Minneapolis Institute of Art

Armchair from a pair of armchairs

Designer: Filippo Pelagio Palagi; Gabrielle Capello (Monclavo); Carlo Chiavasse

Date

1835

Medium

Maple, mahogany (modern upholstery)

Department

European Art

Institution

Minneapolis Institute of Art

This regal armchair was designed by Italian painter, sculptor, interior designer, and collector Filippo Pelagio Palagi for the Castello Racconigi, located south of Turin in northern Italy. Palagi was considered the most important Italian interior designer of the 19th century. He began his career working for Napoleon at the Quirinale Palace in Rome. He moved to northern Italy in 1818 and then to Turin in 1832, where he worked for the royal house of Savoy (later the royal family of unified Italy). In the mid 1830s, Palagi was commissioned to redecorate the interiors of Castello Racconigi, a summer palace of the Savoy family originally built in 1570. There Palagi created his best-known Neoclassical interiors. This pair of armchairs belong to a suite of bedroom furniture that also included a daybed now in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, a sofa and chairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and a chair at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Europe

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