Out of all furniture objects, the chair could be of the most importance. While most of the other objects (apart from the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair can be said here in the common sense, from stool to throne to developed pieces for example 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 overtly labeled.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support or an aesthetic piece of art; it is also semiotic of social standing. In the past royal courts there were significant signifiers between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to use a stool. From the last century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been regarded as iconic of superior status, as well as in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a higher platform.
As a furniture purpose, the chair is used for a variety of different models. There are chairs manufactured to match man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has derived new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair shapes have changed to suit to differing human requirements. Due to its unique importance with man, the chair lives to its full importance only when in employ. Whereas it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there might be items inside or not, a chair is seen best and fairly regarded with a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter require one another. Thus the various limbs of the chair are named likened to the elements of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the clear purpose of the chair is to support the human body, its value is tested firstly from how well it does fulfill this practical purpose. Within the manufacture of a chair, the chair maker is restricted within the static rules and principal measurements. In these rules, however, the chair creator has great freedom.
The history of the chair covered dates of several thousand years. There are civilizations that had distinctive chair types, as expressions of the topmost object in the arenas of handling and design. Among these societies, individual note needs to 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 items of skilled craft, are now seen from findings made in tombs. The first of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have four legs shaped as akin to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this a durable triangular structure was obtained. There was to all appearances no notable difference in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary peasantry. The only change was in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the choice of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was designed to be an easily portable seat for army officers. As a camp stool this form persisted until much later days. But the stool then also was made for the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original task as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can today be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the construction of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats were worked of wood. The simplistic manufacture of the folding stool, composed of two frames that spin on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, is seen again but somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this type is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not from any ancient item still around but as seen in a variety of pictorial items. The significant kind is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area by Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs would be shown. These odd legs were thought to be manufactured in bent wood and were probably had great pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore super stable and were overtly drawn.
The Romans embued the Greek design; some casts of seated Romans offer chairs of a thicker and apparently somewhat more crudely designed klismos. Both types, the light or heavy, were seen again in the Classicist era. The klismos style is used in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in special forms of profound iconicism around Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China cannot be followed as well as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed series of drawings and works of art had been kept, detailing the inside and exteriors of Chinese homes and their furniture. Preserved also of the 16th century are a number of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that show an intriguing familiarity to styles of ancient chairs.
As were the designs in Egypt, two chair forms dominated in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair can be found both with and without arms though always with its square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to hold up the back. In one style, it has been found, the stiles could be marginally curved on top of the arms for the purpose of fit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a back). The three sections were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Though the innovation of the back splat had an introduction for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could merely to a restricted extent stabilise corner joints (as well as being loose in the result) indicate an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes around the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or have rounded edges—referable perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and occasionally had a plaited seat. These chairs required of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a habit of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs most likely were kept for older people in the family, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have taken to China from the West. It is not dissimilar very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is delicately joined to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is more often than not designed with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the overall effect of these two furniture items is stylized. The manufacture and decorative issues are combined in a manner that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual items do not seem to have been put together with either glue or screws, but were mortised on one another and locked into its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Works of art project a kind of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, in the same era, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the interior of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this design of chair can also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not decided that the style actually began in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of such chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of its elegant 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 of forms—that was, to say, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually 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 methods in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them have wood of fairly thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and more expensive examples may be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more open in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles within 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 commonly known 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 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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