Out of all furniture objects, the chair could be the most imperative. While the majority of other items (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is intended to be looked upon here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to complex items such as a bench and 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 evidently labeled.
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 or an aesthetic artwork; it can also be a signifier of social standing. Within the Medieval royal courts there were social connotations between sitting on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to utilise a stool. In the last century, a director’s or manager’s chair has been seen as iconic of superior standing, like in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on an elevated level.
In its furniture construction, the chair holds a number of different forms. There are chairs manufactured to fit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past times there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has demanded special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair kinds have been evolved to conform to evolving human uses. From its significant association with man, the chair appears to its full importance only when used. While it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there might be anything inside or not, a chair is understood best and tested by a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter require one another. Thus the various parts of a chair were named likened to the names of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the fundamental job of the chair is to support our body, its credit is tested basically by how fully it measures up to this practical use. In the construction of the chair, the designer is bound under particular static rules and principal measurements. Within these limits, however, the chair designer has large freedom.
The history of the chair lasted dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of cultures that made individual chair types, as expressions of the premier craft in the industries of handling and art. From these such cultures, a 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 structures of expert make, were seen from findings made in tombs. The first one of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair had four legs structured similar to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this design a durable triangular design was created. There appears to be no noteworthy change in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary populace. The general difference was in the brand of ornamentation, in the choice of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was designed to be an easily portable seat for soldiers. As a camp stool this type continued during much later days. But the stool also was made for the role of a ceremonial seat, its technical job as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the form of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats were formed with wood. The easy construction of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that turn on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric held between them, can be seen some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of these is the folding stool, made from ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is found not in any ancient fossil still around but in a variety of pictorial evidence. The better known is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area by Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs are shown. These unusual legs were thought to be crafted in bent wood and were as such needed to bear huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore super durable and were visibly pointed out.
The Romans emulated the Greek chair; designs of casts of seated Romans show chairs of a denser and are a slightly less intricately crafted klismos. Both designs, the light or the heavy, were popularised during the Classicist epoch. The klismos chair is used in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of notable iconicism around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China isn’t able to be charted as long as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed collection of drawings and artworks has been preserved, detailing the interior and outside of Chinese households and the kinds of furniture. Kept also of the 16th century are some chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an astonishing resemblance to pictures of previous chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there were two particular chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That chair can be designed both with or without arms however never without a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to give support to the back. In one design, it must be said, the stiles are slightly curved above the arms so as to conform to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its chairback). Together, all three limbs had been mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Though the innovation of a back splat later had an introduction for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could only to a particular capability embolden corner joints (and then were loose as a result) indicate a signature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes around the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or possesses rounded edges—acknowledging maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to stay stiff and upright; when too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs probably were only for senior people, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have taken to China from the West. It is akin much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is delicately affixed to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is generally seen with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resulting effect of these furniture items is stylized. The construction and decoration parts are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual items do not seem to have been held together by means of either glue or screws, but have been mortised into one another and fixed in position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Artworks project a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same time, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is displayed in engravings of the inside of rich 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 made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not held that the innovation actually was born in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in large numbers, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself by its elegant 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 styles—that was, to say, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat suits 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 tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methods in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are constructed from wood of quite thick density; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been sanded away, and more expensive items might be further embellished with very delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in design than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and became the favourite 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 well-known 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 brands 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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