1950s Ernest Race Antelope chair

Product code: 963

1950s Antelope chair designed by Ernest Race.  Bent steel rod frame and moulded plywood seat.  

In good vintage condition.  The frame and seat have been stripped and polished.

The Antelope chair was designed for the 1951 Festival of Britain, where it gained much critical acclaim.  The lightness of its steel wire form and its playful reference to traditional chair design make the Antelope chair an iconic design piece.  

"On an aesthetic level the Antelope chair articulates its importance as a leading example of post-war chair design. The chair expresses a whimsical and almost frivolous optimism rare in other international designs from the early 1950s. Whilst the ball feet suggest the molecular and atomic imagery characteristic of the period, the outline of the frame appears almost as if a Saul Steinberg cartoon, a fluid freehand movement of continuous line. The vertical slats to the back recall the Windsor side chairs, a folk form popular in both America and Britain from the Eighteenth century onwards". (Design Museum).