Details
About this piece
The design is James Leonard's, made for the Education Supply Association (ESA, trading as Esavian), the company that re-fitted Britain's post-war schools. His stacking chair, the Lamstak, took the moulded plywood developed for wartime aircraft and put it under schoolchildren; it arrived alongside the Eames bent-ply chair of 1946 and now sits in the V&A. Cast aluminium and moulded ply, made to stack and be forgotten, it turned out to be one of the quiet landmarks of British post-war design.
Leonard himself is the part almost no one can name. He came to ESA in 1946, just out of the RAF and already in his forties, and turned a school-supply firm into a serious modern furniture maker, pushing cast aluminium and moulded ply when both were still new ideas. His aluminium work ran in Domus in 1948; the few who have since gone looking for him point out that this was two years before Prouvé's celebrated compass leg, and argue Leonard got there first. Whether or not that settles anything, it places these chairs in the founding stretch of post-war design, drawn by a man the design books mostly left out.
The cast oval on the frame reads EDUCATION N.S.W. DEPARTMENT: these are the Australian issue, the chairs that furnished New South Wales schoolrooms rather than English ones. They wear that service plainly. Some of the ovals have gone smooth through use, and a faint mark underneath still points to the office they were kept in, the small kind of context that usually gets rubbed off things entirely. Sold as a set of four.
Specifications
- Britain / New South Wales, Australia, c. 1950s-70s
- Designed by James Leonard for ESA / Esavian; NSW Education Department issue
- Cast aluminium frame, moulded plywood seat and back, stackable
- 77 x 43 x 48 cm each (H x W x D); 3.8 kg each, 15.2 kg the set of four
- Sold as a set of four; wear consistent with age and use. One chair has heavier wear to its front foot stoppers; it still stands level and sits true
- Color
- Silver
- Style
- Mid-Century Modern
- Material
- Aluminium
- Condition
- Good
- Dimensions (cm)
- W 43D 48H 77
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