Out of all furniture pieces, the chair may be the most imperative. While many other forms (save the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair must be regarded here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to developed makes for example 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 obviously definitive.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support and aesthetic craft; it is historically an indicator of social rank. At the past royal courts there were significant distinctions between sitting on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to cope with a stool. During the 20th century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been regarded as iconic of superior standing, as well as in democratic governments the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
As a furniture form, the chair can be used for a range of various makes. There are chairs manufactured to fit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From historical times there were chairs for births (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has developed particular chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair shapes have been perfected to conform to differing human uses. Due to its unique relationship with man, the chair lives to its full meaning only when in use. Although it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there might be things inside or not, a chair is best seen and fairly tested by a person using it, for chair and sitter need one another. Thus the individual parts of the chair are named corresponding to the areas of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the fundamental role of a chair is to support a human body, its credit is judged firstly for how well it does fulfill this practical role. Within the manufacture of the chair, the chair maker is limited in particular static laws and principal measurements. Inside these restrictions, however, the chair creator has great freedom.
The history of the chair is a period of several thousand years. There are civilizations that held significant chair types, as seen of the topmost endeavour in the industries of craft and aesthetics. In those peoples, 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of careful scheme, were known from tombs. The first one of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair had four legs crafted like those of a particular animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this design a durable triangular construction was crafted. There was from our knowledge no particular variation in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary citizens. The general change was in the complex ornamentation, in the particulars of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was designed as an easily packed seat for soldiers. As a camp stool the chair stayed til much later times. But the stool then was made as the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its technical history as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can already be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the structure of folding stools but are not able to be folded because the seats were formed from wood. The simplistic construction of the folding stool, made of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric set between them, can be seen but somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this type is the folding stool, from ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is known not as any ancient item still existing but seen in a variety of pictorial evidence. The iconic kind is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs are visible. These curving legs were understood to have been executed from bent wood and were likely to have been subjected to extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore super strong and were visibly drawn.
The Romans embued the Greek style; some statues of seated Romans display designs of a heavier and which appear to be a slightly less intricately built klismos. Both styles, light and heavy, were revived in the Classicist epoch. The klismos style is found in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some particular forms of marked originality in Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China isn’t able to be charted as long as that of Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged series of images and paintings was kept, displaying the interior and exteriors of Chinese homes and the furniture. Preserved also of the 16th century are a trove of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that hold an intriguing similarity to pictures of previous chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there existed two particular chair forms in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This chair is constructed both with or without arms although always with the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to firm the back. In one type, it has been seen, the stiles were marginally curved above the arms to fit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its chairback). The three limbs were mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of this back splat exercised an introduction for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden items that merely to a particular limit stabilise corner joints (and furthermore are loose as a result) indicate a feature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—referable perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to collapse. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs likely were only for senior individuals in the family, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It does not vary that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is prettily affixed 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 these two furniture styles is stylized. The manufacture and aesthetic aspects are combined in a way that is all at once both naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the manner that the individual items do not seem to have been fixed with either glue or screws, but have been mortised with one another and locked into its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Paintings show a type of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, at the same time, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be seen 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. While this kind of chair may also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not held that the form actually began in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in impressive quantities, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of this kind of chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of its elegant proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that is, as developed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike methodology despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those have wood of rather thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and finer designs may be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engravings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated 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 found favour 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 popular 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 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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