Out of all furniture forms, the chair could be the paramount one. While most of the other pieces (save for the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair was looked upon here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to complex chairs including a bench or sofa, which may be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support and aesthetic craft; it was historically a symbol of social standing. In the past royal courts there were plain differences between having a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to cope with a stool. From the past century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been regarded as a symbol of superior rank, and even in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on an elevated level.
In its furniture form, the chair holds a number of different purposes. There are chairs manufactured to match man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From historical times there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has derived particular chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair types have perfected to fit to growing human desires. For its significant importance with man, the chair exists to its full advantage only when used. While it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there are items inside or not, a chair is really seen best and judged with a person using it, for chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the different parts of the chair have been named as the parts of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal function of the chair is to support a body, its worth is evaluated principally from how suitably it fulfills this practical function. In the structure of the chair, the chair maker is bound within the static laws and principal measurements. Inside these boundaries, however, the chair creator has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair lasted over dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of cultures that had distinctive chair forms, expressions of the topmost craft in the arenas of craft and art. Within those cultures, special note 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of careful craft, are today seen from tomb findings. The first of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have four legs structured as akin to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this design a strong triangular construction was created. There was from our knowledge no noteworthy differentiation in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common populace. The main change lies in the complexity of ornamentation, in the particulars of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was designed to be an easily packed seat for army. As a camp stool that chair stayed til much later periods. But the stool also then was designed as the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical task as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be observed, 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 were constructed in the form of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats were formed from wood. The easy construction of the folding stool, composed of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, then came up but somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of those is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not as any ancient fossil still extant but as seen from a wealth of pictorial objects. The most well known is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area near Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of which could be displayed. These unique legs were most likely to have been executed of bent wood and were therefore put under great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super strong and were particularly indicated.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; some casts of seated Romans offer evidence of a more heavyset and which appear to be a kind of less intricately designed klismos. Both types, the light or heavy, were seen again within the Classicist period. The klismos influence is known in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some brands of profound uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be followed as far back as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed collection of images and paintings had been preserved, with images of the insides and exteriors of Chinese households and the kinds of furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are some chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an astonishing familiarity to pictures of older chairs.
Same as in Egypt, two chair forms dominated in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair can be seen both with or without arms however never missing its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to support the back. In one kind, it must be said, the stiles could be delicately curved over the arms for the purpose of sit correctly with the form of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of its back). Each of the three limbs are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of the Chinese back splat later had an influence on English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden items that could merely to a particular ability embolden corner joints (and are loose to top it off) indicate an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes around the rounded staves. All members are round in section or have rounded edges—references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited texture. These chairs required the sitter to stay stiff and upright; when too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs likely were kept only for older people, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have taken to China from the West. It does not differ much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the ultimate effect of both furniture designs is stylized. The manufacture and decoration parts are combined in a manner that is all at once naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual parts do not seem to have been put together by use of either glue or screws, but had been mortised with one another and locked into place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Artworks show 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 produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture while traveling which, at the same period, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is displayed in engravings of 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. While this style of chair can also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not decided that the innovation actually originated in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair are 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 crafted in vast numbers, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of such chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its shapely proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that was, to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The model owes its popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike principles even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof employ wood of relatively thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and finer examples might be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engravings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used instead of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which came from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and became the preference 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 commonly known and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
Within 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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