Antonio Debertolis: an Austrian Chairmaker in Gippsland, Victoria, Australia: Terence Lane

Antonio Debertolis Memorial, Drouin Cemetery, Gippsland, Victoria

This article, which appeared in the Gippsland Heritage Journal No. 24 (2000) is reproduced with the kind permission of the author, Terence Lane, together with Linda Barraclough & Meredith Fletcher of the Gippsland Heritage Journal.

M. R. M. Smith, in his 1968 reminiscences of old Drouin, gives a tantalizing firsthand account of the Austrian chairmaker, Antonio Debertolis, who lived and worked in Drouin at the turn of the century:

One of our neighbours in these days was an elderly Italian, though he might have been a Greek, named Antonio Derbertolis (sic) (generally known as ‘Old Antoney’) who was a positive genius at manufacturing chairs and other household furniture out of blackwood (for the frames) and rushes for the seats, etc. The principal tool which I recall his using was a spokeshave with which he used to shape the wood, and I spent very many happy hours in his workshop watching him. He was a small man, somewhat stooped and bent, with curly hair going grey and with ear-rings in his ears - the ears were pierced, of course. My wife and I still have two of his chairs and a foot-stool which he made for my mother many years ago. In his work Antoney did not use screws, nails or glue and in their place wonderfully shaped wooded dowels held the frames together. The chairs which we have are very light in weight but very strong and never, in all the years we have had them, have the chairs or the foot­ stool required any attention by way of repairs, even though they have suffered some very hard use over the years from three generations of small children.¹

Time has not been kind to Antonio Debertolis. His name was better remembered in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, and in more recent years he has posthumously suffered the indignity of having his chairs misattributed to a number of other makers. The tide appears to have turned, though, and in 1998 two of his chairs, together with a biographical outline, were correctly published in Kevin Fahy and Andrew Simpson’s definitive Australian Furniture: Pictorial History and Dictionary, 1788-1938²

Antonio Debertolis was neither Italian nor Greek, as M.R.M. Smith suggested. He was in fact an Austrian, born in 1849 or 1850 in Tonadico, a village in the Dolomites, at that time in the southern region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but now part of Italy. It is not known when or why he left Austria, but he arrived in the Colony of Victoria from Wellington, New Zealand, in March 1877. He was naturalised in 1893, his application stating that he was a labourer and that he had been living in Drouin for fifteen of his sixteen years in the Colony.³ In the years 1883-84, 1884-85 and 1885-86 he was registered as a ratepayer and occupier of 43 acres of Crown Land in the Parish of Drouin West,⁴ and in 1884-85 the Gippsland directory listed him as a farmer.⁵ Towards the end of his life he was living in Drouin, and the Warragul and District Historical Society has located his house, now demolished, in Young Street, on the outskirts of the town.⁶ When he died in February 1913 at the age of 63, his occupation was again given as ‘labourer’.⁷ He was a Roman Catholic and, apparently, a bachelor, and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Catholic section of Drouin Cemetery.⁸

The bare contemporary details of Debertolis’ life make no reference to his principal claim to fame, the craft of chairmaking that he must have practised on quite a scale during his years in Gippsland. His chairs belong firmly to what has been called ‘the Latin slat-back chair’⁹ tradition, the ‘open frame’ cottage chair idiom of the Mediterranean and other European countries, extending through colonization across the globe. The completeness with which Debertolis transferred the Austro/North Italian tradition to Gippsland is demonstrated by a comparison of one of his baluster-splat chairs (plate 1) with a chair of the same type and about the same date (plate 2) from the Treviso region of Italy, just a short distance from his birthplace. 

Plate 1: Debertolis chair, blackwood, c.1900.
Private collection, Melbourne.

Plate 2: Chair from Treviso region, c.1900.
Private collection, Treviso.

The similarities are striking, even down to the smallest details, such as the outswept top rail and the taper of the feet. This was the ancient craft of the rural or village chairmaker, before the production line and the division of labour - a craft that was completely transportable and, therefore, ideally suited to the itinerant or emigrant craftsman. Debertolis’ tools would have been of the simplest kind - an axe and saw for cutting timber in the bush, wedges and a mallet for cleaving it into manageable lengths, a drawknife or spokeshave for shaping the members, a drill and brace and bit for making rail and stretcher ends and sockets, and a knife for cutting rushes in the local creeks and swamps. There is no evidence that he owned anything as sophisticated as a lathe.

Debertolis chairs are always of blackwood, presumably ‘found’or cut green in the bush. Often he used the sapwood, which was lighter in density than commercial dressed timber and sometimes had a colourful striped appearance. The legs and uprights are generally square-in-section, and tapered, with chamfered edges. The stretchers and rails are usually round in section, either spokeshaved or made from saplings or thin branches, with natural bends and kinks, which would only have to be scraped of their bark. As M.R.M. Smith noted, Debertolis used no screws, nails and glue: slats were secured between rails or uprights with traditional mortise and tenon joints; arm posts, seat rails and stretchers were firmly held in sockets drilled right through the arm rests, legs and uprights rather than concealed; and wooden pegs reinforced the uppermost joints of those chairs with outswept top rails. Although seagrass seats are often found on Debertolis chairs, it seems that all his chairs were originally rush-seated. Excavated original seats have been found to be stuffed with blackwood chips and shavings.¹⁰

Five designs of Debertolis chairs, distinguished by the treatments oftheir backs, have been recorded. They are listed in order of rarity, from the most to the least common:

• Twin, opposing, triangular-shaped horizontal splats, pointing inwards, with the slats secured between the uprights. Types: chair, child’s chair and child’s high chair, (plate 3)

Plate 3: Debertolis chair, blackwood, c.1900.
Private collection, Melbourne.

• Thin, vertical slats, secured between the top rail and cross rail. Types: chair (three slats), child’s chair (three slats), armchair (four, five or six slats) and settle (seventeen slats), (plate 4)

Plate 4: Debertolis chair, blackwood, c.1900.
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.

• Twin, opposing, serpentine, vertical slats, secured between the top rail and the cross rail. Types: chair and armchair, (plate 5)

Plate 5: Debertolis chair, blackwood, c.1900.
Private collection, Melbourne.

• Pierced baluster-shaped splat, secured between the top upright and cross rail. Types: chair (one splat) and settle (five splats).(plate 1)

• Ladderback, with horizontal slats secured between the uprights. Types: chair (three slats) and armchair (four slats).

One of Debartolis’ printed paper labels has survived (ANTONIO DEBERTOLIS/ Maker, Drouin/ Every Chair is Guaranteed for Rough Ware), and a rectangular white enamel label, with black lettering, has been sighted.¹¹

The number of surviving chairs testifies to the strength of their construction and to a wide production. Debertolis apparently catered to both the Gippsland (local and tourist) and Melbourne markets - the latter supplied by the Malvern furniture dealer, E. J. Smith.¹² Debertolis chairs no doubt found their way into many a Gippsland farmhouse, but also had a following in the towns, amongst the local gentry and in the metropolis. Without postulating a brilliant career for Debertolis - quite the opposite - he was in some ways the right man in the right place at the right time, in that rush-seated chairs of honest construction had been promoted internationally since the 1860s, when William Morris, the father of the Arts and Crafts Movement, launched his open­ framed, rush-seated ‘Sussex’ chairs as an alternative to the carved, veneered, French-polished and heavily upholstered contortions of ‘the Trade’. In the late 1880s Morris’follower, Ernest Gimson, revived another rustic classic, the rush-seated ladderback chair, which went on to become a staple of the turn of the century Arts and Crafts interior. The ’90s were the time of ‘the great cleanout’ of the cluttered, heavily upholstered and accessoried interiors of the late Victorian period. This decade also saw the awakening of interest in folk art, and the growing appreciation of traditional furniture forms. These European developments soon reached the design­ conscious elite in the Colonies, and by 1887 we find the author, Ada Cambridge, furnishing the St Kilda home of her Aesthetic heroine with rush-seated chairs, in her story, ‘Human Perversity’.¹³ The cabinet maker and art furnisher must have been pleased to know that they only had to run down to Mr Smith’s in Malvern Road, or send the buggy down to Drouin, to get a near equivalent (plate 4) of the oak and rush-seated armchair shown by Walter Cave at the 1896 Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in London.¹⁴ (plate 6) 

Plate 6: Armchair by Walter Cave exhibited at the 1896 Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, London. Reproduced in The Cabinet Maker and Art Furnisher, November 1896, p. 119.

And in 1908 the Melbourne architect, Robert Haddon, could almost have been talking of ‘Old Antoney’s’ chairs when he recommended, in his Australian Architecture, rush-seated chairs of medium weight for breakfast rooms.¹⁵

From our vantage point at the beginning of the 21st century, it is possible to make quite an impressive list of original Debertolis chair owners. Theatrical entrepreneur, George Coppin, owned pattern 1 chairs, as did artist Frederick McCubbin, who showed his daughter Sheila sitting on one of them in the kitchen at Fontainebleau, Mount Macedon, in his picture, Shelling Peas (c. 1913).¹⁶ Artist and National Gallery of Victoria Director (Director 1892-1935), Bernard Hall, owned chairs of patterns 1 and 5 and featured them in his still lives and interiors. Architect Rodney Alsop had a set of chairs of pattern 2. Both Hall and Alsop, like Robert Haddon, were involved with the Arts and Crafts Movement in Melbourne in the years around 1900. Hall was a contributor to the three issues of Arts and Crafts, published in Melbourne in 1895, 1896 and 1898, and Haddon and Alsop were foundation committee members of the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria in 1908, Haddon as Vice-President and Alsop as a Council Member. Their patronage supports claims of a wider market for Debertolis chairs in Arts and Crafts circles in Victoria, and might explain the timely parallels between Debertolis’ patterns 2 and 5 and the latest overseas Arts and Crafts designs emerging from Great Britain, for example, Gimson’s and Cave’s designs, and America, for example, Gustav Stickley’s.

Debertolis chairs were still prized after his death, and in 1920, when Helen Pearson of Kilmany Park, near Sale, married William Borthwick, of Raeshaw, Fulham, her mother presented her with a large set of pattern 1 Debertolis chairs. When the Melbourne bookseller, Margareta Webber, opened her Little Collins Street shop in 1931, she furnished with Debertolis chairs. The chairs were still there when she retired in 1971. Other second and third generation admirers and owners of Debertolis chairs include the collector, Dr Helen Sexton, the Austrian sculptor, Karl Duldig, the zoologist and writer, Jock Marshall, the jeweller, Matcham Skipper, and the architect, Roy Grounds.

Using the time-honoured designs and methods of his homeland and the native timber and rushes of his adopted land, Antonio Debertolis bridged continents and cultures and created several classic Australian chairs. Those who have the good fortune of living with his chairs never tire of their lively, forthright designs and beautiful, faceted surfaces. In time their maker will be recognised as one of the most interesting craftsmen to have worked in Gippsland.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Graham Nichols, Ruth Dwyer, Ross Newton Smith.

NOTES

1. M. R. M. Smith, ‘Reminiscences of Drouin’ (typescript), 1968. I am indebted to Denise Nest, Warragul and District Historical Society, and Patrick Morgan, Monash University College Gippsland, for this reference.

2. K.Fahy and A. Simpson, Australian Furniture: Pictorial History and Dictionary, 1788-1938, Sydney, 1998, p. 43; pis. 122, 185.

3. Naturalisation papers of Antonio Debertolis, Series A712/1, item 93/V806, National Archives of Australia.

4. Information from Carlo Moscato, Drouin, 23 September 1988.

5. Middleton & Maning, Gippsland Directory, 1884-85, Melbourne, J. J. Miller, 1886, p. 102.

6. Denise Nest, Warragul and District Historical Society, to Patrick Morgan, Monash University College Gippsland, 25 October 1991. Patrick Morgan to author 6 December 1991.

7. ‘Deaths in the District of Warragul’, no. 991/ 3892, Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, Melbourne.

8. Denise Nest to Patrick Morgan.

9. Mobilia, no. 315-16, 1983, pp. 51-62.

10. Information from Graham Nicholls, 22 June 1995.

11. Ibid.

12. The firm, established in 1892 by Edward J Smith, was renamed E. H. Smith & Son in c.1955.

13. Illustrated Australian News, 21 December 1887. 

14. The Cabinet Maker and Art Furnisher, November 1896, p. 119.

15. R.J. Haddon, Australian Architecture, Melbourne, 1908, p.191.

16. Private collection, courtesy of Lauraine Diggins Fine Art. Reproduced in Jane Clark, ‘A Happy Life: Frederick McCubbin’s Small Paintings and Oil Sketches, National Gallery of Victoria and Ballarat Fine Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1991, no. 37, and Graham Cornall, Memories, Perth, 1990, p.171.

Terence Lane is a senior curator of Australian Art to 1900 at the National Gallery of Victoria. He would welcome hearing from anyone with more information on Antonio Debertolis or of his surviving chairs.