From each of the furniture items, the chair might be of most importance. While most other items (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair must be looked upon here in the common sense, from stool to throne to derivative pieces such as a bench and 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 overtly distinguished.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and an aesthetic artwork; it was also a symbol of social place. From the Medieval royal courts there were clear distinctions between being seated on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to cope with a stool. Since the past century, the director’s and manager’s chair has developed an identifier of superior dignity, and in democratic governments the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
As its furniture creation, the chair is utilised for a number of various purposes. There are chairs manufactured to match man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past times there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). There are 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 for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has demanded unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair kinds have been adapted to fit to growing human requirements. Due to its particular relationship with man, the chair appears to its full advantage only when in use. Whereas it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is really understood and fairly judged by a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter suit the other. Thus the individual parts of the chair have been given names likened to the limbs of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious job of a chair is to support our human body, its worth is tested firstly from how fully it measures up to this practical job. Within the design of a chair, the chair maker is limited by the static rules and principal measurements. Within these regulations, however, the chair designer has large freedom.
The history of the chair extends over an epoch of several thousand years. There existed peoples that made individual chair types, as expressive of the highest object in the areas of skill and aesthetics. Among those cultures, special 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of skilled scheme, were known from tomb discoveries. The first one of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair has four legs designed akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. From this design a solid triangular design was made. There was from our knowledge no noteworthy change from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common non-royals. The general change exists in the brand of ornamentation, in the particulars of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was designed as an easily stored seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool the chair stayed until much later times. But the stool also then existed in the use of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical role as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from evidence be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the structure of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats were worked of wood. The easy structure of the folding stool, made of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric held between them, appeared again somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of these 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 seen not from any ancient item still existing but from a wealth of pictorial objects. The best recognised is the klismos drawn 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 which could be shown. These strange legs were considered to be manufactured in bent wood and were likely to have been needed to bear extreme pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very stable and were clearly pointed out.
The Romans emulated the Greek style; some statues of seated Romans show examples of a denser and apparently slightly crudely crafted klismos. Both types, the light and heavy, were revived in the Classicist era. The klismos style is evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in special brands of considerable uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China cannot be tracked as long as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full collection of sketches and artworks was kept safe, displaying the interiors and exteriors of Chinese houses and the furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are some chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an interesting likeness to representations of older chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there existed two particular chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This chair has been constructed both with or without arms although never missing a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to hold up the back. In one style, however, the stiles were lightly curved over the arms for the purpose of conform to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the chairback). Together, the three limbs are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Though the innovation of the back splat then had an influence on English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could only to a particular extent reinforce corner joints (and were loose to top it off) represent a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends upon the rounded staves. Members are round in section or have rounded edges—references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and may have a plaited texture. These chairs needed the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs most likely were allowed only for senior people, for they were respected greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have taken to China from the West. It does not vary very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is usually possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resultant effect of both these furniture items is stylized. The manufacture and decoration aspects are combined in a style that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is a result of the way that the individual parts do not look to have been fixed by use of either glue or screws, but were mortised with one another and locked into its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Works of art project a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same time, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is seen in engravings of the interior of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this kind of chair can also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not determined that the form actually began in The Netherlands. Normally, 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 clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of these chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself by its elegant proportions and fine 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 was, to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike methodology in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are constructed from wood of quite thick density; but all the members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and more expensive items might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engraving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes used instead of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which came from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and was popularised 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 well-known 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 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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