Wenzel Friedrich, a Bohemian immigrant to San Antonio, Texas, was the premier horn furniture manufacturer of the late 19th century. From the 1880s to approximately 1900, he produced various types of horn furniture: tables, hat and coat racks, umbrella stands, and seating furniture of every kind. His pieces appealed greatly to his Gilded Age clients, who had a distinct taste for the exotic. Yet Friedrich's work was not only popular in the United States, but grew quite favored in Europe, where a taste for horn furniture had already developed in Germany in the 1830s. There, his patrons included Queen Victoria, Otto von Bismark and Kaiser Wilhelm I. This particular chair would have appealed to both Friedrich's European and American clients, combining a horn structural frame with ocelot upholstery.