54. LARS SÖDERHOLM (chair maker in Stockholm 1785-1794), an armchair, Gustavian Stockholm work, signed LSH, and with the seal of the Stockholm Chairmakers' Association.

Wood carved leaf rod decor, volute armrests, corner fleurons, well-crowned leg brackets, tapered canelled legs, mahogany stained, seat height 41 cm

PROVENANCE: Christopher O'Regan Collection

Christopher tells us:
The armchair is perhaps the object in my collection that has described the greatest transformation from being just one item among a thousand others of the same kind that I have seen in the antique market, to becoming something that filled me with both sadness and empathy. It is signed LSH which indicates that it comes from the chair maker Lars Söderholm's workshop at Regeringsgatan (in the Polacken block at the part of the street that today forms the northwestern stronghold of the bridge over Kungsgatan). And in the old source material there is a sad and heartbreaking story about his fate as well as that of his wife. I found a search for him in the newspaper Daglig Allehanda from February 1794, in which the troubled wife Elisabet writes that “notwithstanding all the requests and inquiries made, no information could be obtained about the stay of the chair maker (Lars) Söderholm, or wherever he had gone, since he departed from his wife and residence on the 20th of January”. And the most remarkable thing is that we also get a signal from him: “Skolandes Söderholm, which is around (!) 33 years old and small in stature, at the time of his passing he was dressed in a dark blue dress shirt with dark blue silk buttons, a sea-green jacket and vest, black satin trousers, boots and a black hat with Spanish piping and silver button.”
What she didn't know at the time, was that he had already been dead for a little over a month; drowned out at Sickla. Little did she know that she herself would meet a dark fate, and in the 1808 assessment note that the chair widow Elisabeth Söderholm “enjoys the maintenance of the poor as sick and penniless”.
I wish the future owner of Söderholm's beautiful armchair the same sense of empathy with the chair maker and his wife that I enjoyed.