Out of each of the furniture pieces, the chair could be the primary one. While many other objects (save for the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is intended to be viewed here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to further pieces for example a bench or sofa, which may be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or aesthetic piece of art; it historically was semiotic of social rank. Within the Medieval royal courts there were significant signifiers between being led to a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to cope with a stool. During the recent century, the director’s or manager’s chair has developed iconic of superior dignity, and even in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a raised platform.
As a furniture creation, the chair is utilised for a range of various models. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the past there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has demanded particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair types have adapted to fit to changing human uses. For its unique link with man, the chair comes to its full importance only when being utilised. Whereas it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there might be anything inside or not, a chair is best seen and regarded best by a person using it, because chair and sitter need one another. Thus the several elements of a chair were given labels as the areas of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the clear job of a chair is to support the body, its worth is tested firstly from how well it fulfills this practical use. In the build of a chair, the carpenter is bound for certain static legislation and principal measurements. Through these limits, however, the chair builder has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair covered dates of several thousand years. There were peoples that have created iconic chair forms, expressive of the topmost endeavour in the arenas of craft and creativity. Among these peoples, a mention should 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 objects of masterful design, are a finding from tomb discoveries. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have four legs structured akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this design a strong triangular form was created. There was from our view no notable difference from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical peasantry. The real change existed in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the evidence of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was made as an easily portable seat for army officers. As a camp stool that type persisted until much later days. But the stool also then took on the use of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can today be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the construction of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats are worked from wood. The simplistic structure of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric held between them, reappears somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this kind is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not as any ancient item still around but found in a wealth of pictorial objects. The archetype is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location near Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them were seen. These curving legs were probably crafted of bent wood and were probably bore great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore super solid and were overtly drawn.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek designs; evidence of casts of seated Romans are chairs of a denser and in appearance kind of less intricately built klismos. Both features, the light or heavy, were revived within the Classicist era. The klismos design is known in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some particular kinds of profound uniqueness in Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be traced as long as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed series of images and artworks had been kept safe, detailing the insides and outer parts of Chinese homes and the kinds of furniture. Also preserved of the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that show an amazing likeness to styles of previous chairs.
Same as in Egypt, there existed two particular chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This chair can be designed both with or without arms however never without the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one type, however, the stiles could be delicately curved over the arms so as to conform to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a chairback). Together, all three areas are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Although the style of a back splat later had an introduction for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden members that just to a limited ability embolden corner joints (and were loose in the result) are a signature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which finishes about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or have rounded edges—a left over as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and may have had a plaited texture. These chairs required of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs likely were kept only for older individuals in the family, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have been brought to China from the West. It is akin much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is delicately fixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is usually designed with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resulting effect of both furniture styles is stylized. The constructive and decorative aspects are combined in a manner that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual parts do not look to have been held together with either glue or screws, but have been mortised into one another and held in place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Artworks display a kind of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to bring out a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture in traveling which, in the same time, held the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is displayed in engravings of the inside of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this type of chair is also seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not determined that the design actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in vast amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of these chairs lined up along a wall. The design asserts itself with its shapely proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that was, to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The style owes its popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat adheres to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them use wood of rather thick density; but all the members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been taken away, and more upmarket items can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carvings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used in place of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and was popular in several 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 reknowned 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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