From all the furniture pieces, the chair might be primary. While many other pieces (save the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair must be viewed here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to developed forms including the bench or sofa, which can be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and/or an aesthetic creation; it is historically semiotic of social standing. From the Medieval royal courts there were social signifiers between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or having to utilise a stool. From the recent century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been regarded as a symbol of superior dignity, like in democratic governments the speaker sits on a high-set level.
As its furniture purpose, the chair can be utilised for a number of different makes. There are chairs manufactured to suit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). During historical days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); since 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 make chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has developed special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair shapes have changed to suit to evolving human uses. From its particular connection with man, the chair comes to its full importance only when in use. Though it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there is anything inside or not, a chair is really seen and fairly evaluated by a person utilising it, because chair and sitter complement the other. Thus the individual limbs of the chair have been labeled likened to the parts of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary role of the chair is to support our human body, its credit is tested basically on how suitably it measures up to this practical purpose. In the creation of a chair, the carpenter is restricted in particular static law and principal measurements. Through these limitations, however, the chair maker has large freedom.
The history of the chair covered an era of several thousand years. There are societies that made individual chair shapes, expressions of the principal endeavour in the industries of technique and aesthetics. Out of such cultures, special 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of careful craft, are today seen from tomb discoveries. The first one of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair has four legs crafted akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this way a durable triangular construction was obtained. There appears to be no marked change from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary peasantry. The general variation existed in the type of ornamentation, in the evidence of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was created for an easily stored seat for army officers. As a camp stool this form persisted until much later periods. But the stool also then was created as the use of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical task as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from evidence be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the structure of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats are formed with wood. The simple build of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that spin on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, then came again at some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of those is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is found not as any ancient item still around but seen in a trove of pictorial objects. The better known is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those were shown. These unusual legs were presumably executed of bent wood and were as such subjected to extreme pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore extremely strong and were overtly indicated.
The Romans adopted the Greek design; a number of casts of seated Romans show examples of a thicker and which appear to be a kind of less intricately crafted klismos. Both types, the light and heavy, were popularised within the Classicist time. The klismos design is used in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some types of profound individuality in Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China can not be charted as long as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken collection of images and paintings has been protected, detailing the interior and outside of Chinese houses and the furniture. Also preserved of the 16th century are a trove of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an interesting similarity to designs of past chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there existed two major chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair can be seen both with or without arms although always with a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to give support to the back. In one kind, it has been seen, the stiles are delicately curved on top of the arms to conform to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of the back). The three areas were mortised into the yoke-like top rail. While the style of the back splat then had an inspiration for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only to a particular extent support corner joints (and are loose into the bargain) represent a feature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which stops over the rounded staves. All members are round in section or is given rounded edges—a left over perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and might have had a plaited texture. These chairs demanded of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs presumably were allowed only for elderly family members, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It is not dissimilar very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is intricately joined to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is often provided with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resultant effect of both these furniture forms is stylized. The structure and decoration elements are combined in a manner that is all at once naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the fact that the individual items do not appear to have been put together with either glue or screws, but are mortised into one another and fixed in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Paintings project a kind of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same time, had the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be found in engravings of the interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this kind of chair can also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not believed that the innovation actually started in The Netherlands. Usually, 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 produced in large amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its elegant proportions and fine 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 brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike methodology in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of quite thick density; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been taken away, and more expensive chairs might be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and won favour 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
During 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 styles 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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