From each of the furniture objects, the chair could be the most important. While most other pieces (save for the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is intended to be said here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to further makes for example a bench and sofa, which might be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly defined.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and aesthetic item; it historically is a symbol of social place. In the past royal courts there were significant connotations between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to sit on a stool. During the 20th century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has developed a signifier of superior status, and in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a higher platform.
As a furniture construction, the chair can be used for a variety of various models. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In the past there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (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 have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has designated special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair types has been perfected to match to growing human needs. Because of its unique association with man, the chair lives to its full meaning only when being utilised. Although it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is really seen best and regarded best by a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter need each other. Thus the various elements of a chair are given names like the areas of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original role of the chair is to support the body, its credit is evaluated basically for how completely it fulfills this practical function. In the structure of a chair, the chair maker is limited for some static regulations and principal measurements. Through these rules, however, the chair creator has great freedom.
The history of the chair covered an epoch of several thousand years. There were societies that created individual chair types, expressive of the leading endeavour in the spheres of technique and art. Out of those peoples, individual 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of careful scheme, are found from tomb discoveries. One of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair has four legs formed like those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this design a strong triangular structure was created. There seems to be no particular difference between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common peasantry. The simple difference exists in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the choice of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was made to be an easily carried seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool this stool persisted for much later periods of time. But the stool then also was made for the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can today be noted, 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 construction of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats were created from wood. The easy structure of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that turn on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric set between them, reappeared but somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this kind is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not in any ancient specimen still extant but as seen in a wealth of pictorial items. The better known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs were shown. These odd legs were thought to have been executed of bent wood and were probably had to bear a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super solid and were clearly indicated.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek chair; some casts of seated Romans offer designs of a more heavyset and which appear to be a rather more crudely designed klismos. Both designs, the light and the heavy, were seen again within the Classicist period. The klismos design can be found in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in particular types of notable individuality within Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be charted as far as that of Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken folio of images and artworks has been kept safe, displaying the interior and outside of Chinese households and the designs of furniture. Kept also of the 16th century are a collection of chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that display an intriguing familiarity to designs of older chairs.
Just as in Egypt, two iconic chair forms existed in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair was designed both with or without arms although always with its square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to firm the back. In one form, it has been found, the stiles are slightly curved above the arms for the purpose of suit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of its back). All three parts were mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the design of this back splat then had an introduction for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that only just to a limited capability embolden corner joints (and are loose as a result) signify a signature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops about the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or has rounded edges—acknowledging maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited form. These chairs demanded of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; when too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs probably were kept only for older persons, for they were respected greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have taken to China from the West. It is not dissimilar much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool with 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 decoration elements are combined in a way that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the way that the individual parts do not appear to have been held together by means of either glue or screws, but are mortised onto one another and held in position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Works of art display a style of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture in 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 is found 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. While this kind of chair can also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not determined that the form actually was born in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in considerable numbers, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The design asserts itself with its elegant proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that is to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes the popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are made from wood of quite thick density; but all the members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and finer examples can be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles over 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 well-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 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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