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. Shufflin’ Along began a string of Broadway appearances that eventually earned Josephine the title of “highest-paid chorus girl in vaudeville.” In 1925, at the age of 19, 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. She was praised for her energy and glamorous costuming, though her most iconic routine of the time was her Dance Sauvage, which saw her take the stage clad-covered only in a skirt made of bananas. Becoming one of the most sought-after and well-paid stage performers, 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. Recruited into the French Resistance by Jacques Abtey himself, then head of French counterintelligence, 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. That same status enabled her to write notes on her own body, confident that she could avoid a strip search and charm her way out of a Nazi search of her residence at a moment when it was filled with French resistance fighters. By the time she fled France with Abtey under orders from general Charles de Gaulle, the pair carried more than 50 classified documents. Along the way, she 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. At a time when stars the caliber of Sammy Davis Jr. were prohibited from staying at the luxury hotels they performed in, 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. In 1951, Josephine’s activism reached far beyond the stage, as she battled publicly with the Ku Klux Klan, offering to meet them “in the south or anywhere else they like,” while using her visibility in the press to call out public figures such as the heads of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and Oakland Key System Transit Company for their racist hiring policies. The government would eventually strip her of the right to perform anywhere in the US, prompting her return to France. Josephine’s career as a Civil Rights activist arguably reached its peak in 1963 when, with the assistance of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, she returned to America to attend the March on Washington. She was the only woman to address the crowd that day, delivering remarks in her Air Force uniform. Later, after Martin Luther King’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. Though struggles with her age, health and finances mounted throughout the years, Josephine 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. Shufflin’ Along began a string of Broadway appearances that eventually earned Josephine the title of “highest-paid chorus girl in vaudeville.” In 1925, at the age of 19, 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. She was praised for her energy and glamorous costuming, though her most iconic routine of the time was her Dance Sauvage, which saw her take the stage clad-covered only in a skirt made of bananas. Becoming one of the most sought-after and well-paid stage performers, 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. Recruited into the French Resistance by Jacques Abtey himself, then head of French counterintelligence, 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. That same status enabled her to write notes on her own body, confident that she could avoid a strip search and charm her way out of a Nazi search of her residence at a moment when it was filled with French resistance fighters. By the time she fled France with Abtey under orders from general Charles de Gaulle, the pair carried more than 50 classified documents. Along the way, she 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. At a time when stars the caliber of Sammy Davis Jr. were prohibited from staying at the luxury hotels they performed in, 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. In 1951, Josephine’s activism reached far beyond the stage, as she battled publicly with the Ku Klux Klan, offering to meet them “in the south or anywhere else they like,” while using her visibility in the press to call out public figures such as the heads of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and Oakland Key System Transit Company for their racist hiring policies. The government would eventually strip her of the right to perform anywhere in the US, prompting her return to France. Josephine’s career as a Civil Rights activist arguably reached its peak in 1963 when, with the assistance of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, she returned to America to attend the March on Washington. She was the only woman to address the crowd that day, delivering remarks in her Air Force uniform. Later, after Martin Luther King’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. Though struggles with her age, health and finances mounted throughout the years, Josephine 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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