Of all furniture pieces, the chair may be the most important. While many other forms (except the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair can be viewed here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to complex makes including a bench or 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 defined.
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 aesthetic craft; it historically is a signifier of social placement. Within the old royal courts there were social connotations between sitting on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to utilise a stool. Since the last century, the director’s or manager’s chair has risen iconic of superior standing, as well as in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a raised platform.
In its furniture purpose, the chair encompasses a number of various models. There are chairs manufactured to suit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since past days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has derived particular chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair forms have evolved to fit to differing human uses. From its close importance with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when in use. Though it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there are things inside or not, a chair is seen best and judged best by a person utilising it, for chair and sitter need each other. Thus the individual areas of a chair are named according to the elements of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary role of the chair is to support your body, its credit is tested generally by how suitably it does fulfill this practical use. In the design of a chair, the builder is restricted under particular static legislation and principal measurements. Through these regulations, however, the chair maker has large freedom.
The history of the chair lasted an era of several thousand years. There were cultures that held individual chair shapes, as seen of the leading task in the industries of skill and art. Out of these peoples, individual 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 upshot of skilled make, were seen from tomb discoveries. One of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed as akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this way a solid triangular structure was obtained. There was apparently no particular variation in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common citizens. The real difference existed in the kind of ornamentation, in the choice of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was created for an easily portable seat for officers. As a camp stool that chair existed for much later points in time. But the stool then also was made for the task of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical function as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can from evidence be found, 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 were in the shape of folding stools but are not able to be folded because the seats were formed of wood. The simple manufacture of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric set between them, reappears somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of those is the folding stool, from ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not from any ancient object still extant but found in a large amount of pictorial evidence. The significant kind is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground by Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs could be seen. These odd legs were thought to have been crafted with bent wood and were thus put under a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore super strong and were particularly signified.
The Romans embued the Greek design; a number of statues of seated Romans are examples of a denser and in appearance rather less delicately designed klismos. Both styles, the light and heavy, were popularised within the Classicist period. The klismos chair can be found in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some special forms of notable uniqueness within Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be followed as far back as in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken folio of images and works of art was preserved, with images of the interior and exteriors of Chinese houses and the designs of furniture. Also kept from the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that display an interesting similarity to pictures of older chairs.
Like in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair was constructed both with and without arms although always with the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one type, it has been found, the stiles are lightly curved over the arms to suit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the back). The three sections are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the innovation of a back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that would merely to a limited limit embolden corner joints (as well as being loose additionally) are a feature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes around the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or has rounded edges—a left over perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and had on occasion a plaited texture. These chairs required the sitter to be stiff and upright; if too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs most likely were kept for older persons in the family, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is elegantly held to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is usually possessing metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resultant effect of both furniture designs is stylized. The construction and aesthetic elements are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual members do not seem to have been fixed with either glue or screws, but were mortised into one another and held in position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Works of art project a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture in traveling which, in the same time, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is seen in engravings of the interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this type of chair might also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not certain that the design actually was born 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 clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast numbers, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The form 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 of styles—that is, as brought out in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and elegance. 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 achieved 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 are made from wood of quite thick dimensions; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and finer chairs can be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engraving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles through 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
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 versions 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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