From all the furniture items, the chair may be of the most importance. While many other objects (apart from the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is regarded here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to derivative forms such as the bench and sofa, which may be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously distinguished.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as a creative art. The chair is not only a physical support or an aesthetic piece; it was also a symbol of social rank. In the old royal courts there were clear connotations between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to utilise a stool. During the last century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has developed a symbol of superior status, like in democratic governments the speaker sits on a raised level.
In a furniture creation, the chair can be employed for a variety of various forms. There are chairs structured to fit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the past there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has designated special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair kinds has changed to fit to growing human needs. Due to its particular importance with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when utilised. Although it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there might be anything inside or not, a chair is understood best and evaluated with a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter need each other. Thus the various elements of the chair are named according to the elements of the human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original work of a chair is to support a body, its value is evaluated basically on how well it does measure up to this practical use. In the construction of the chair, the maker is limited with certain static law and principal measurements. Through these rules, however, the chair designer has great freedom.
The history of the chair covered an epoch of several thousand years. There is evidence of societies that made distinctive chair forms, as expressions of the foremost work in the spheres of craft and art. In those cultures, a mention needs to 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 skilled design, were found 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 would have four legs formed like those of some animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular design was created. There was from our understanding no marked difference in the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical non-royals. The general difference exists in the complexity of ornamentation, in the evidence of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was developed as an easily stored seat for army officers. As a camp stool this chair continued until much later times. But the stool then was made as the role of a ceremonial seat, its technical job as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the shape of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats are formed out of wood. The plain make of the folding stool, being of two frames that spin on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, is seen again somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of these is the folding stool, of ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient item still in form but as seen from a variety of pictorial material. The best recognised is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them are visible. These curving legs were presumed to have been crafted from bent wood and were as such put under great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore super stable and were clearly denoted.
The Romans adopted the Greek designs; existing casts of seated Romans offer designs of a heavier and which appear to be a somewhat crudely built klismos. Both kinds, the light and heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist period. The klismos influence is known in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some special brands of considerable uniqueness within Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China isn’t able to be traced as far as the progression of the chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged series of drawings and artworks had been kept, displaying the interior and outer parts of Chinese homes and the designs of furniture. Also preserved from the 16th century are a number of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an interesting similarity to designs of ancient chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there were two iconic chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This chair can be constructed both with and without arms however never missing its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one style, though, the stiles are marginally curved on top of the arms so as to sit right with the form of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the back). Each of the three areas had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Though the innovation of the back splat had an inspiration for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only just to a particular capability stabilise corner joints (and furthermore are loose as well) indicate a feature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which finishes upon the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or is given rounded edges—an acknowledgement maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited texture. These chairs needed the sitter to be stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs presumably were reserved for older individuals, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have taken to China from the West. It is akin that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is elegantly affixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is more often than not designed with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resultant effect of these furniture forms is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic parts are combined in a way that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual members do not look to have been held together by means of either glue or screws, but had been mortised with one another and fixed in position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Paintings show a kind of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same era, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be displayed in engravings of the interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this type of chair might also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not certain that the innovation actually started in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in large quantities, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that is to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The style owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike principles despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof use wood of fairly thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been cut away, and more expensive chairs might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carvings. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more open in design than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and found favour 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 popularised 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 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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