Folding Invalid Chair

This folding chair can assume more than fifty positions. The design for the chair is derived from European late eighteenth-century portable metal campaign furniture used by military officers in the field. The appeal of elaborate folding chairs to late nineteenth-century American consumers who lived in small urban spaces is confirmed by the nineteen United States patents granted between 1870 and 1889 for similar pieces of furniture. The designer of this chair, Cavedra B. Sheldon, sold his design to the Marks Adjustable Folding Chair Company, which manufactured it for almost twenty-five years. Furniture that metamorphosed into different forms for different uses was not only useful, but also signaled an avid interest in invention and innovation that marked American industry after the Civil War and ushered in the Machine Age.

The upholstery on this chair is modern but reproduces the elaborate schemes popular when the chair was made. Old trade cards such as the one suspended above and images from the Mmarks Company trade catalogue served as models. The detail of the fringe is copied exactly from a rare original fragment that survives on a similar chair in the Denver Art Museum.