Details
The Josephine Club Chair features 100% top grain Italian leather. This sumptuous seating with a smooth finish includes button-tufted details and shimmering chrome feet, all supported by a Brazilian hardwood frame. The height of luxury for your living room, the Josephine Club Chair is a beautifully constructed piece that looks best when paired with the Josephine Sofa and settee.
Editors' Note
Born Freda Josephine McDonald in 1906, Josephine Baker hailed from St. Louis, Missouri. Impoverished from birth, Josephine was working as a live-in domestic for white families by the time she was 8 years old, organizing groups of Black children to go door-to-door offering cleaning services in white neighborhoods. By the time she was a teenager, a fraught relationship with her mother had driven Baker from the family home. At 15 she was discovered by a St. Louis vaudeville group. 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. The clear standout of the production, Josephine was 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, the 1934, Zouzou, and 1940’s, Fausse Alerte, among others. Pablo Picasso would sketch her, calling her “the Nefertiti of Now;” painter Paul Colin created perhaps the most iconic image of her in his 1927 work, A Dancer With a Banana Skirt, sometimes simply called, Josephine Baker; and Alexander Calder sculpted her in wire. 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. Josephine used her celebrity status to obtain information while performing behind enemy lines and attending diplomatic functions, obtaining visas for resistance fighters and passing information encoded onto sheet music with invisible ink. She would became a lieutenant in the Free French Air Force and would wear her uniform on special occasions with pride for the rest of her life. She put her increased status to work again, this time crusading 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 and forcing compliance when managers tried to renege, she battled publicly with the Ku Klux Klan, and in 1963 was the only woman to address the crowd at the March on Washington. Later, 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 continued to perform throughout her life, passing away in 1975 at the age of 68. She was found lying peacefully in her bed, surrounded by newspaper reviews excitedly celebrating her latest performance. “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.”
Details
The Josephine Club Chair features 100% top grain Italian leather. This sumptuous seating with a smooth finish includes button-tufted details and shimmering chrome feet, all supported by a Brazilian hardwood frame. The height of luxury for your living room, the Josephine Club Chair is a beautifully constructed piece that looks best when paired with the Josephine Sofa and settee.
Editors' Note
Born Freda Josephine McDonald in 1906, Josephine Baker hailed from St. Louis, Missouri. Impoverished from birth, Josephine was working as a live-in domestic for white families by the time she was 8 years old, organizing groups of Black children to go door-to-door offering cleaning services in white neighborhoods. By the time she was a teenager, a fraught relationship with her mother had driven Baker from the family home. At 15 she was discovered by a St. Louis vaudeville group. 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. The clear standout of the production, Josephine was 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, the 1934, Zouzou, and 1940’s, Fausse Alerte, among others. Pablo Picasso would sketch her, calling her “the Nefertiti of Now;” painter Paul Colin created perhaps the most iconic image of her in his 1927 work, A Dancer With a Banana Skirt, sometimes simply called, Josephine Baker; and Alexander Calder sculpted her in wire. 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. Josephine used her celebrity status to obtain information while performing behind enemy lines and attending diplomatic functions, obtaining visas for resistance fighters and passing information encoded onto sheet music with invisible ink. She would became a lieutenant in the Free French Air Force and would wear her uniform on special occasions with pride for the rest of her life. She put her increased status to work again, this time crusading 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 and forcing compliance when managers tried to renege, she battled publicly with the Ku Klux Klan, and in 1963 was the only woman to address the crowd at the March on Washington. Later, 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 continued to perform throughout her life, passing away in 1975 at the age of 68. She was found lying peacefully in her bed, surrounded by newspaper reviews excitedly celebrating her latest performance. “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.”
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