Of all furniture items, the chair could be the imperative one. While most of the other objects (except the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is used here in the common sense, from stool to throne to complex types including a bench and sofa, which should be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly labeled.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not just a physical support and/or aesthetic piece of art; it was also semiotic of social hierarchy. Within the past royal courts there were clear signifiers between sitting on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to cope with a stool. Since the last century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been seen as a signifier of superior rank, like in democratic governments the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
As its furniture creation, the chair ranges from a number of various purposes. There are chairs designed to match man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the olden days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (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 have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has developed new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair kinds has been changed to fit to evolving human uses. Because of its particular link with man, the chair lives to its full advantage only when being used. Although it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there are items inside or not, a chair is really seen and fairly tested by a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter complement one another. Thus the several areas of a chair have been named according to the areas of our human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal function of the chair is to support our body, its credit is evaluated generally on how suitably it does measure up to this practical role. Within the creation of a chair, the chair maker is restricted by some static law and principal measurements. Under these restrictions, however, the chair creator has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair covered an era of several thousand years. There were peoples that created unique chair shapes, seen of the principal task in the industries of skill and art. Out of these such cultures, a note 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of expert design, were seen from discoveries made in tombs. The first of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have four legs crafted as akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this way a stable triangular design was obtained. There seems to be no particular difference from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical non-royals. The simple variation lied in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the choice of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was made for an easily carried seat for army officers. As a camp stool that type continued until much later days. But the stool also was created for the role of a ceremonial seat, its original job as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can already be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the structure of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats are created with wood. The easy structure of the folding stool, made of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric set between them, was then seen at some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of these is the folding stool, made from ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is known not with any ancient object still extant but seen in a trove of pictorial material. The best recognised is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location near Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs are seen. These unusual legs were most likely to be manufactured with bent wood and were therefore subjected to great pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore extremely strong and were visibly pointed out.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek chair; designs of casts of seated Romans show evidence of a denser and apparently somewhat crudely crafted klismos. Both designs, the light or heavy, were revived in the Classicist period. The klismos chair is evidenced in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in special kinds of considerable individuality in Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China is not able to be charted as far back as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full collection of drawings and works of art was protected, with images of the insides and outside of Chinese houses and the designs of furniture. Another preservation since the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that show an amazing similarity to pictures of previous chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair has been found both with or without arms however always with a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one kind, it has been found, the stiles are delicately curved above the arms for the purpose of fit the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the back). Each of the three sections were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. While the style of this back splat had an influence on English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden items that would only to a restricted capability reinforce corner joints (and are loose to top that off) are a design signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or have rounded edges—referable perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and might have had a plaited texture. These chairs required the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs likely were only for senior members of the family, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have been brought to China from the West. It is akin so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is often designed with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the overall effect of both these furniture forms is stylized. The structure and decoration parts are combined in a way that is all at once both naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual parts do not look to have been put together with either glue or screws, but are mortised on one another and fixed 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. Works of art display a kind of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board from the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same time, had the status 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 interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this style of chair may also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not decided that the form actually began in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in vast amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of those chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its shapely 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 form—that is, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. 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 tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike principles in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are made from wood of rather thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and finer designs can be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engravings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more open in style than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and was popular 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 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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