LIBRARY FABRIC, also known as the MISSOURI COMPROMISE,... Lot 70

LIBRARY FABRIC, also known as the MISSOURI COMPROMISE, made of walnut, moulded and carved with profiles by Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Its shape is animated with leaves and scrolls and it rests on four claw feet, two casters at the back. A clapper button behind the chair operates brass levers that extend five steps. Stamped "P.DORDONNAT". American work from the mid-19th century. Covered with a rugged tapestry with exotic plant motifs. Height. 94.5 Width 56, Depth 64.5 cm. (small accidents). Armchair forming a library stepladder after the Missouri compromise. American work from the mid 19th century. Bibliography: - an almost identical armchair by Auguste Emmanuel Eliaers (active in Boston between 1849-1865, "patent date 10/25/1853") kept in New York, at the Brooklyn Museum. - for an armchair with the same system by Auguste Emmanuel Eliaers, sale 9 July 2016, Peterborough, USA, lot n°110. The profiles of our armchair represent Henry Clay (1777-1852) and Daniel Webster (1782-1852), two prominent American senators, who together with John C. Calhoun formed the "Great Triumvirate". Considered one as a slaveholder and the other as an anti-slavery activist, they are gathered back to back on this armchair, whose patented mechanism the year after their death was probably made for an American "mechanical fair", the forerunner of the World's Fairs. This iconography illustrates the compromise of 1850, of which these two parliamentarians were the artisans, thirty years after a first compromise called the Missouri compromise, with identical stakes. Although opposed in their ideas, the senators were eager to preserve peace between the young United States of America, working to contain the separatists of North and South on the occasion of the entry of anti-slavery California into the Union. Their efforts were in vain: nine years after their death, the Civil War broke out. The Civil War ended in 1865 with the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,