The “Rising Sun” Chair.

The “Rising Sun” Chair. NPS Photo.

In 1779, Philadelphia furniture maker John Folwell provided the Pennsylvania Assembly with a new chair for the legislature’s Speaker. Today, we call this the “Rising Sun” Chair after Franklin’s famous 1787 observation that the gilded half sun on the chair’s top was analogous to the new nation under the Constitution in that both were “rising” to greatness. The Rising Sun Chair replaced an earlier one presumably destroyed by the British Army when they occupied Philadelphia during the fall of 1777 and the spring of 1778. That earlier chair was the one that John Hancock sat in during the Declaration of Independence’s creation in the summer of 1776.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, people frequently confused Hancock’s chair with the Rising Sun Chair and assumed that the two were one and the same. It wasn’t until furniture scholar William Macpherson Hornor, Jr. published his Blue Book, Philadelphia Furniture in 1935 that Folwell’s 1779 creation of the Rising Sun Chair was widely publicized. Even after Hornor’s clarification, the name “Hancock’s Chair” clung to the Rising Sun Chair. Franklin’s 1787 observation about the chair as Washington’s seat during the Constitutional Convention was well known, but it didn’t contribute to naming the chair until the latter part of the 20th century. Perhaps the National Park Service invented the name “Rising Sun” Chair in an attempt to get people to stop calling it “Hancock’s” Chair? The Rising Sun Chair remained in the custody of the Pennsylvania State Legislature until 1872 when Frank Etting, the chairman of Philadelphia’s Centennial committee, and two former state governors negotiated the chair’s return to Independence Hall. Since then, the chair has been a focal point of many exhibits in the Hall’s Assembly Room.

Over the years, the Rising Sun Chair has undergone many changes. For example, in 1838, Philadelphia antiquarian John Fanning Watson saw the chair in Harrisburg and sketched it showing that the chair had casters for feet, rather than the flat caps that we see today. In addition, the chair’s wooden frame shows many nail holes (although no traces of the original upholstery material remain) indicating that the chair has been upholstered many times since it was new. During the National Park Service’s early stewardship of the chair, it received new upholstery as part of a larger furniture restoration project. Recently, the appearance of that modern upholstery was questioned by INDE curators who asked the Friends of Independence to fund a chair study and reupholstery project. In 2008, the Friends received $9000 from Tourism Cares, a national philanthropic group. These funds paid for the Rising Sun Chair’s reupholstery, a 3-month project completed just in time for this year’s July 4th celebration.

The new upholstery addresses three main questions about the chair’s historic appearance: (1) what kind of material would be used on such an important chair that also saw such hard use? (2) how would the chair’s upholstery have been ornamented, if at all? and (3) how would 18th-century upholstery methods have made the chair’s original cushioning look? Karie Diethorn and Bob Giannini discussed these questions with the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s lead furniture conservator, David deMuzio, and his associates.  The PMA conservation staff is intimately familiar with 18th-century Philadelphia furniture of the highest caliber as their institution contains some of the most important examples of the city’s 18th-century cabinetmaker’s trade. The study group concluded that cow hide tanned dark brown would have been considered in 1779 to be both attractive and durable. Ornamental brass tacks, sized to match those on surviving chairs of the same time period, were used to outline the bottom edges of the chair’s seat and arms. The tacks were not added to the top edges of the chair’s seat because that style or ornamentation wasn’t popular in Philadelphia around the time of the Revolution when the Rising Sun Chair was made.  Finally, the newly upholstered seat has a much loftier profile now than previously as the former is closer to what chairs of this era usually had. The PMA conservators further tweaked the chair’s new upholstery by artificially stressing the leather to simulate wear. This artificial patina lends great character to the new upholstery and suggests the heavy use the chair would have gotten during the first 60 years of its highly visible life.

One final aspect to the Rising Sun Chair’s new upholstery reminds us that this isn’t just any chair. All of the recent upholstery work was done with one very important goal in mind– the preservation of the chair’s original, historic wood. To do that, the PMA conservators attached nothing to the chair’s frame.  Instead, all of the upholstery is built upon a lightweight platform that sits on top of the chair’s frame. This platform also provides a base for the upholstery that covers the front of the chair seat edges; the ornamental brass tacks are just heads glued onto the upholstery. This conservation upholstery method means that even George Washington couldn’t sit on the Rising Sun Chair today– the chair seat can no longer support anyone’s weight!