From all the furniture items, the chair may be the paramount one. While many other objects (save for the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair can be said here in the general sense, from stool to throne to further forms for example 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 overtly defined.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as a creative art. The chair is not simply a physical support and an aesthetic item; it was also a signifier of social place. From the past royal courts there were clear connotations between being seated on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to use a stool. In the recent century, a director’s and manager’s chair has become an indicator of superior rank, like in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a raised platform.
In its furniture creation, the chair holds a variety of different purposes. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). From historical days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has demanded unique chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair kinds have been perfected to suit to different human desires. For its unique connection with man, the chair exists to its full advantage only when in employ. Whereas it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there might be anything inside or not, a chair is seen best and fairly evaluated with a person utilising it, for chair and sitter need each other. Thus the individual elements of a chair were named like the areas of a human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elemental work of the chair is to support the body, its value is evaluated firstly from how fully it does fulfill this practical job. In the build of a chair, the chair maker is bound within certain static law and principal measurements. Inside these limitations, however, the chair builder has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair covers a period of several thousand years. There existed civilizations that created individual chair shapes, as seen of the premier endeavour in the arenas of technique and creativity. Out of these cultures, a mention 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of skilled scheme, are now seen from discoveries made in tombs. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair had four legs structured not unlike those of some animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this a stable triangular construction was made. There appeared to be no notable variation in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common citizens. The general difference lied in the type of ornamentation, in the particulars of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was designed as an easily stored seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool the stool stayed during much later points. But the stool then was created for the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its technical history as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can now 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 were constructed in the shape of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats are created from wood. The simple manufacture of the folding stool, made of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric held between them, then came again some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this type is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is found not as any ancient fossil still in form but in a trove of pictorial material. The significant kind is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of which could be seen. These creative legs were considered to be manufactured out of bent wood and were therefore put under huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore very durable and were plainly indicated.
The Romans embued the Greek chair; some models of seated Romans show evidence of a more heavyset and in appearance somewhat less intricately built klismos. Both styles, the light or the heavy, were revived within the Classicist era. The klismos chair is known in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some particular brands of marked originality of Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China isn’t able to be tracked as far back as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken collection of sketches and artworks has been preserved, displaying the insides and exterior of Chinese households and the designs of furniture. Another preservation of the 16th century are a trove of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an amazing familiarity to designs of previous chairs.
Same as in Egypt, there existed two particular chair forms in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair has been found both with or without arms however never without the square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to hold up the back. In one style, it has been found, the stiles were lightly curved over the arms for the purpose of conform correctly to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a back). Each of the three areas are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of a back splat had an inspiration for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only just to a limited extent stabilise corner joints (and furthermore were loose in the bargain) are a signature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which ends upon the rounded staves. All members are round in section or is given rounded edges—a left over as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a way of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs probably were allowed only for senior people in the family, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have been brought to China from the West. It is not dissimilar very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is delicately held to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is usually provided with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the overall effect of both these furniture styles is stylized. The construction and decorative aspects are combined in a way that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual items do not appear to have been adjoined by means of either glue or screws, but are mortised on 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 put its name on the chair. Artworks display a style of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to produce a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same era, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is evidenced in engravings of the inside of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this kind of chair may also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not determined that the style actually began in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in vast numbers, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of these chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its elegant 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 was, to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The model owes its popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting 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 on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of rather thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and more expensive examples would be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and was popularised 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 styles 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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