The Dragon’s Chair

Eileen Gray, an Irish designer, created the Dragon Chair between 1917 and 1919. The frame is sculpted wood, lacquered brownish-orange and silver, and shaped as the serpentine, interwoven bodies of two dragons, their eyes in black lacquer on a white base, and their bodies adorned in low relief with stylized clouds.

Suzanne Talbot, the first patron to provide her with the opportunity to construct a whole setting, purchased Miss Gray's one-of-a-kind 'Dragons' armchair. The foreign, symbolist nature of the piece places it theoretically within Miss Gray's first creative cycle. It corresponds to the figurative panels and screens that can be traced back to her first public exhibit in 1913 and the first published feature on her in British Vogue in 1917; it has a completely different spirit than the reductionist features such as the 'brick' wall panelling and screens that gave the Suzanne Talbot apartment such a radically modern character.

The armchair distils all that was so personal and magical in Miss Gray's early, intimately expressive era of her career; it is a masterpiece of imagination and execution, startling, inventive, discreetly sculpted, and made.

The chair was projected to be worth between $2.5 million and $3.5 million at a Christie's auction in 2009, but it sold for an astounding $28 million, making it one of the most expensive chairs in the world.

Price: $28 million