From each of the furniture forms, the chair may be the most imperative. While many other forms (apart from the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair can be viewed here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to complex chairs for example the bench and sofa, which might be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously defined.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and an aesthetic piece; it was also an indicator of social place. In the Medieval royal courts there were important signifiers between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to utilise a stool. Since the recent century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has become an identifier of superior position, and in democratic governments the speaker sits on an elevated floor.
As its furniture construction, the chair ranges from a range of various purposes. There are chairs designed to match man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past times there were chairs for births (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs used 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. We can have chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has designated special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair types have evolved to conform to different human desires. For its significant connection with man, the chair lives to its full advantage only when being utilised. While it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there are things inside or not, a chair is really seen and fairly tested with a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter require the other. Thus the individual parts of the chair are given labels corresponding to the limbs of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first purpose of a chair is to support your body, its credit is judged primarily from how well it measures up to this practical role. Within the structure of the chair, the builder is limited under the static legislation and principal measurements. Under these restrictions, however, the chair builder has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair was an era of several thousand years. There are societies that created iconic chair forms, seen of the premier work in the industries of technique and art. Among such cultures, special mention 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 structures of careful scheme, are now found from tomb findings. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair has four legs designed not unlike those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this design a durable triangular construction was obtained. There was in our knowledge no particular differentiation between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary people. The real variation exists in the decorative ornamentation, in the selection of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was made to be an easily packed seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool that form continued during much later periods of time. But the stool then was designed for the task of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical history as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can now be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the structure of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats are created with wood. The simplistic construction of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, then came up but some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of this type is the folding stool, made of ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient specimen still extant but found in a trove of pictorial evidence. The best recognised is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs are shown. These creative legs were possibly created from bent wood and were probably bore huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore extremely solid and were clearly signified.
The Romans emulated the Greek designs; some casts of seated Romans display designs of a more heavyset and apparently rather less intricately crafted klismos. Both designs, the light and the heavy, were revived during the Classicist period. The klismos chair can be evidenced in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some special types of marked originality of Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be charted as long as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed collection of drawings and paintings had been preserved, with images of the insides and exterior of Chinese houses and the furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are a trove of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that display an interesting likeness to styles of older chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair is designed both with and without arms although always having its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one kind, it has been found, the stiles are marginally curved above the arms to sit correctly with the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its back). All three parts are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. While the innovation of this back splat had a foundation for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that could merely to a limited ability stabilise corner joints (and then were loose in the bargain) signify a feature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes over the rounded staves. All members are round in section or is given rounded edges—an acknowledgement perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and had on occasion a plaited texture. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs likely were kept only for the senior people in the family, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have come to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian or 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 usually seen with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the overall effect of both of these furniture designs is stylized. The construction and decoration elements are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the fact that the individual items do not appear to have been fixed together by means of either glue or screws, but were mortised with one another and fixed in position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Paintings show a design of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, in the same time, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be found in engravings of the inside of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this kind of chair can also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not held that the innovation actually was born in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in impressive numbers, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The design asserts itself with its elegant proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that is, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat suits 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 small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike principles even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are constructed from wood of fairly thick density; but all the members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and finer examples might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carving. The wood may 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 sometimes used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles through 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 popularised 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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