Hans Wegner is considered one of the most important and prolific modernists who designed over 500 chairs. In 1943, Wegner designed this now-iconic 'China' chair which derived from an eighteenth-century imperial Chinese precedent, a photograph of which Wegner had encountered in the pages of Ole Wanscher's 1932 book, Types of Furniture, in Aarhus library. In looking to Chinese arts and crafts as models for contemporary furniture in the West, Wegner followed a trend taken up by Arne Jacobsen and other exhibitors at the Copenhagen Cabinetmaker's Guild exhibition already in the early 1930s, and before then by European craftsmen as early as the second half of the seventeenth-century. What set Wegner's designs apart from those of his predecessors was isolation of the key structural components of the Chinese model, the rounded top rail with continuous arms, and the strip-form back support, in a simplified, essentialised modernist design, whose formal details are at once decorative and naturally constructive. Such was the basis of the present 'China' chair model no. 4283, manufactured by Fritz Hansen between 1944 and 1960, which first gained critical acclaim at the 1944 Spring Exhibition of the School of Arts and Crafts in Copenhagen.