Of all furniture needs, the chair may be primary. While most of the other forms (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair should be regarded here in the general sense, from stool to throne to derivative makes including the bench and sofa, which might be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently definitive.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and aesthetic artwork; it historically is semiotic of social hierarchy. Within the old royal courts there were plain differences between sitting on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to cope with a stool. Since the last century, the director’s or manager’s chair has risen an indicator of superior dignity, like in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
In a furniture purpose, the chair can be utilised for a wealth of variations. There are chairs created to attend to man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past days there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has developed new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair kinds have evolved to suit to growing human desires. Due to its particular connection with man, the chair comes to its full purpose only when in employ. Whereas it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is really understood and fairly tested by a person utilising it, because chair and sitter complement the other. Thus the various elements of a chair have been given names as the names of our human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal job of your chair is to support the human body, its credit is judged generally for how fully it measures up to this practical use. Within the build of the chair, the builder is restricted by the static rules and principal measurements. Within these boundaries, however, the chair builder has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair was an era of several thousand years. There were cultures that held individual chair types, as seen of the principal object in the arenas of technique and art. From such societies, a mention must be made of ancient Egypt and Greece; China; Spain and The Netherlands in the 17th century; England in the 18th century; and France in the 18th century during the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of expert design, are now a finding from tombs. The first one of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair has four legs crafted akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this a strong triangular construction was made. There appears to be no noteworthy change between the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular peasantry. The only difference was in the kind of ornamentation, in the choice of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was crafted as an easily carried seat for army. As a camp stool that stool existed for much later days. But the stool also was made for the task of a ceremonial seat, its original job as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the shape of folding stools but can not be folded as the seats are formed out of wood. The simplistic manufacture of the folding stool, being of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, is seen again but some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this type is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not as any ancient item still extant but found in a wealth of pictorial items. The most well known is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them were visible. These curving legs were thought to be manufactured in bent wood and were likely to have been subjected to a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore extremely durable and were visibly drawn.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek designs; designs of models of seated Romans are examples of a thicker and apparently slightly crudely designed klismos. Both features, the light and heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist epoch. The klismos style can be evidenced in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in special kinds of considerable originality around Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China cannot be traced as long as in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed folio of drawings and paintings has been kept safe, with images of the insides and exteriors of Chinese houses and the designs of furniture. Also preserved since the 16th century are some chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that show an astonishing similarity to representations of older chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair was found both with and without arms although always with the square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to firm the back. In one style, however, the stiles were marginally curved over the arms for the purpose of fit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of the back). The three areas had been mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of this back splat had an inspiration for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only to a particular limit reinforce corner joints (and then were loose in the result) signify a feature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops upon the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or have rounded edges—a left over perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have had a plaited bottom. These chairs needed the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a habit of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs likely were reserved for older individuals, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have taken to China from the West. It is akin much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is elegantly joined to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is more often than not provided with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the overall effect of both furniture styles is stylized. The construction and decoration issues are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the way that the individual items do not look to have been held together by either glue or screws, but are mortised onto one another and locked into its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Paintings show a type of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same time, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the inside of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this style of chair might also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not believed that the design actually started in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in vast quantities, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of those chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself with its harmonious proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of styles—that was, to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The chair owes this popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are constructed from wood of relatively thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and more upmarket items would be further embellished with special delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and found favour in many parts of the Continent, had no parallel in England. Prior to 1740, the most commonly used wood was walnut; thereafter, and for the rest of the century, it was mahogany. Walnut, though beautiful in hue, was soft and therefore less suited to wood carving than to rounded, curving forms. Outer surfaces, such as the back and seat frame, were usually veneered. During the walnut period, highly overstuffed armchairs, covered with leather or embroidered material, were also developed. The best upholstery of this period is precisely and firmly modelled and accentuated by braiding or tacks. When imports of mahogany became common, no specifically new chair designs appeared, but the character of the woodwork changed. Mahogany, having a firmer, closer grain, could be cut thinner, which meant that individual parts of the chair could be more slender in shape. Mahogany also lent itself better to carving than walnut. Carving was concentrated more on the arms and back than on the legs, which as a rule were straight and smooth with chamfered (bevelled) edges and molding. There was a wealth of variety in chairback designs, featuring elegant, pierced, vase-shaped splats or two upright posts connected by horizontal slats (ladderback).
Alongside the French Rococo chair and the best English chairs in walnut and mahogany, the stick-back chair was relatively unaffected by the stylistic changes of the day. Originally a medieval form, known, for example, from paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and still found in mid-20th century in the churches and inns of southern Europe, the stick-back chair (in all of its variations) consists basically of a solid, saddle-shaped seat into which the legs, back staves, and possibly the armrests are directly mortised. This typically peasant form underwent a renewal and a process of refinement in England and America during the 18th century. Under the name Windsor chair (a term that seems to have been used for the first time in 1731) or Philadelphia chair, it became commonly known and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
In the Neoclassical period, no basic changes took place in chair forms, but legs became straight and dimensions lighter. Backs in the shape of classical vases replaced the fanciful outlines of the Rococo period. Around 1800, freely executed imitations of Greek and Roman chairs of the klismos type, with curved legs and backrest, appeared. French chairs of the Empire period, executed in dark mahogany and embellished with ornate bronze mounts, created a ponderous effect.
In cheaper brands of inferior workmanship, bourgeois chairs of the 19th century carried on the traditions of the 17th and 18th centuries. The only real innovations were the bentwood (wood that has been bent and shaped) chairs in beech that became popular all over the world and were still made in the 20th century. Around 1900 the continental Art Nouveau and Jugendstil styles (French and German styles characterized by organic foliate forms, sinuous lines, and non-geometric forms), and the Arts and Crafts movement in England (established by the English poet and decorator William Morris to reintroduce idealized standards of medieval craftsmanship), gave rise to original chair designs by Eugène Gaillard in France, Henry van de Velde in Belgium, Josef Hoffman in Austria, Antonio Gaudí in Spain, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Scotland. These new furniture styles did not exercise wide, let alone decisive, influence. The Art Nouveau chairs designed by the French architect Hector Guimard, for example, are collector’s pieces, but his name is known to a broader public only because of his fanciful entrances to the Paris Métro.
Modern
After World War I, the Bauhaus school in Germany became a creative centre for revolutionary thinking, resulting, for example, in tubular steel chairs designed by the architects Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and others. During World War II, the aircraft industry accelerated the development of laminated wood and molded plastic furniture. The dominant chair forms of this period go back to designs by Alvar Aalto, Bruno Mathsson, and Charles and Ray Eames. Rapid technical developments, in conjunction with an ever-increasing interest in human-factors engineering, or ergonomics, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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