Side Chair
- Samuel Gragg, American, 1772-1855
- Work Locations: Boston, MA
- Shop of Samuel Gragg
- Work Locations: Boston, MA
- Active Dates: 1800-1830
Samuel Gragg, Side Chair, about 1808. Painted wood (ash, oak, maple, and beechwood); 33 1/2 × 15 1/4 × 14 1/4 in. Manufactured by shop of Samuel Gragg, Furniture Warehouse, Boston. Denver Art Museum: The Harry I. Smookler Memorial Endowment Fund, 1988.13.
On August 31, 1808, Boston furniture maker Samuel Gragg received a patent for what he named an “elastic” chair. A startling innovation in its day, Gragg’s chair stretched the boundaries of bending wood. Single strips of wood were bent under steam pressure and then held or clamped against specially shaped forms to construct the chair’s continuous seat and back. Additional slats filled in the seat and followed the same sinuous curve. The flexible or “elastic” nature of these thin strips of wood provides the chair with a degree of movement not found in chairs constructed with traditional joinery techniques.
Gragg wanted his chairs to flex, but he also needed them to be sufficiently strong to hold the sitter’s weight. To solve this problem, he created the chair’s compound-curve design; that is, the seat and the back curve in two different directions. This sophisticated solution distributes the weight of the sitter more evenly across the entire frame of the chair.
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