Of all furniture items, the chair might be the paramount one. While many other forms (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair must be said here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to developed kinds like the bench and sofa, which can be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently labeled.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not only a physical support and/or aesthetic item; it historically was an indicator of social place. From the historical royal courts there were significant differences between sitting on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to utilise a stool. During the last century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been a signifier of superior rank, as well as in democratic governments the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
In its furniture form, the chair is utilised for a range of different makes. There are chairs manufactured to match man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). During past times 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, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has derived particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair kinds have perfected to suit to evolving human requirements. Due to its particular association with man, the chair appears to its full advantage only when used. While it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is seen best and evaluated by a person utilising it, for chair and sitter require each other. Thus the several areas of a chair have been given names according to the limbs of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elemental role of the chair is to support your body, its value is evaluated generally for how fully it measures up to this practical purpose. Within the build of a chair, the chair maker is limited in particular static laws and principal measurements. Within these regulations, however, the chair maker has large freedom.
The history of the chair covered dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of cultures that held unique chair shapes, as seen of the highest craft in the industries of technique and art. From these peoples, a note can 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of skilled design, were a finding from discoveries made in tombs. The first one of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair had four legs shaped like those of some animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this design a solid triangular form was made. There was in our knowledge no significant differentiation between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary non-royals. The real change was in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the selection of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was manufactured as an easily carried seat for army. As a camp stool the kind persevered during much later days. But the stool then was created as the task of a ceremonial seat, its technical task as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can already be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the construction of folding stools but can not be folded as the seats are worked of wood. The easy construction of the folding stool, composed of two frames that spin on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, also appeared at some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of this kind is the folding stool, from ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not in any ancient fossil still existing but seen in a variety of pictorial evidence. The significant kind is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them would be displayed. These unusual legs were understood to be crafted of bent wood and were thus had great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super durable and were clearly indicated.
The Romans emulated the Greek design; existing models of seated Romans are evidence of a more heavyset and apparently rather less intricately designed klismos. Both styles, the light and the heavy, were brought back as part of the Classicist period. The klismos style is known in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some kinds of profound uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China isn’t able to be charted as long as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full collection of sketches and works of art was preserved, detailing the interiors and exterior of Chinese households and the designs of furniture. Also preserved since the 16th century are a trove of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that display an interesting likeness to pictures of past chairs.
Like in Egypt, there were two standard chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair is found both with and without arms however always having the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to hold up the back. In one image, it has been found, the stiles are delicately curved above the arms so as to sit correctly with the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the chairback). The three parts are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of the Chinese back splat then had an inspiration for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden items that merely to a limited extent embolden corner joints (and furthermore were loose as a result) represent a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or is given rounded edges—references as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and occasionally had a plaited texture. These chairs required the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs presumably were reserved only for elderly individuals, for they were respected greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have taken to China from the West. It is akin much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is intricately held to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resulting effect of these two furniture forms is stylized. The manufacture and decorative aspects are combined in a way that is at the same time naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the way that the individual items do not appear to have been fixed by use of either glue or screws, but are mortised onto one another and held in its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Paintings project a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a similar board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, in the same period, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is found in engravings of interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this type of chair may also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not held that the design actually began in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast numbers, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and fine 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 styles—that is to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike practices in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof use wood of rather thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been sanded away, and more expensive examples would be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and won favour in large 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
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 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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