronations and state dinners to the salons of the French Académies. The brass version, produced by Venetian and Roman craftsmen for luxury clients, represented the ultimate refinement of this already prestigious form, its metallic structure rendering the chair's architectural elegance in a material of absolute distinction.

To possess a set of six brass Chiavari chairs is an extraordinary rarity. Presented together, they form a complete dining or reception suite of unsurpassed elegance and historical resonance, equally at home in a formal dining room, a music room, or displayed as a complete ensemble in a salon of considerable ambition.