Side Chair

George Mann Niedecken was a prominent “interior architect” based out of Milwaukee from 1902 to 1945. He began his career as a freelance designer from 1902 to 1907, collaborating with a number of prominent Prairie School architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright and the firm of William Gray Purcell and George Grant Elmslie, to design furniture, art-glass, textiles, and murals that accompanied a building’s architecture. This chair was designed for the dining room of the Adam J. Mayer House in Milwaukee. The chair evokes the Prairie School style with the play of horizontal and vertical lines and use of wheat-yellow upholstery to evoke the prairie. Niedecken’s work, however, also shows influence from the Art Nouveau and Vienna Secessionist styles—we get a sense of these influences in the chair’s rounded top and the space between the chair’s seat rails and crests.