The Dragon Chair That Set Eileen Gray's Auction Record

Eileen Gray's Fauteuil Aux Dragons (1917) sold for $28.24m (EUR21.91m) at Christie's in Paris on February 23, 2009. The chair had been traded three times before.

Eileen Gray's Dragons armchair was acquired by Madame Mathieu-Lévy, who is better known as Suzanne Talbot. A champion of modern design, Talbot was Gray's first patron to commission an entire apartment, which was completed in the early 1920s in Paris.

Gray's brown leather chair features lacquered wooden arms in the shape of two dragons, their bodies decorated with stylised clouds and eyes picked out in black lacquer. Its exotic design matches figurative panels and screens that featured in an article about Gray's work, which appeared in British Vogue in 1917.

Born in Ireland to an aristocratic family, Gray was among the first women to be admitted to London's Slade School of Art. After an apprenticeship in a London lacquer workshop, she moved to Paris and established herself as designer of chic, modern furniture, opening her own gallery to showcase her work.

Encouraged by De Stijl founder, J.J.P. Oud, and fellow architect Le Corbusier, Gray went on to design not just furniture and apartments but strikingly modern buildings as well.

The sale beat Gray's previous auction record by $27.78m, a 6,000% rise. Her previous record was set by a screen, Panneau ‘Aum Mane Padme Aum' (Salut a Toi, O Joyau dans le Lotus) (1912), which sold for $459,500 at Beaussant & Lefevre on December 3, 2003.