Out of each of the furniture forms, the chair might be primary. While most other forms (except the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair can be looked upon here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to developed makes for example the bench or sofa, which might be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently definitive.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not simply a physical support or an aesthetic object; it can also be an indicator of social rank. In the old royal courts there were social connotations between having a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to squat on a stool. In the past century, a director’s and manager’s chair has risen iconic of superior position, and in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a raised level.
In its furniture purpose, the chair holds a variety of various models. There are chairs designed to suit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since past times there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has developed particular chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair forms have evolved to fit to different human uses. From its close association with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when being used. Whereas it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there is anything inside or not, a chair is understood best and fairly regarded with a person using it, because chair and sitter need each other. Thus the individual limbs of the chair are given labels as the names of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first purpose of the chair is to support the body, its worth is judged firstly by how suitably it fulfills this practical job. In the manufacture of a chair, the designer is bound in the static law and principal measurements. Within these rules, however, the chair designer has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair covered an epoch of several thousand years. There is evidence of societies that had significant chair types, as expressions of the highest object in the industries of skill and art. Within these cultures, a mention 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of skilled design, are found from tomb findings. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have four legs shaped like those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this way a durable triangular construction was created. There appears to be no marked difference in the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary peasantry. The real variation lies in the kind of ornamentation, in the selection of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was designed to be an easily packed seat for army. As a camp stool the stool continued til much later periods. But the stool then also played the task of a ceremonial seat, its original task as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the structure of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats are created out of wood. The plain manufacture of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that turn on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, then appeared somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of those is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is known not with any ancient item still existing but seen in a large amount of pictorial items. The better recognised is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them can be displayed. These creative legs were thought to be manufactured out of bent wood and were as such needed to bear great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super solid and were visibly signified.
The Romans adopted the Greek designs; existing models of seated Romans display chairs of a denser and which appear to be a somewhat less intricately crafted klismos. Both types, light or heavy, were revived within the Classicist time. The klismos chair is found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some particular types of profound uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China cannot be followed as well as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full collection of sketches and works of art has been preserved, displaying the interiors and outside of Chinese households and their furniture. Another preservation of the 16th century are a collection of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that show an astonishing resemblance to styles of older chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there were two major chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair can be constructed both with and without arms though always with its square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one style, it has been found, the stiles could be slightly curved above the arms for the purpose of sit correctly with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its chairback). The three sections are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Although the design of the Chinese back splat had an introduction for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden members that merely to a limited ability support corner joints (and furthermore were loose additionally) are a design signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes upon the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or have rounded edges—acknowledging as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have had a plaited seat. These chairs required of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for if too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs most likely were kept only for elderly family members, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have come to China from the West. It does not differ very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is generally provided with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resultant effect of these furniture items is stylized. The construction and decoration aspects are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is a result of the fact that the individual parts do not seem to have been constructed with either glue or screws, but were mortised with one another and fixed in place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Artworks display a style of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same time, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is displayed in engravings of interiors 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 type of chair might also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not certain that the style actually was born in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in vast amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by its elegant 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 of styles—that is, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The model owes the popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat suits to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically 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 cover all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike methodology in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those have wood of quite thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been taken away, and more expensive items might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more open in style than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the royal 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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