Of all furniture pieces, the chair could be primary. While most of the other pieces (except the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair should be said here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to developed pieces including the bench or sofa, which can be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly labeled.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not only a physical support and/or an aesthetic craft; it historically is an indicator of social standing. From the historical royal courts there were significant signifiers between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or having to utilise a stool. From the 20th century, the director’s or manager’s chair has become an identifier of superior position, as well as in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a high-set level.
As a furniture form, the chair can be utilised for a range of different makes. There are chairs designed to match man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since past times there were chairs for births (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, 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.
Our modern lifestyle has demanded new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair shapes has been changed to suit to changing human requirements. Because of its particular association with man, the chair appears to its full meaning only when used. While it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there might be items inside or not, a chair is really seen best and regarded best with a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter require each other. Thus the individual areas of the chair have been given names like the areas of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple work of the chair is to support our human body, its credit is judged primarily by how suitably it does fulfill this practical role. In the construction of a chair, the chair maker is bound under particular static regulations and principal measurements. Inside these rules, however, the chair creator has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair lasted a period of several thousand years. There were peoples that made iconic chair shapes, as expressions of the foremost object in the industries of technique and art. In these such civilisations, 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of masterful design, are known from findings made in tombs. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair had four legs crafted as akin to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this a durable triangular structure was crafted. There was in our knowledge no notable differentiation between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary non-royals. The only variation lies in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the choice of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was manufactured to be an easily carried seat for army. As a camp stool the kind persisted during much later points. But the stool then existed in the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can already be noted, 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 made in the structure of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats are formed of wood. The easy construction of the folding stool, composed of two frames that turn on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric set between them, came up but somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this type is the folding stool, made of ashwood, which can now be found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient object still in form but as in a variety of pictorial items. The best known is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location near Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which were shown. These unusual legs were possibly created in bent wood and were therefore had extreme pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore extremely stable and were clearly denoted.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; quite a few statues of seated Romans are chairs of a denser and which appear to be a kind of more crudely designed klismos. Both features, light and heavy, were brought back within the Classicist epoch. The klismos design is used in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of notable uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China can not be traced as well as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged serial of drawings and paintings was kept safe, with images of the interior and outside of Chinese homes and their furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are a trove of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an interesting familiarity to styles of older chairs.
As in Egypt, two iconic chair forms existed in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair is seen both with and without arms although never without a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to hold up the back. In one form, however, the stiles were lightly curved over the arms to fit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its chairback). Together, all three areas were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Although the style of this back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could only to a limited capability support corner joints (and then are loose to top it off) represent an element signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which finishes around the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or have rounded edges—references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have a plaited texture. These chairs demanded of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; if too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs probably were kept for the senior family members, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have been brought to China from the West. It is not dissimilar that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is prettily joined to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is generally designed with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resulting effect of these two furniture items is stylized. The constructive and decoration parts are combined in a manner that is at the same time naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual parts do not look to have been fixed together with either glue or screws, but have been mortised with one another and held in position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Paintings display a design of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same era, possessed 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 interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this design of chair may also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not decided that the design actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair were 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 manufactured in impressive amounts, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The style 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 into the mid-20th century. The design owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat conforms 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 covering the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal 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 those are made from wood of fairly thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been taken away, and finer designs might be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carvings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and won 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
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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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