From each of the furniture objects, the chair might be the most important. While the majority of other pieces (except the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is looked upon here in the general sense, from stool to throne to developed types such as the bench and sofa, which might be seen 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 intriguing as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support and an aesthetic item; it historically is symbolic of social place. Within the old royal courts there were significant distinctions between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to use a stool. From the last century, the director’s and manager’s chair has been seen as an identifier of superior dignity, and even in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
In a furniture purpose, the chair is utilised for a variety of various purposes. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the past there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). There are 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 and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has designated unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair forms has adapted to fit to evolving human requirements. Due to its particular connection 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 seen best and evaluated with a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter require one another. Thus the individual elements of a chair were given names as the elements of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elemental job of the chair is to support the human body, its credit is judged principally on how fully it does measure up to this practical function. Within the creation of a chair, the builder is limited with particular static regulation and principal measurements. Within these limits, however, the chair maker has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair was dates of several thousand years. There existed civilizations that have created iconic chair shapes, expressive of the premier endeavour in the industries of handling and design. From these such societies, particular 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 upshot of skilled design, are today found from findings made in tombs. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair had four legs formed similar to those of an animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this design a durable triangular form was crafted. There appeared to be no noteworthy change between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical non-royals. The real difference was in the level of ornamentation, in the choice of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was created to be an easily portable seat for army officers. As a camp stool the kind continued during much later periods of time. But the stool then was designed for the character of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from today be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the structure of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats are made of wood. The plain build of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that turn on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, reappeared somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this type is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not with any ancient item still existing but as seen in a wealth of pictorial objects. The best known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place outside Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them are visible. These creative legs were presumed to be executed from bent wood and were likely to have been bore great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore super stable and were plainly drawn.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; quite a few casts of seated Romans show designs of a more heavyset and apparently rather less intricately crafted klismos. Both styles, the light and heavy, were brought back as part of the Classicist time. The klismos style can be found in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some particular types of marked iconicism around Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China cannot be followed as far back as chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full folio of images and artworks was kept, displaying the inside and exteriors of Chinese houses and the furniture. Kept also of the 16th century are a number of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that hold an amazing familiarity to designs of past chairs.
Like in Egypt, two major chair forms existed in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair can be seen both with or without arms however always with a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to hold up the back. In one style, though, the stiles are marginally curved on top of the arms for the purpose of suit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its chairback). All three areas were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. While the style of the back splat exercised an influence on English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden items that would only to a limited extent embolden corner joints (and are loose as a result) indicate a signature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes over the rounded staves. Members are round in section or have rounded edges—acknowledging perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and might have had a plaited bottom. These chairs needed the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs likely were kept for elderly members of the family, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have come to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is intricately joined to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resultant effect of both of these furniture designs is stylized. The construction and decoration elements are combined in a way that is all at once naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual items do not seem to have been adjoined with either glue or screws, but have been mortised into one another and held in position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Artworks show a design of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same period, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be found in engravings of the interior of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this kind of chair can also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not decided that the design actually was born in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in large numbers, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of these chairs lined up against a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of its elegant proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that was, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes the popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methodology despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of rather thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and finer chairs can be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engraving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and won 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 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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