South African Design, Past & Present
Timed Online Auction, 7 - 26 June 2024
Furniture and Metalware
Incl. Buyer's Premium & VAT
About this Item
Notes
Siegruhn came out from Germany in 1818 and worked in the Eastern Cape area. His benches, with their very specific design vocabulary of shells and volutes or breaking wave motifs on the back rail make them very recognizable and they are know as the 'Eastern Cape benches' . What makes these benches very special and collectable is the fact that they are of exceptional quality but also that Siegruhn was one of the very few furniture makers that marked his pieces.
The tapering neo-classical legs point to the fact that this specific bench is an earlier example. Story has it that it was buried during the Boer War in the Stormberge in order to save it from the English.