From each of the furniture pieces, the chair may be the most important. While most of the other pieces (save the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair should be viewed here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to complex chairs such as the bench and sofa, which might be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly labeled.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as a creative art. The chair is not just a physical support and/or aesthetic creation; it historically is an indicator of social standing. In the past royal courts there were significant signifiers between sitting on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to make do with a stool. In the 20th century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been seen as an identifier of superior status, and in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a higher platform.
As its furniture form, the chair ranges from a number of various makes. There are chairs created to suit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the olden days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has designated particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair types has perfected to suit to evolving human requirements. Due to its significant connection with man, the chair lives to its full advantage only when utilised. Whereas it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there is anything inside or not, a chair is seen best and tested by a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the various limbs of the chair are labeled as the names of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first work of the chair is to support the body, its value is valued firstly by how well it fulfills this practical purpose. Within the design of the chair, the builder is limited for certain static laws and principal measurements. Inside these limitations, however, the chair builder has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair is dates of several thousand years. There existed civilizations that had iconic chair types, as expressive of the foremost task in the arenas of technique and art. Within these societies, a mention can 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of skilled craft, are known from tomb discoveries. The first one of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair had four legs crafted as akin to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this a stable triangular structure was created. There was in our view no particular difference between the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical populace. The real change lied in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the selection of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was made to be an easily carried seat for officers. As a camp stool this kind persevered for much later times. But the stool then was created as the character of a ceremonial seat, its original task as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can today be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the construction of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats were formed with wood. The simplistic structure of the folding stool, composed of two frames that spin on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, was then seen but some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of this type is the folding stool, made of ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient specimen still extant but as seen from a wealth of pictorial items. The most recognisable is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs would be visible. These strange legs were presumably crafted of bent wood and were in that case needed to bear extreme pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore very stable and were visibly denoted.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; a number of models of seated Romans offer chairs of a thicker and apparently rather less delicately crafted klismos. Both designs, the light or the heavy, were popularised within the Classicist epoch. The klismos chair can be found in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some particular brands of notable individuality within Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China can not be charted as far back as chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of drawings and works of art had been preserved, showing the inside and outside of Chinese buildings and their furniture. Kept also of the 16th century are a trove of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that display an interesting similarity to designs of previous chairs.
As in Egypt, there existed two standard chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That chair is constructed both with and without arms however always with the square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to give support to the back. In one image, however, the stiles were lightly curved over the arms to fit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a back). The three limbs had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Although the innovation of the back splat then had an influence on English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that could only to a limited ability embolden corner joints (and furthermore are loose to top that off) are a signature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends about the rounded staves. All members are round in section or have rounded edges—acknowledging perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and might have had a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to be stiff and upright; if too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs probably were reserved only for elderly family members, for they were respected greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have taken to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is intricately held to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is generally designed with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of these two furniture styles is stylized. The structure and aesthetic parts are combined in a way that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual items do not seem to have been held together by use of either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and fixed in its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Artworks project a design of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same time, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is found in engravings of interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this type 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 innovation actually originated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in vast numbers, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of this kind of chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself with its shapely 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 forms—that was, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The model owes its popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them use wood of quite thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and more upmarket examples would be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carvings. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more open in style than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and found favour in large 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 popularised 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 versions 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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