Of all furniture pieces, the chair could be the most imperative. While most other pieces (save the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair must be viewed here in the general sense, from stool to throne to derivative kinds including a bench or sofa, which can be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly defined.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and aesthetic object; it historically was a signifier of social status. From the old royal courts there were significant connotations between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to utilise a stool. From the past century, the director’s and manager’s chair has been regarded as an identifier of superior dignity, and in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
In its furniture creation, the chair can be employed for a number of different purposes. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). During past days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We have chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has derived unique chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair types have evolved to suit to different human uses. From its unique association with man, the chair appears to its full importance only when in use. Although it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there are items inside or not, a chair is really seen best and judged with a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter need each other. Thus the individual elements of a chair were given names likened to the areas of the human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elemental work of your chair is to support your body, its credit is valued basically for how suitably it does fulfill this practical use. In the creation of the chair, the chair maker is bound with some static regulation and principal measurements. Inside these boundaries, however, the chair creator has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over a period of several thousand years. There existed civilizations that had made distinctive chair shapes, as expressive of the foremost task in the areas of skill and creativity. Among such civilisations, special 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of masterful design, are now seen from tomb findings. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair had four legs shaped similar to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this design a solid triangular construction was crafted. There was in our knowledge no marked variation between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary non-royals. The simple change exists in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the particulars of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was developed for an easily carried seat for army officers. As a camp stool that chair continued until much later periods. But the stool then also was created as the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical history as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can from today be noted, 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 made in the shape of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats were formed out of wood. The simplistic build of the folding stool, made of two frames that turn on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, is seen somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this type is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is known not from any ancient specimen still in form but as seen from a trove of pictorial evidence. The most well known is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs would be displayed. These odd legs were presumed to be manufactured out of bent wood and were thus subjected to huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore extremely solid and were particularly denoted.
The Romans adopted the Greek style; some statues of seated Romans display designs of a heavier and which appear to be a slightly less delicately designed klismos. Both designs, light or heavy, were popularised in the Classicist period. The klismos chair is used in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular kinds of marked uniqueness within Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China can not be tracked as far as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken folio of drawings and works of art had been protected, showing the interiors and outside of Chinese households and their furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are some chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that show an amazing resemblance to designs of previous chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there were two iconic chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That chair has been seen both with or without arms though never missing a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to hold up the back. In one type, though, the stiles had been delicately curved above the arms in order to fit the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of a chairback). Together, all three sections had been mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the innovation of the back splat had an inspiration for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden items that would only to a limited extent stabilise corner joints (and furthermore are loose to top that off) are an element exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which closes over the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or is given rounded edges—references perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and might have had a plaited texture. These chairs required the sitter to be stiff and upright; for if too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs presumably were kept for the senior persons in the family, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It is not dissimilar much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is generally provided with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resultant effect of these two furniture forms is stylized. The constructive and decorative aspects are combined in a manner that is all at once naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual members do not appear to have been joined together by means of 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 in the 17th century also left its name on the chair. Artworks display a type of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same time, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is found in engravings of interiors of wealthy 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 is also found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not decided that the innovation actually started in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of these chairs lined up against a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its elegant proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that is, as brought out in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes this popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike methodology in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those have wood of relatively thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and finer examples would be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engraving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more open 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 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 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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