Out of all furniture objects, the chair might be the most important. While the majority of other forms (except the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair can be said here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to developed types such as the bench and sofa, which might be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously definitive.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or an aesthetic artwork; it was historically an indicator of social hierarchy. Within the past royal courts there were clear distinctions between possessing a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to use a stool. From the last century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen iconic of superior dignity, and even in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a raised platform.
As a furniture form, the chair is employed for a range of different models. There are chairs manufactured to suit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). There are 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.
Our modern lifestyle has designated new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair forms has evolved to fit to growing human needs. For its unique relationship with man, the chair comes to its full purpose only when being utilised. Whereas it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there are things inside or not, a chair is really understood and clearly evaluated by a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter suit the other. Thus the individual limbs of a chair are named according to the parts of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the basic purpose of your chair is to support your body, its value is valued basically on how suitably it measures up to this practical function. Within the creation of a chair, the maker is bound within some static laws and principal measurements. In these limitations, however, the chair creator has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair covers an epoch of several thousand years. There is evidence of peoples that have created iconic chair shapes, seen of the premier work in the industries of technique and art. Within such peoples, individual note 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of careful design, are now found from tombs. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have had four legs structured similar to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this design a durable triangular construction was created. There was apparently no notable variation from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary peasantry. The general difference exists in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the selection of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was made as an easily packed seat for officers. As a camp stool the chair stayed around til much later points. But the stool also played the task of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can now be seen, 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 are constructed in the construction of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats are created of wood. The easy make of the folding stool, being of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric held between them, then came again but some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this form is the folding stool, of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is known not from any ancient item still around but as seen in a variety of pictorial evidence. The better recognised is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of which are shown. These curving legs were likely to have been manufactured out of bent wood and were likely to have been subjected to extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore extremely solid and were overtly pointed out.
The Romans adopted the Greek design; designs of casts of seated Romans are chairs of a more heavyset and in appearance rather crudely constructed klismos. Both types, light and heavy, were seen again in the Classicist era. The klismos style is evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some special types of marked uniqueness in Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China isn’t able to be followed as well as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of images and paintings has been kept, detailing the inside and outside of Chinese buildings and their furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are a number of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an astonishing resemblance to designs of older chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair is seen both with and without arms although never missing its square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to hold up the back. In one image, it must be said, the stiles had been marginally curved above the arms to sit right with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its back). Together, the three sections had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the design of a back splat had an influence on English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that could merely to a particular limit embolden corner joints (and then are loose in the result) signify a signature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or possesses rounded edges—an acknowledgement perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and occasionally had a plaited texture. These chairs demanded of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for when too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs most likely were reserved for the senior persons, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It does not differ much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is elegantly fixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resultant effect of both these furniture designs is stylized. The construction and aesthetic parts are combined in a way that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual parts do not seem to have been fixed together with either glue or screws, but had been mortised with one another and fixed in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Artworks show a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, during the same period, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is displayed in engravings of interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this kind of chair might also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not believed that the style actually originated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of thin dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in large numbers, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself with its harmonious proportions and delicate 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, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes such popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike principles in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof have wood of relatively thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been taken away, and finer chairs would be further embellished with special delicate and decorative engravings. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and was popularised in several 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 popular and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
During 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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