Out of each of the furniture pieces, the chair could be the imperative one. While most other items (except the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is meant to be looked upon here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to developed kinds such as a bench or sofa, which can be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently labeled.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or an aesthetic creation; it historically was a signifier of social placement. Within the historical royal courts there were significant differences between sitting on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to use a stool. During the recent century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen an indicator of superior standing, and even in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a raised platform.
As its furniture creation, the chair encompasses a number of different purposes. There are chairs designed to fit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical days there were chairs for births (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 can have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has developed new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair types have adapted to match to different human uses. Because of its unique importance with man, the chair comes to its full significance only when being used. Whereas it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is understood and judged by a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the various areas of the chair were given labels corresponding to the limbs of our human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal purpose of your chair is to support the human body, its credit is tested principally by how suitably it does fulfill this practical use. In the build of the chair, the maker is restricted under certain static regulation and principal measurements. Inside these regulations, however, the chair builder has great freedom.
The history of the chair was dates of several thousand years. There were peoples that created distinctive chair types, expressive of the leading endeavour in the industries of skill and creativity. In these civilisations, 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of careful craft, are known from 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 as akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this way a solid triangular form was obtained. There was from our view no particular variation in the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary peasantry. The main change lies in the type of ornamentation, in the choice of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was made to be an easily packed seat for soldiers. As a camp stool the chair stayed until much later periods of time. But the stool also played the character of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical function as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from evidence be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the form of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats are made from wood. The simplistic make of the folding stool, made of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric set between them, came up but some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this type is the folding stool, made from ashwood, which can now be found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is known not with any ancient fossil still extant but as seen in a trove of pictorial objects. The most well known is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs were seen. These unusual legs were probably executed with bent wood and were as such subjected to great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore extremely durable and were particularly indicated.
The Romans adopted the Greek designs; some models of seated Romans are evidence of a heavier and which appear to be a somewhat less delicately crafted klismos. Both features, light or heavy, were popularised within the Classicist period. The klismos chair is evidenced in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some forms of notable originality around Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China isn’t able to be tracked as far back as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of drawings and works of art has been protected, with images of the insides and exteriors of Chinese homes and their furniture. Preserved also of the 16th century are a collection of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an intriguing likeness to pictures of ancient chairs.
Same as in Egypt, there were two iconic chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair was constructed both with or without arms though always having a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to support the back. In one form, however, the stiles had been slightly curved over the arms to fit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a back). Together, all three parts had been mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of this back splat then had an introduction for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only to a particular limit embolden corner joints (and were loose as well) are a design exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or possesses rounded edges—a left over perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and might have had a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to collapse. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs probably were reserved only for senior individuals, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have taken to China from the West. It does not differ very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is elegantly fixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is more often than not possessing metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of these furniture designs is stylized. The structure and aesthetic parts are combined in a style that is both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual parts do not appear to have been fixed with either glue or screws, but have been mortised on one another and fixed in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Works of art project a style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same period, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be seen in engravings of the inside of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this kind of chair can also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not decided that the innovation actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in impressive numbers, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of these chairs lined up along a wall. The design asserts itself by its elegant 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 created in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The chair owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike principles even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them use wood of relatively thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been sanded away, and finer items might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engravings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for all 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 design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and became the favourite in large 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 popular and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
In 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 styles 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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