Of all furniture forms, the chair could be of the most importance. While most of the other pieces (save for the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is viewed here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to derivative pieces like a bench or sofa, which can be regarded 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 intriguing as its history as a creative art. The chair is not just a physical support or an aesthetic piece; it can also be a symbol of social status. From the old royal courts there were social distinctions between possessing a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to sit on a stool. From the last century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been iconic of superior dignity, and even in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a higher platform.
As a furniture purpose, the chair can be used for a range of variations. There are chairs created to suit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the olden days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has designated particular chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair shapes have been adapted to match to changing human uses. For its significant link with man, the chair exists to its full meaning only when being used. While it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is seen best and clearly evaluated by a person utilising it, for chair and sitter require the other. Thus the various areas of a chair are given names according to the names of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple role of the chair is to support our human body, its value is valued principally from how completely it measures up to this practical purpose. In the manufacture of the chair, the builder is bound by the static regulations and principal measurements. In these restrictions, however, the chair designer has large freedom.
The history of the chair extends over dates of several thousand years. There were cultures that made iconic chair types, as expressions of the leading craft in the arenas of technique and art. Out of those peoples, particular note must 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 objects of careful craft, are now a finding from tombs. First of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs crafted like those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this design a strong triangular structure was created. There was from our knowledge no noteworthy differentiation in the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common citizens. The real variation lied in the decorative ornamentation, in the selection of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was designed as an easily carried seat for army. As a camp stool the stool persevered until much later points. But the stool then took on the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool being forgotten. This can today be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the construction of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats were created of wood. The simplistic construction of the folding stool, made of two frames that spin on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, came up but somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of this kind 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 found not from any ancient item still existing but seen in a large amount of pictorial objects. The archetype is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place near Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of which are seen. These strange legs were thought to be manufactured of bent wood and were as such had great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore extremely durable and were plainly signified.
The Romans embued the Greek design; existing casts of seated Romans are examples of a thicker and are a slightly more crudely crafted klismos. Both kinds, the light and heavy, were seen again within the Classicist era. The klismos design is used in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in special brands of profound originality within Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China isn’t able to be followed as long as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of drawings and paintings was kept, showing the inside and exteriors of Chinese houses and their furniture. Another preservation of the 16th century are a collection of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an astonishing similarity to pictures of past chairs.
As in Egypt, there existed two particular chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair is designed both with and without arms however never missing a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to hold up the back. In one kind, however, the stiles are lightly curved by the arms for the purpose of sit correctly with the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of its chairback). The three parts are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Though the idea of the Chinese back splat then had an influence on English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that could only to a limited limit support corner joints (and are loose as a result) represent a design solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which finishes upon the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or is given rounded edges—references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and had on occasion a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to be stiff and upright; if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs most likely were kept only for elderly individuals, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have taken to China from the West. It is not dissimilar very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is intricately affixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the ultimate effect of both these furniture designs is stylized. The structure and aesthetic aspects are combined in a manner that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the manner that the individual members do not appear to have been put together with either glue or screws, but were mortised onto one another and held in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Works of art project a kind of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same period, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the interior of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this style of chair can also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not decided that the design actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in vast quantities, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its elegant proportions and delicate 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 created in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The chair owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed seated 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 methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them use wood of fairly thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and more expensive items might be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and was popular in many 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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