Out of all furniture pieces, the chair could be primary. While many other objects (apart from the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is meant to be used here in the common sense, from stool to throne to developed kinds such as the bench and sofa, which may be seen 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 interesting as its history as art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support or aesthetic artwork; it historically is symbolic of social rank. From the Medieval royal courts there were clear differences between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, and having to squat on a stool. Since the 20th century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been a symbol of superior position, and in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
In its furniture creation, the chair ranges from a range of various forms. There are chairs created to fit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We design 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 up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has developed particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair shapes have been evolved to suit to evolving human desires. From its significant connection with man, the chair comes to its full importance only when utilised. While it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there might be items inside or not, a chair is really understood and judged with a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter need the other. Thus the individual areas of the chair were labeled corresponding to the areas of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple work of a chair is to support your body, its value is tested primarily for how suitably it does fulfill this practical role. In the build of a chair, the carpenter is limited by certain static rules and principal measurements. Inside these rules, however, the chair creator has large freedom.
The history of the chair is dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of civilizations that have created iconic chair types, expressions of the topmost task in the arenas of technique and creativity. Within these such cultures, individual mention 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 careful make, are found from tomb findings. The first one of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have had four legs crafted like those of some animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular construction was crafted. There appears to be no significant change in the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary populace. The main change exists in the complex ornamentation, in the selection of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was manufactured as an easily carried seat for soldiers. As a camp stool the chair persisted during much later days. But the stool also then was designed for the use of a ceremonial seat, its technical history as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can today be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the structure of folding stools but can not be folded as the seats are created with wood. The plain manufacture of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that turn on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, is seen but some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of these is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not from any ancient fossil still existing but found in a wealth of pictorial objects. The significant kind is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs were visible. These unusual legs were probably executed from bent wood and were thus had huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore super durable and were particularly pointed out.
The Romans adopted the Greek style; some casts of seated Romans show chairs of a heavier and are a slightly less intricately constructed klismos. Both types, the light and the heavy, were brought back within the Classicist period. The klismos design can be found in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some forms of marked originality in Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be charted as far as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full folio of drawings and paintings was preserved, detailing the interiors and outer parts of Chinese homes and the designs of furniture. Preserved also since the 16th century are a number of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that hold an intriguing familiarity to designs of previous chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there existed two standard chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair is designed both with and without arms but never missing the square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one form, it has been seen, the stiles had been slightly curved on top of the arms in order to conform to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a chairback). Together, all three sections are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. While the style of the Chinese back splat then had an inspiration for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden members that would merely to a limited limit reinforce corner joints (and were loose in the result) represent a signature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which finishes around the rounded staves. All members are round in section or is given rounded edges—references as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and had on occasion a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs probably were kept only for the senior individuals in the family, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have come to China from the West. It does not vary so 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 by using a curved member, which is more often than not provided with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resulting effect of these furniture designs is stylized. The construction and decoration elements are combined in a way that is all at once naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual members do not seem to have been joined together with either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and locked into place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Artworks show a style of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same time, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be displayed in engravings of the interior of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this type of chair is also made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not believed that the form actually originated in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in considerable amounts, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of those chairs lined up along a wall. The design asserts itself with 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 form—that was, to say, as brought out in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat suits to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike methods in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of quite thick dimensions; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been taken away, and more upmarket examples may be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engravings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used in place of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and found favour 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 commonly known 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 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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