From all the furniture items, the chair could be of most importance. While many other objects (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair should be regarded here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to complex types such as a bench and 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 obviously labeled.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as a creative art. The chair is not just a physical support or aesthetic artwork; it historically was symbolic of social hierarchy. Within the past royal courts there were clear distinctions between sitting on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to sit on a stool. From the past century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been regarded as a symbol of superior rank, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a raised level.
As a furniture form, the chair can be used for a wealth of different forms. There are chairs structured to suit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical times there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has developed new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair kinds has been perfected to conform to changing human needs. From its particular connection with man, the chair comes to its full purpose only when in employ. While it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there might be things inside or not, a chair is understood best and evaluated by a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter need each other. Thus the several parts of the chair have been named according to the parts of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple purpose of your chair is to support your body, its value is tested generally by how completely it measures up to this practical role. In the construction of a chair, the designer is bound in the static law and principal measurements. Within these boundaries, however, the chair creator has large freedom.
The history of the chair covers an epoch of several thousand years. There is evidence of peoples that held distinctive chair shapes, as expressions of the foremost craft in the industries of technique and design. From such 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of careful make, are now known from discoveries made in tombs. The first of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have four legs formed as akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this a stable triangular construction was made. There appears to be no marked variation between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common citizens. The main change exists in the complex ornamentation, in the evidence of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was created to be an easily packed seat for officers. As a camp stool the kind existed til much later periods. But the stool also then was designed for the task of a ceremonial seat, its original task as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can from evidence be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the structure of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats are worked out of wood. The easy make of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, came again at some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this kind is the folding stool, made 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 item still extant but seen in a trove of pictorial material. The better recognised is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those would be visible. These unique legs were considered to be manufactured in bent wood and were therefore put under a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore super stable and were plainly denoted.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek chair; some models of seated Romans offer examples of a heavier and are a kind of crudely crafted klismos. Both kinds, the light or the heavy, were seen again within the Classicist period. The klismos style is evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some brands of considerable uniqueness of Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China cannot be followed as far back as that of Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full series of images and works of art had been kept safe, displaying the interior and exterior of Chinese buildings and their furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are a number of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an astonishing likeness to images of past chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, two iconic chair forms existed in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair can be constructed both with or without arms though never without a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to firm the back. In one image, it must be said, the stiles could be marginally curved above the arms for the purpose of suit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a back). The three sections are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the style of the Chinese back splat exercised a foundation for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden members that merely to a restricted capability support corner joints (and then are loose as well) are a feature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops about the rounded staves. All members are round in section or is given rounded edges—an acknowledgement as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs probably were only for the senior individuals in the family, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have come to China from the West. It is akin much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is more often than not possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the overall effect of these two furniture items is stylized. The structure and decorative issues are combined in a manner that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual members do not appear to have been adjoined by use of either glue or screws, but were mortised onto one another and fixed in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Works of art show a type of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same period, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is displayed in engravings of the inside 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 type of chair might also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not certain that the design actually started in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable numbers, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of such chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself with its shapely 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 form—that is to say, as brought out in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The chair owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and allows 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 disguise all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike methodology in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are constructed from wood of rather thick dimensions; but all the members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and more upmarket examples might be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in style than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and found favour 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 brands 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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