Of all furniture forms, the chair may be of most importance. While most other forms (apart from the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is intended to be regarded here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to complex makes for example a bench or sofa, which should be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently labeled.
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/or an aesthetic object; it historically was an indicator of social place. At the old royal courts there were social connotations between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to cope with a stool. In the 20th century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has developed an identifier of superior status, and in democratic governments the speaker sits on an elevated floor.
In a furniture creation, the chair is employed for a number of different makes. There are chairs manufactured to suit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We have 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 up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has derived new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair shapes has been adapted to conform to different human requirements. For its particular connection with man, the chair appears to its full purpose only when in use. Whereas it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there are items inside or not, a chair is really seen best and evaluated by a person using it, for chair and sitter complement the other. Thus the different limbs of the chair were given names like the parts of a human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious purpose of your chair is to support the human body, its worth is tested generally for how suitably it measures up to this practical function. Within the build of a chair, the carpenter is limited for the static law and principal measurements. Under these limitations, however, the chair creator has great freedom.
The history of the chair covers an epoch of several thousand years. There existed peoples that had significant chair shapes, as expressive of the highest craft in the industries of technique and design. In such cultures, individual 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the objects of careful make, are today found from tomb discoveries. The first of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair had four legs structured like those of a designated animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this way a strong triangular design was crafted. There was to all appearances no noteworthy variation from the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary people. The only change exists in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the selection of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was created for an easily carried seat for soldiers. As a camp stool this stool persevered until much later periods of time. But the stool then also was designed as the role of a ceremonial seat, its technical task as a folding stool being forgotten. This can already be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the construction of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats are made from wood. The easy manufacture of the folding stool, composed of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, came again but some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this form is the folding stool, made from ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not with any ancient fossil still existing but as seen from a large amount of pictorial material. The significant kind is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them were shown. These curved legs were thought to be executed from bent wood and were therefore bore extreme pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore very durable and were overtly indicated.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; designs of statues of seated Romans are examples of a heavier and apparently slightly less intricately crafted klismos. Both styles, the light or heavy, were revived during the Classicist period. The klismos design is seen in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of considerable uniqueness in Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China can not be traced as far back as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed serial of sketches and artworks was kept, with images of the interiors and outside of Chinese households and the designs of furniture. Kept also since the 16th century are a trove of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an amazing likeness to pictures of past chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there existed two major chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair can be seen both with and without arms but always with its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to support the back. In one form, however, the stiles had been lightly curved on top of the arms to sit right with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the chairback). All three limbs are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of this back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden items that could merely to a particular extent embolden corner joints (and furthermore are loose as a result) represent an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops upon the rounded staves. Members are round in section or has rounded edges—an acknowledgement maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and had on occasion a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for if too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs presumably were reserved only for the senior family members, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have been brought to China from the West. It does not vary much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is elegantly held to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is more often than not seen with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the overall effect of these two furniture designs is stylized. The constructive and decoration parts are combined in a way that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual members do not seem to have been fixed together by either glue or screws, but were mortised on one another and fixed in its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Paintings show a design of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board from the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, in the same era, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be evidenced in engravings of interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this kind of chair can also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not determined that the design actually began in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in large quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of such chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself with its elegant proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that is, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes such 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. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike practices despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are made from wood of fairly thick dimensions; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and more upmarket designs might be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood can 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 in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more varied in style than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and was popularised 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 products 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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