From all the furniture pieces, the chair could be of most importance. While most of the other pieces (apart from the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair was looked upon here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to complex items like a bench and sofa, which should be considered 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 stimulating as its history as art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and aesthetic creation; it can also be a symbol of social hierarchy. In the historical royal courts there were plain distinctions between being led to a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to make do with a stool. During the 20th century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen an identifier of superior position, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a higher floor.
In its furniture purpose, the chair can be utilised for a variety of various forms. There are chairs manufactured to attend to man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). During past times there were chairs used for birth (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 have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has demanded unique chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair kinds have been changed to conform to different human desires. Due to its particular association with man, the chair appears to its full advantage only when used. Though it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there are items inside or not, a chair is really understood and judged best by a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter complement the other. Thus the various limbs of the chair were named likened to the areas of the human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple role of a chair is to support our body, its credit is evaluated principally from how well it does measure up to this practical use. In the creation of the chair, the carpenter is bound under the static rules and principal measurements. Inside these limitations, however, the chair maker has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair lasted a period of several thousand years. There are societies that had made significant chair types, expressions of the foremost object in the areas of technique and creativity. In these societies, individual mention must 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of expert design, are known from tomb discoveries. First of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair has four legs shaped similar to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. From this design a solid triangular form was made. There was in our knowledge no significant variation from the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary non-royals. The main change was in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the selection of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was manufactured to be an easily stored seat for officers. As a camp stool the kind stayed during much later points in time. But the stool then also was designed for the character of a ceremonial seat, its original job as a folding stool being forgotten. This can already be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the construction of folding stools but are not able to be folded because the seats are worked out of wood. The easy build of the folding stool, composed of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, came up but somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this kind is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not with any ancient fossil still in form but as found in a large amount of pictorial items. The best recognised is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area near Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those are displayed. These odd legs were considered to be created in bent wood and were likely to have been needed to bear great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore super solid and were plainly drawn.
The Romans emulated the Greek chair; a number of casts of seated Romans are examples of a thicker and which appear to be a slightly less delicately constructed klismos. Both kinds, the light or the heavy, were seen again during the Classicist period. The klismos influence is used in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in particular forms of notable iconicism of Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China cannot be tracked as far back as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full collection of drawings and works of art had been preserved, showing the insides and outer parts of Chinese houses and their furniture. Also kept of the 16th century are some chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that display an astonishing likeness to pictures of past chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there were two iconic chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair was seen both with or without arms however always with a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to firm the back. In one style, though, the stiles had been delicately curved on top of the arms in order to suit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a back). All three areas had been mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. While the design of the Chinese back splat later had an inspiration for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden members that would only to a restricted limit stabilise corner joints (and furthermore were loose in the result) are a feature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which stops about the rounded staves. All members are round in section or is given rounded edges—an acknowledgement maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and occasionally had a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to be stiff and upright; for if too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs most likely were kept for older persons, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is thought 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 difference in that the top rail is elegantly fixed to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is generally seen with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resultant effect of both furniture items is stylized. The construction and aesthetic issues are combined in a manner that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the manner that the individual members do not seem to have been fixed together by means of either glue or screws, but are mortised into one another and fixed in place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Artworks display 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, stitched to bring up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, during the same time, possessed the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this style of chair might also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not held that the innovation actually began in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in considerable quantities, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself with its elegant proportions and fine 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, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat adheres to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike practices in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of fairly thick measurements; but all the members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and more expensive examples might be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and was popularised 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 reknowned 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 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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