From each of the furniture forms, the chair may be primary. While the majority of other pieces (apart from the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair can be used here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to complex types like a bench or sofa, which should be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly defined.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not only a physical support and/or aesthetic object; it is historically a signifier of social ranking. In the past royal courts there were clear differences between being seated on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to make do with a stool. Since the recent century, a director’s or manager’s chair has become an identifier of superior dignity, and in democratic governments the speaker sits on a higher level.
As its furniture purpose, the chair can be utilised for a wealth of various purposes. There are chairs manufactured to suit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since historical times there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (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. There are chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has developed unique chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair kinds have perfected to match to growing human requirements. From its particular connection with man, the chair appears to its full importance only when used. While it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there might be anything inside or not, a chair is really seen and judged with a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the individual areas of the chair are labeled like the elements of the human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elemental role of a chair is to support a human body, its worth is tested basically on how completely it fulfills this practical role. In the build of the chair, the carpenter is limited with the static rules and principal measurements. In these restrictions, however, the chair designer has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over an epoch of several thousand years. There are civilizations that have created significant chair types, seen of the highest craft in the industries of technique and creativity. In such cultures, a 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 structures of skilled craft, are now known from tombs. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair has four legs formed like those of an animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. In this way a stable triangular structure was made. There seems to be no marked differentiation from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular peasantry. The only change was in the kind of ornamentation, in the choice of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was developed as an easily carried seat for officers. As a camp stool the kind stayed during much later times. But the stool also was made as the character of a ceremonial seat, its original task as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can from today be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the form of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats were worked of wood. The simplistic make of the folding stool, being of two frames that spin on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, is seen but somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of those is the folding stool, made of ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is found not in any ancient item still in form but found in a large amount of pictorial items. The better recognised is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs can be shown. These unique legs were thought to be crafted out of bent wood and were therefore subjected to a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very stable and were overtly signified.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; designs of casts of seated Romans show evidence of a denser and which appear to be a kind of less intricately designed klismos. Both features, light and heavy, were revived within the Classicist era. The klismos design is evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in special kinds of profound individuality within Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China cannot be tracked as long as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full series of sketches and paintings has been preserved, detailing the interiors and outer parts of Chinese buildings and the kinds of furniture. Also kept of the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an amazing likeness to images of previous chairs.
As in Egypt, two iconic chair forms existed in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This chair was found both with or without arms though never without its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to firm the back. In one kind, though, the stiles are marginally curved by the arms so as to sit correctly with the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the back). Together, all three sections are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of the back splat had an influence on English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that could only to a restricted extent stabilise corner joints (and then were loose as well) indicate a feature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops upon the rounded staves. Members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—acknowledging perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and might have had a plaited form. These chairs needed the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs presumably were reserved only for elderly members of the family, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It is akin much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is intricately held to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is often designed with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the ultimate effect of both these furniture designs is stylized. The manufacture and aesthetic aspects are combined in a way that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual members do not seem to have been fixed together with either glue or screws, but were mortised into one another and fixed in position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Paintings display a style of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same period, possessed the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is found in engravings of the interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this type of chair can 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 originated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast amounts, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up against a wall. The style asserts itself with 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 forms—that is, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The model owes the popularity to a combination of leisure and charm. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike principles even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are constructed from wood of relatively thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and finer examples can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engravings. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and became the favourite 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 popularised and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
Within 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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