Out of all furniture objects, the chair may be the primary one. While most other objects (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair can be said here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to derivative items for example a bench or sofa, which might be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently defined.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support or aesthetic item; it is also a signifier of social placement. From the past royal courts there were plain distinctions between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to utilise a stool. Since the past century, a director’s or manager’s chair has developed a symbol of superior standing, and even in democratic governments the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
As a furniture purpose, the chair encompasses a range of variations. There are chairs structured to suit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). From historical days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has developed special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair kinds have adapted to fit to growing human uses. From its particular connection with man, the chair lives to its full significance only when used. While it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there might be things inside or not, a chair is really seen best and fairly regarded by a person using it, for chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the several parts of a chair are named according to the limbs of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious work of your chair is to support our human body, its worth is valued principally on how completely it measures up to this practical function. In the creation of a chair, the carpenter is bound under particular static laws and principal measurements. Inside these boundaries, however, the chair creator has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair extended over a period of several thousand years. There existed cultures that have created unique chair forms, as expressions of the foremost object in the industries of handling and aesthetics. Within those civilisations, special 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of careful make, were known from tomb discoveries. One of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair has four legs formed like those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this design a stable triangular construction was crafted. There was in our view no significant difference between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular non-royals. The real variation exists in the level of ornamentation, in the choice of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was developed to be an easily carried seat for army officers. As a camp stool the kind persisted til much later periods. But the stool also then was designed for the use of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical job as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can today be seen, 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 form of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats are worked out of wood. The simple construction of the folding stool, being of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, appeared some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this type is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is known not from any ancient specimen still around but in a variety of pictorial items. The iconic kind is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place by Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs are visible. These curving legs were understood to have been executed from bent wood and were in that case needed to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very strong and were particularly pointed out.
The Romans embued the Greek style; quite a few casts of seated Romans are evidence of a more heavyset and which appear to be a kind of more crudely built klismos. Both kinds, the light and the heavy, were seen again within the Classicist period. The klismos style is used in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some forms of profound iconicism in Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China is not able to be followed as well as in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed folio of images and artworks was kept, with images of the interior and outside of Chinese buildings and their furniture. Preserved also since the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that display an astonishing similarity to styles of past chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there existed two standard chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That chair was found both with and without arms but always with a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one image, it has been found, the stiles are marginally curved by the arms in order to sit correctly with the form of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of the chairback). All three parts are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Although the innovation of this back splat later had an inspiration for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only to a restricted ability stabilise corner joints (as well as being loose as a result) represent an element signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes about the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or possesses rounded edges—an acknowledgement perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and might have had a plaited texture. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs presumably were reserved only for elderly individuals, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have taken to China from the West. It is akin that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is intricately joined to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is often provided with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resultant effect of these two furniture designs is stylized. The structure and aesthetic parts are combined in a way that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual items do not appear to have been adjoined by either glue or screws, but were mortised with one another and held in position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Paintings project a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same period, possessed the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is seen in engravings of interiors 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 made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not believed that the form actually started in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in impressive quantities, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself by its harmonious proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that was, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The model owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back disguise 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 employ wood of relatively thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and finer items would be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and became the preference 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 commonly 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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