From each of the furniture pieces, the chair might be the paramount one. While the majority of other forms (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair must be viewed here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to derivative chairs like the 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 evidently definitive.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support or an aesthetic object; it is also an indicator of social standing. From the past royal courts there were significant distinctions between sitting on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to cope with a stool. Since the recent century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has developed a symbol of superior position, as well as in democratic governments the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
As a furniture creation, the chair is used for a wealth of various models. There are chairs manufactured to fit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical times there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); during 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. We have chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has derived special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair shapes have been adapted to conform to different human uses. Due to its significant link with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when being utilised. While 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 really seen and clearly evaluated by a person utilising it, because chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the various elements of a chair are given labels as the areas of our human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first job of a chair is to support your body, its credit is tested generally by how suitably it does fulfill this practical role. Within the build of the chair, the designer is limited by some static laws and principal measurements. Within these limitations, however, the chair maker has great freedom.
The history of the chair covers a period of several thousand years. There is evidence of peoples that had made iconic chair forms, as seen of the topmost craft in the industries of handling and art. Out of those cultures, a mention 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 objects of skilled scheme, were a finding from discoveries made in tombs. The first of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair has four legs crafted akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this way a durable triangular structure was made. There was in our view no notable differentiation between the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common peasantry. The simple variation existed in the complex ornamentation, in the selection of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was manufactured for an easily stored seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool this type continued during much later points. But the stool also was designed as the task of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from evidence be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the shape of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats were created out of wood. The plain build of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric held between them, reappeared but somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this form is the folding stool, made of ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is found not from any ancient object still extant but found in a variety of pictorial evidence. The better recognised is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs are visible. These creative legs were understood to be executed out of bent wood and were as such had a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore extremely strong and were particularly drawn.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; existing models of seated Romans show examples of a denser and apparently kind of less delicately constructed klismos. Both styles, the light and the heavy, were brought back in the Classicist time. The klismos chair can be evidenced in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some particular types of notable originality within Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as long as chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of sketches and paintings had been kept safe, detailing the insides and outside of Chinese homes and the designs of furniture. Also kept of the 16th century are a collection of chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an astonishing similarity to designs of ancient chairs.
As were the designs in Egypt, there were two standard chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This chair can be designed both with and without arms although never without a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to hold up the back. In one form, it must be said, the stiles could be slightly curved above the arms in order to sit correctly with the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the back). Each of the three parts had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Although the innovation of the back splat then had an influence on English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that could merely to a restricted extent reinforce corner joints (as well as being loose as well) indicate a feature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends upon the rounded staves. Members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and might have had a plaited bottom. These chairs needed the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a way of toppling. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs probably were reserved for the senior members of the family, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have travelled to China from the West. It is not dissimilar much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is prettily affixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is often seen with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of both these furniture styles is stylized. The construction and decoration aspects are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual members do not appear to have been joined together by either glue or screws, but are 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 put its mark on the chair. Works of art project a type of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of little pads. The front board and a corresponding board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same period, granted 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, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this kind of chair can also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not decided that the style actually originated in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are occasionally 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 a whole row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and delicate 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 styles—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 design owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and charm. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed seated 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 achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike methodology despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of quite thick measurements; but all the members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and finer designs would be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and became the favourite 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 popularised 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 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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