Lost Danish Treasure – Oro Editions – Publishers of Architecture, Art, and Design

Architecture

Lost Danish Treasure

“The history of Finn Juhl’s iconic Chieftain Chair and a long-forgotten painting that preceded it.”

Growing up, almost every kid dreams of finding buried treasure. That dream slowly fades with age as they realize that Blackbeard never visited their backyard. For some, the search for treasure continues in their adult lives in other ways. Metal detectors and shovels may be replaced with online searches and library visits, but the thrill of the hunt is still alive, ever driving the quest forward. Lost Danish Treasure tells the tale of two stories: 1) the history of Finn Juhl’s iconic Chieftain Chair and a long-forgotten painting that preceded it, and 2) the individual connections to this design by a small group of collector researchers.

Although starting in different eras and timelines, the two accounts start to intertwine over the course of the book, with the research efforts of today helping to unravel the mysteries of the past. As each chapter unfolds, more and more clues are revealed that slowly weave the storylines closer together—until the summer of 2021, when both accounts collided after Lot 242 popped up in an auction house in Chicago. The result of the subsequent analysis sheds new light about the origins and identity of the very first Chieftain Chair.

“How four Danish Modern collectors leveraged years of previous research to connect the dots and uncover a lost masterpiece of Finn Juhl . . . no one realized it was missing.”

In his youth, Finn Juhl originally wanted to become an art historian, before a compromise with his business-minded father resulted in the son’s enrollment into architecture school. Although trained as an architect, Juhl returned to his first love of art by using watercolors to help bring life to his architecture and furniture technical line drawings. Copies were often made from original line drawings and then watercolored afterward for use as either gifts or for marketing purposes. Juhl had famously used watercolor in 1950 to help convince Baker to approve his designs for production, after the black-and-white line drawings initially sent were returned and rejected. Recent interest in Finn Juhl has blossomed to the extent that a book dedicated solely to his watercolors was published just a few years ago, in 2015.

Watercolors by Finn Juhl, by Anne-Louise Sommer, was compiled and supported by the Designmuseum Denmark, where most of the original watercolors that Juhl created during his lifetime now reside. These watercolors were part of a large drawing and documentation archive donation by Juhl’s widow, Hanne Wilhelm Hansen, after his death at an early age in 1989. With limited Juhl watercolors left in private hands, the pre-auction estimates of $3,000-$5,000 was perhaps a touch on the low side, even for a watercolor of an American-made Baker Chieftain, painted on a reproduced drawing.

Except this watercolor wasn’t done on a copied drawing, nor was it of a Baker Chieftain.