From each of the furniture objects, the chair could be of most importance. While most other items (apart from the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair can be regarded here in the general sense, from stool to throne to derivative makes such as the bench or sofa, which might be looked upon 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 curious as its history as art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and/or an aesthetic item; it historically was an indicator of social ranking. At the historical royal courts there were significant differences between being seated on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to use a stool. During the past century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been seen as a symbol of superior position, and in democratic governments the speaker sits on a higher platform.
As a furniture creation, the chair is utilised for a number of different models. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From historical times there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We have 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.
Our contemporary lifestyle has demanded new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair forms have changed to conform to evolving human requirements. Because of its unique association with man, the chair comes to its full importance only when in use. While it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is best seen and fairly tested by a person using it, because chair and sitter need one another. Thus the several limbs of a chair have been named corresponding to the areas of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the clear function of your chair is to support a human body, its credit is evaluated basically by how suitably it measures up to this practical role. Within the build of a chair, the maker is restricted in the static regulation and principal measurements. Inside these restrictions, however, the chair creator has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair extended over an era of several thousand years. There are cultures that had made distinctive chair shapes, expressions of the highest task in the industries of technique and aesthetics. Within these such cultures, special 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of careful make, were a finding from findings made in tombs. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair had four legs designed similar to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this a durable triangular structure was created. There appears to be no notable change in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical populace. The general difference lied in the level of ornamentation, in the choice of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was crafted for an easily packed seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool the kind persisted for much later points in time. But the stool then also was created as the character of a ceremonial seat, its technical task as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the structure of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats were made out of wood. The simple build of the folding stool, composed of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, then appeared but some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this kind is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not from any ancient specimen still in form but as in a large amount of pictorial evidence. The better recognised is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs are visible. These strange legs were presumed to have been manufactured from bent wood and were as such had to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore extremely strong and were plainly indicated.
The Romans adopted the Greek style; designs of casts of seated Romans display examples of a more heavyset and in appearance rather more crudely designed klismos. Both features, light or heavy, were popularised within the Classicist period. The klismos chair is known in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some special forms of considerable uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China can not be charted as long as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken collection of images and works of art was kept, displaying the inside and outside of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Preserved also of the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that display an amazing familiarity to styles of past chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That chair is designed both with and without arms though always with the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to firm the back. In one kind, it must be said, the stiles could be lightly curved above the arms to sit right with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of its back). All three sections were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Though the idea of the back splat then had an influence on English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that would only to a particular extent stabilise corner joints (and were loose additionally) signify a signature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes upon the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or have rounded edges—an acknowledgement perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have a plaited texture. These chairs demanded of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for when too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a habit of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs probably were only for the senior people in the family, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have taken to China from the West. It is not dissimilar that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is more often than not possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resultant effect of these furniture designs is stylized. The structure and decoration parts are combined in a manner that is all at once naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual parts do not seem to have been fixed by use of either glue or screws, but had been mortised with one another and locked into its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Artworks project a style of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same era, had the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is found 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. While this style of chair is also made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not determined that the design actually began in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in considerable numbers, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself with its shapely proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that is, as developed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The style owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed seated 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 are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of rather thick density; but every member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been taken away, and more expensive designs can be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used in place of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable 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 became the favourite 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 well-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 products 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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