From each of the furniture forms, the chair might be the most imperative. While most other forms (apart from the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is intended to be viewed here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to further makes such as a bench or sofa, which can be considered 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 intriguing as its history as a creative art. The chair is not only a physical support and/or an aesthetic craft; it was also an indicator of social status. At the historical royal courts there were clear differences between being seated on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to sit on a stool. During the 20th century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been a symbol of superior standing, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated floor.
In a furniture form, the chair can be used for a range of various purposes. There are chairs structured to match man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past times there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, or 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.
Our modern lifestyle has demanded particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair types has been adapted to fit to growing human uses. Due to its close association with man, the chair lives to its full purpose only when in use. Although it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there might be anything inside or not, a chair is best seen and judged best with a person using it, for chair and sitter require one another. Thus the several areas of the chair are named like the parts of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the basic function of a chair is to support our human body, its value is tested generally on how fully it fulfills this practical job. Within the design of the chair, the carpenter is bound for particular static laws and principal measurements. Within these boundaries, however, the chair creator has large freedom.
The history of the chair extended over a period of several thousand years. There are societies that had made individual chair types, as expressive of the highest craft in the areas of handling and design. Within these cultures, individual note 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of masterful craft, are today known from discoveries made in tombs. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed like those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this a solid triangular form was created. There was in our understanding no noteworthy difference between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular non-royals. The only change existed in the complexity of ornamentation, in the selection of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was made as an easily stored seat for soldiers. As a camp stool that type stayed during much later points in time. But the stool then played the task of a ceremonial seat, its original job as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today 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 are constructed in the construction of folding stools but are not able to be folded because the seats were worked with wood. The simple construction of the folding stool, composed of two frames that spin on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric set between them, can be seen somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this form is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not from any ancient fossil still in form but in a trove of pictorial evidence. The best recognised is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which could be displayed. These curving legs were probably manufactured of bent wood and were likely to have been needed to bear extreme pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore super solid and were visibly denoted.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek design; a number of models of seated Romans offer evidence of a thicker and in appearance kind of less intricately designed klismos. Both features, the light or heavy, were popularised as part of the Classicist period. The klismos style can be seen in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in particular types of considerable uniqueness of Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be followed as long as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed folio of drawings and paintings has been kept, showing the interior and exterior of Chinese houses and the furniture. Another preservation from the 16th century are a collection of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that hold an interesting familiarity to pictures of ancient chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there was two major chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair can be found both with or without arms although always having its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one image, it has been found, the stiles had been marginally curved over the arms to sit correctly with the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a back). Each of the three limbs were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. While the style of this back splat later had an influence on English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden items that could only to a particular limit stabilise corner joints (and furthermore are loose as well) are a signature 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 has rounded edges—acknowledging as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have a plaited form. These chairs demanded of the sitter to be stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs presumably were kept for the senior individuals in the family, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It does not vary very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is generally seen with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of these furniture forms is stylized. The construction and decoration parts are combined in a style that is at the same time naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual members do not look to have been constructed by means of either glue or screws, but were mortised on one another and locked into position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Paintings show a type of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to bring out a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, in the same era, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is seen in engravings of the interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this kind of chair is also made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not determined that the form actually was born in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in large numbers, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its shapely 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, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes such 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. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike practices in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them have wood of fairly thick dimensions; but all the members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and finer items might be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engraving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more open in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and was popular 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 popularised 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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