Josephine Chalk Velvet Dining Chair

Details

The Josephine Chalk Velvet Dining Chair is a touch of Paris-inspired elegance designed to create the perfect dining experience. Drawing on the Art Deco style and Jazz era grace of the 1930s and 40s, the soft organic velvet upholstery embraces the body, inviting stillness through comfort. Its fluid, rounded lines, evoking the continuous flow of water and the softness of natural movement, make this piece an eye-catcher that will define and enhance the decor of any space while providing next-level leisure. Pair this dining chair with other pieces from the Josephine Collection for a perfect look.

Editors' Note

Born Freda Josephine McDonald in 1906, Josephine Baker hailed from St. Louis, Missouri. At 15 she was discovered by a St. Louis vaudeville group and touring with the group eventually landed her the show Shufflin’ Along, taking her to New York just as the Harlem Renaissance was reaching its height. Josephine was discovered again, this time by American socialite Caroline Dudley for an all-Black vaudeville show in Paris — La Revue Nègre. Dubbed “the Black Venus,” by the French press, Josephine’s image inspired filmmakers who cast her in films including her 1927 silent film screen debut, Siren of the Tropics. In 1937, Josephine became an official French citizen, and by the end of the Second World War in 1945, the performer — who was was fluent in French, Italian and Russian — was the hero of her adopted nation, using her celebrity status to obtain information while performing behind enemy lines and passing information encoded onto sheet music with invisible ink. She would became a lieutenant in the Free French Air Force and would go on to crusade for equality in the US in the early years of the Civil Rights Movement. Josephine secured lodgings for herself and her entire band, dictating terms in her contract for integrated audiences, she battled publicly with the Ku Klux Klan, and in 1963 was the only woman to address the crowd at the March on Washington. After Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination in 1968, Coretta Scott King would approach her to consider assuming leadership of the Civil Rights Movement. Baker, who had adopted 12 children over the course of her life, refused, citing concerns for her children should she be killed. Baker passed away in 1975 at the age of 68. “I have never really been a great artist,” she told Ebony magazine earlier that year. “But I have loved and believed in art and the idea of universal brotherhood so much, that I have put everything I have into them, and I have been blessed.”