Carved and painted pine armchair, decorated in the Dragon style

A chair made of carved and painted pine. The open back consists of two uprights joined by a curved rail that continues forward as arms, to be jointed through the continuations of the front legs, these capped with carved balls. The two back uprights are jointed up into the curved back panel. The front legs are connected below by a rail. The uprights and top rail of the back, the edges of the seat, the front legs and the rail between them are elaborately carved with interlacing bands, grotesque animals and geometrical ornament painted red, blue, green and yellow. The arm-rail is painted with interlacing bands.

This chair, (to the left in the image) together with another (Museum number 4-1901) was bought at the Universal Exhibition at Paris in 1900, by Sir George Donaldson, and given to the Museum along with twenty two pieces of French Art Nouveau furniture and a few pieces from Hungary and Germany, as important examples of a new movement in design. Donaldson, a collector and retired antique dealer, was Vice-President of the Jury of Awards and the only English judge at the exhibition. The furniture, especially the French, was widely criticized as providing poor examples for British designers, but Donaldson defended the gift in a published pamphlet: 'I saw that this, far from being the result of accidental, isolated, or local efforts, was a very active artistic evolution which had spread over the countries of the Continent, and which gave unmistakable evidence of enormous mercantile advantage to its producers....this selection of 'New Art' furniture demonstrates at least that there are forms and combinations of line, colour and materials not hitherto dreamt of in the philosophy of English designers and producers of furniture, and I have perfomed what I felt my duty in placing these things before them.'

The two Norwegian chairs differ in style from the Art Nouveau style of the French furniture bought at the exhibition. They are representative of the focus on Norwegian traditional shapes and motifs by Norwegian designers in the 1890s, part of a growing movement towards nationalism and political independence from Sweden, which was finally achieved in 1905. Kinsarvik was one of the designers who created a Nordic version of the Art Nouveau style.

Lars Tronson Kinsarvik (1846-1925), a woodcarver from Hardanger, a rural area near Bergen, was one of the leaders of a new style of furniture in Norway in the 1890s, blending traditional Norwegian motifs with new furniture forms. The son of a carver and painter, he studied drawing in Bergen, before turning to woodcarving, running a woodcarving school in Hardanger in the late 1880s. Many of his small carvings, at that time unpainted, and made for collectors and tourists, are in the collection of the National Museum in Oslo. In the late 1890s he began to make chairs and cabinets decorated with painted carvings. The Hardanger Folk Museum has a representative collection of his work; his chairs are also in the Musee D'Orsay in Paris (an example almost identical to V&A Museum number 5-1901) and the Higgins Museum, Bedford. The Higgins Museum armchair has a rectangular seat with a high back unlike the chairs shown at the Paris 1900 Exhibition.

The two V&A chairs have curved seats and arms reminiscent of vernacular Norwegian country chairs carved from tree-trunks. The curved arms are made of a single piece of wood bent into shape, echoing traditional bentwood boxes. The two forms of chair made by Kinsarvik: the tall-backed armchair such as the Higgins Museum chair, and the chairs with a lower curved back such as those in the V&A, were also made and exhibited by J. Borgerson at the Paris exhibition. The shallow relief carving of interlaced bands and geometric motifs refer both to traditional Norwegian folk traditions such as the carved decoration on early wooden 'stave' churches, and to the carvings seen on artefacts excavated from Viking burial ships in the 1880s and 1890s. The interlaced designs are reminiscent of the Celtic revival ornament used by British designers such as Archibald Knox's 'Cymric ware' designed for Liberty's, London, in the 1890s.

When this chair was shown at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1900, Norway was still ruled by Sweden, and was not to become an independent country for another five years. However, Norwegian manufacturers and designers insisted on having their own pavilion, distinct from the one showing Swedish objects. At the end of the nineteenth century, designers all over northern Europe were turning to their countries' ancient history for inspiration. In Norway, the enthusiasm for vernacular design was powerfully linked to the struggle for independence. In 1867 and 1880 archaeologists had excavated important Viking ships, and designers responded by creating what became known as the Viking or Dragon style.
On this chair, designer Lars Kinsarvik combined motifs that he would have seen in ancient Nordic art and architecture, with the colourful decoration that was typical of more modern Norwegian peasant furnishings.

5-1901