Library Step-Chair

When a lever at the lower back of this armchair is depressed, the back rotates forward on brass hinges at the knees of the chair to reveal a set of library steps. This useful design was popular throughout the nineteenth century in both the United States and Europe. Eliaers’s chair was patented in the United States forty years after Morgan & Sanders introduced the mechanical concept in London in 1811 (see magazine illustration displayed nearby). Eliaers rendered the chair in the then-popular Rococo Revival style, based on the curvilinear mid-eighteenth-century style of the Louis XV period in France.

The two heads on the crest of the chair represent Daniel Webster (1782–1852), at the right, and Henry Clay (1777–1852), at the left, two United States senators who held opposing views on slavery and the extension of the institution into the new territories. Both died in 1852, and this chair, patented the next year, might have been made for one of the so-called mechanical fairs, or trade shows, that were predecessors of the great world’s fairs.

The elaborate tufted upholstery scheme of the chair is original, although the show cover is a replacement. Threads of dark red mohair discovered beneath the tacks securing the original underupholstery were used as a guide to select the modern cover with its machine-printed design.