A Dentist’s Chair: For Practicality, Comfort, or Spectacle?

This essay focuses on a thirteen-inch-high reclining chair with a carved walnut frame, brass base, and emerald green velvet upholstery in the Winterthur Museum collection [1 and 2]. Created by Ira Salmon of Boston circa 1866, the chair is a patent model and part of Salmon’s efforts to win a professional reputation as a dentist early in his career. This essay documents the transformation of dentistry in America from an itinerant practice in the early republic to a professionalized career in the mid-nineteenth century. It offers evidence of how the material world of dentists changed when tools of the profession became standardized and mass produced. Developing technologies facilitated reclining chairs suited for newfangled operative techniques. The essay also focuses on a period that anticipates the development of germ theory in the early twentieth century and the sterilization of the dentist’s office. In this mid-nineteenth century moment, the aesthetics of dentist offices, and their chairs’ designs, bridge a divide between the traditional values associated with dentists and those ascribed to dentists today. The patent model demonstrates Salmon’s desire to appeal to his clients’ interest by capturing the dramatic potential of a dentist’s visit while satisfying their desire for comfort and expectation of skilful technique. Olivia Armandroff is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California. She works on early- to mid-twentieth-century American art. She holds a B.A. from Yale University in History and the History of Art where she wrote and later published a senior thesis on how the early-twentieth-century phenomenon for individualized bookplates. Before coming to USC, she was the John Wilmerding Intern for American Art at the National Gallery of Art and then earned an M.A. in American Material Culture from the Winterthur Program where her master’s thesis was dedicated to the early twentieth-century, New York salon of Muriel Draper. Olivia has curated exhibitions at the Yale University Art Gallery, Sterling Memorial Library, the Delaware Art Museum, and the American Swedish Historical Museum and has contributed to exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, the Blanton Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.