Out of each of the furniture objects, the chair may be of the most importance. While most other forms (except the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is meant to be viewed here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to derivative kinds including the bench or sofa, which should be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly defined.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not merely a physical support or aesthetic item; it was historically a signifier of social status. Within the historical royal courts there were important differences between possessing a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to use a stool. During the past century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen an identifier of superior standing, and in democratic governments the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
As a furniture creation, the chair is utilised for a variety of various models. There are chairs structured to fit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). During past times there were chairs for births (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has demanded new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair types has perfected to suit to changing human uses. From its particular link with man, the chair appears to its full significance only when being used. While it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there is anything inside or not, a chair is best seen and clearly evaluated by a person using it, because chair and sitter require the other. Thus the several elements of a chair are given labels likened to the names of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first work of the chair is to support your body, its credit is tested generally by how suitably it does measure up to this practical role. In the construction of the chair, the chair maker is limited within certain static regulations and principal measurements. Inside these rules, however, the chair designer has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair lasted over dates of several thousand years. There are cultures that had made unique chair shapes, as expressions of the leading object in the spheres of handling and design. From these peoples, individual 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the objects of masterful craft, are now found from findings made in tombs. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed akin to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this a solid triangular design was created. There was to our understanding no noteworthy change between the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical non-royals. The real difference exists in the level of ornamentation, in the selection of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was created for an easily carried seat for army. As a camp stool that form stayed around until much later periods. But the stool then also was designed for the task of a ceremonial seat, its original task as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can now be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the construction of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats were formed out of wood. The easy manufacture of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric held between them, is seen again somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of these is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not with any ancient fossil still in form but as seen from a trove of pictorial evidence. The iconic kind is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area near Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those would be displayed. These curving legs were possibly executed in bent wood and were thus needed to bear a large amount of pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore extremely stable and were overtly drawn.
The Romans adopted the Greek design; quite a few models of seated Romans display chairs of a thicker and apparently slightly more crudely built klismos. Both kinds, the light or heavy, were brought back during the Classicist epoch. The klismos style can be seen in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in particular types of marked originality around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China can not be tracked as far back as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken collection of drawings and artworks has been preserved, displaying the interiors and outside of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Kept also since the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that show an astonishing likeness to representations of previous chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there were two major chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This chair has been found both with or without arms though always having its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to give support to the back. In one type, it has been seen, the stiles had been delicately curved on top of the arms in order to conform correctly to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the chairback). All three areas were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the design of a back splat then had an inspiration for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that merely to a particular capability embolden corner joints (and then were loose to top that off) signify an element exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes upon the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or have rounded edges—acknowledging maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and had on occasion a plaited bottom. These chairs needed the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs most likely were reserved for elderly people in the family, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have taken to China from the West. It does not differ so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is generally seen with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resultant effect of both furniture forms is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic aspects are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the fact that the individual items do not seem to have been affixed by means of either glue or screws, but were mortised with one another and locked into position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left its name on the chair. Paintings project a style of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, in the same era, granted the status 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 inside of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this design of chair might also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not decided that the style actually was born in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in vast amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of these chairs lined up along a wall. The design asserts itself by its harmonious proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that was, to say, as created in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of quite thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been cut away, and more expensive items can be further embellished with special delicate and decorative engravings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles within 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
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 brands 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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