I was thumbing through an FLW: Force of Nature by Eric Nash and saw on p.67 a Thomas Heinz photo of the living room of the Herbert E. Johnson house (1939) in Racine, WI. There to my surprise was a what looked like a Papa Bear chair. A little tough to tell for sure, because the chair is aimed away from the camera at far right and center in the photo. The rest of the furniture seems to be Wright's work and to date from 1939 when the house was built. This chair fits comfortably in the room. Did Wright design a papa bear chair long before Wegner's mid 50s effort? Or did the home's owner just insert one some time later? I can't be sure, but I have vague recollection that this topic might have come up before about this chair. Forgive me if I'm repeating an issue already dealt with before.
No,
Wright didn't design that chair. It looks like The Wegner model to me.
Despite Wright's attempt to design furniture in keeping with every project, chairs were a tricky thing for him. And some of his best clients (or ones with the best houses, anyway) chose other sources for furnishings. The Hannas settled on Scandinavian chairs for their dining room, and the Pews and the Rosenbaums had Eames DCW's (early photos of Rosenbaum show a set of Wright chairs at the dining table; don't know where and when they went !). Other period modern furniture shows up in photos of Wright interiors, and even his own living room held more than one conventional -- even traditional -- upholstered arm chair.
It is likely that the semi-rustic Black Forest (?) three-legged chairs that the Kaufmanns placed around the table at Fallingwater -- so as to accomodate the rippled slate floor -- were likely more stable than some of Wright's tripod opera (old plural of opus -- you could look it up !).
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