Detail: Auction: Wednesday, March 25, 2026 at 9am ET
Previews: March 19–21 & 23–24, 10am-5pm; March 22, 12-5pm

This season, Sotheby’s is honored to present Huanghuali for the Scholar’s Studio: An Important Private Collection of Classical Chinese Furniture, comprising fourteen exceptional works of Ming- and early Qing-dynasty ‘huanghuali’ furniture from a distinguished private collection. The sale is led by an exceedingly rare and important seventeenth-century ‘huanghuali’ folding horseshoe-back armchair (jiaoyi), formerly in the collection of Frederic Mueller and previously part of the Museum of Classical Chinese Furniture in Renaissance, California. With fewer than thirty examples of this form known to survive from the Ming dynasty, the folding horseshoe-back armchair is one of the rarest and most celebrated forms within the canon of classical Chinese furniture. Distinguished by its elaborately carved openwork backsplat and sinuously curved crestrail, the present chair stands as a masterful expression of the form. Other highlights include a rare pair of seventeenth-century ‘huanghuali’ and ‘huamu’ ‘Fu character’ armchairs (sichutouguanmaoyi), also formerly in the Museum of Classical Chinese Furniture; a rare late Ming-dynasty ‘huanghuali’ trestle-leg altar table (qiaotou’an); and a very rare seventeenth-century ‘huanghuali’ sedan chair from the esteemed collection of Robert and Alice Piccus.