From each of the furniture objects, the chair may be of the most importance. While the majority of other pieces (except the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is regarded here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to developed kinds including the bench or sofa, which may be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support or aesthetic creation; it historically was symbolic of social hierarchy. In the old royal courts there were plain signifiers between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to sit on a stool. From the past century, the director’s and manager’s chair has been regarded as iconic of superior position, like in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on an elevated floor.
In a furniture creation, the chair is employed for a number of different forms. There are chairs designed to suit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the past there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs 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 make chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has developed new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair kinds have adapted to suit to different human uses. From its unique association with man, the chair comes to its full purpose only when being utilised. While it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there is anything inside or not, a chair is understood best and regarded best with a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter need each other. Thus the various limbs of a chair have been labeled as the elements of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the basic function of your chair is to support our body, its value is evaluated firstly on how fully it does fulfill this practical job. In the creation of a chair, the designer is restricted under certain static laws and principal measurements. Under these regulations, however, the chair maker has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair covers a period of several thousand years. There were cultures that made iconic chair shapes, seen of the foremost craft in the areas of technique and creativity. Out of these such civilisations, individual note 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 items of expert design, were seen from tombs. The first one of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs designed as akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular construction was created. There was from our view no particular change in the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common non-royals. The only change was in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the selection of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was manufactured to be an easily stored seat for army. As a camp stool this stool stayed around til much later points. But the stool then took on the character of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can already be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the form of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats were worked out of wood. The simple structure of the folding stool, composed of two frames that turn on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric held between them, then came again some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this kind is the folding stool, made from ashwood, which can now be found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient object still around but in a variety of pictorial evidence. The significant kind is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those can be seen. These creative legs were most likely crafted out of bent wood and were as such had to bear huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore super stable and were overtly drawn.
The Romans emulated the Greek chair; quite a few models of seated Romans offer examples of a thicker and are a kind of less delicately built klismos. Both types, the light and heavy, were brought back within the Classicist era. The klismos style is found in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in particular types of profound uniqueness within Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China isn’t able to be charted as far back as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed collection of drawings and artworks has been kept safe, detailing the interiors and exterior of Chinese buildings and the designs of furniture. Another preservation since the 16th century are a trove of chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an interesting likeness to designs of past chairs.
Like in Egypt, there were two standard chair forms in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair has been designed both with or without arms although always having a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to support the back. In one design, it has been seen, the stiles are delicately curved by the arms so as to conform correctly to the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a chairback). All three parts had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. While the style of the Chinese back splat then had an introduction for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden items that would only to a limited limit embolden corner joints (and then were loose additionally) are a signature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends around the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or possesses rounded edges—an acknowledgement maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to collapse. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs most likely were allowed only for older persons, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have travelled to China from the West. It is not dissimilar so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is elegantly fixed to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of both these furniture items is stylized. The constructive and decorative aspects are combined in a manner that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the manner that the individual parts do not look to have been affixed by either glue or screws, but had been mortised with one another and locked into its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Artworks project 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 between the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same era, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is evidenced in engravings of the inside of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this type of chair may also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not believed that the style actually was born in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable quantities, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself by its harmonious proportions and expensive 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, to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them use wood of rather thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been removed, and more upmarket items may be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carvings. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and became the favourite 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 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 products 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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