From all the furniture pieces, the chair could be the most important. While most other objects (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is used here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to derivative chairs such as a bench and sofa, which might be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly definitive.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not simply a physical support or an aesthetic piece of art; it was historically symbolic of social place. In the old royal courts there were social signifiers between being led to a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to cope with a stool. Since the 20th century, a director’s or manager’s chair has been an indicator of superior status, like in democratic governments the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
As a furniture construction, the chair is employed for a range of various models. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since the past there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); since 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. There are chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has developed special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair kinds have been changed to fit to evolving human needs. From its close link with man, the chair exists to its full advantage only when in employ. While it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there is anything inside or not, a chair is really seen and fairly regarded by a person using it, for chair and sitter require each other. Thus the various areas of the chair are given labels according to the elements of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the basic function of your chair is to support a human body, its value is valued basically on how suitably it fulfills this practical function. In the construction of a chair, the chair maker is restricted for certain static regulations and principal measurements. Through these limits, however, the chair creator has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair was dates of several thousand years. There are societies that had individual chair shapes, expressive of the premier endeavour in the areas of skill and art. Within such 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of masterful craft, are known from tomb findings. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have four legs shaped not unlike those of some animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. In this design a strong triangular design was obtained. There was to all appearances no notable differentiation between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular people. The main change lies in the decorative ornamentation, in the choice of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was crafted for an easily portable seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool that stool stayed during much later points in time. But the stool also played the character of a ceremonial seat, its technical function as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can already be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the shape of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats are created of wood. The simplistic make of the folding stool, being of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, came up but somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this form is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not with any ancient specimen still extant but in a large amount of pictorial material. The significant kind is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those are shown. These creative legs were possibly crafted out of bent wood and were thus put under great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very solid and were visibly pointed out.
The Romans emulated the Greek design; some statues of seated Romans offer evidence of a more heavyset and which appear to be a somewhat less delicately constructed klismos. Both kinds, light or heavy, were revived as part of the Classicist period. The klismos style is evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular types of considerable iconicism around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China is not able to be charted as far back as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of sketches and paintings has been kept, showing the interior and exteriors of Chinese houses and the designs of furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are a number of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that display an astonishing likeness to pictures of previous chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there were two standard chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair was seen both with or without arms although never missing its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to hold up the back. In one style, it has been seen, the stiles were marginally curved over the arms so as to sit correctly with the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a chairback). Together, the three parts had been mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the innovation of a back splat had an introduction for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could only to a limited extent support corner joints (and furthermore were loose in the bargain) signify a signature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends about the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—an acknowledgement perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have a plaited seat. These chairs needed the sitter to be stiff and upright; when too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a way of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs likely were reserved only for senior people in the family, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have taken to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is delicately held to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is generally seen with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resultant effect of these two furniture forms 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 fact that the individual items do not look to have been joined together by either glue or screws, but have been mortised onto one another and locked into its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Works of art project a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to produce a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same period, had the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is evidenced in engravings of the inside of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this style of chair is also seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not decided that the style actually began in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in large quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of such chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious 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, to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The chair owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof have wood of rather thick measurements; but all the members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and more upmarket designs would be further embellished with special delicate and decorative engraving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework 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 came from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles throughout 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
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 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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