It’s an Eileen Gray chair that holds the record of being the most expensive 20th century chair ever to be sold at auction. In a sale of the collection from the home of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé in 2009, her brown leather Dragons chair sold for $29.6m at Christie’s. That’s million. So far, 13 of Eileen Gray’s furniture designs have sold at auction for more than $1m.
“Her work has always performed well on the public market,” said Beth Vilinsky, Christie’s senior specialist for design. “Her designs are viewed as being extremely modernist, forward-thinking and creative. She was extraordinarily talented and inquisitive throughout her career. Her work continually evolved.”
Born in Ireland in 1878, Eileen and her siblings became known as the Grays after her mother inherited a peerage from a Scottish uncle in 1893 and assumed the title of Baroness Gray. Eileen studied at the Slade School of Art in London – her father was a landscape painter – before moving to Paris in 1902 to study drawing. In 1906 she decided to concentrate on Japanese lacquer, becoming the first European designer to use traditional lacquer techniques in modern European design.
By the time she designed the Dragons chair for society hostess Madame Juliette Mathieu-Levy, Gray had been working with lacquer for more than 15 years. The two arms of the chair were made of wood that Gray lacquered by hand, after which she spent days polishing the piece. The form of stylised dragons combined a modern design with the Chinese association of the dragon with power and good fortune. The chair had been purchased by Parisian art dealer Cheska Vallois from the original apartment in 1971; he then sold it to Yves Saint Laurent in 1973. When it sold for nearly ten times its estimate at Christie’s in 2009, the buyer was once again Cheska Vallois, purchasing on behalf of a client.
You can learn much more about Eileen Gray and her ground-breaking designs in our feature in the Winter 2025 issue of Antiques to Vintage magazine. Subscribe today!
