Of all furniture pieces, the chair might be of the most importance. While many other objects (apart from the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is intended to be said here in the general sense, from stool to throne to further chairs 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 evidently definitive.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support or an aesthetic creation; it was also an indicator of social rank. At the past royal courts there were clear differences between possessing a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, and having to utilise a stool. In the recent century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been an identifier of superior rank, and in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
In a furniture construction, the chair encompasses a range of different makes. There are chairs structured to match man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since past days 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, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has derived special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair forms has been changed to conform to evolving human desires. From its close relationship with man, the chair lives to its full purpose only when in employ. While it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there might be anything inside or not, a chair is best seen and regarded best by a person using it, for chair and sitter require the other. Thus the different elements of a chair were given names corresponding to the parts of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary work of the chair is to support our human body, its credit is valued basically on how completely it fulfills this practical purpose. In the structure of the chair, the builder is restricted under particular static rules and principal measurements. Inside these regulations, however, the chair maker has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair covered an epoch of several thousand years. There were civilizations that had made individual chair forms, as expressions of the premier task in the spheres of technique and art. From such cultures, special note 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 masterful design, were found from tomb findings. The first one of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs designed akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this design a solid triangular form was made. There was from our knowledge no particular difference between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common peasantry. The general variation lied in the complexity of ornamentation, in the particulars of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was crafted for an easily stored seat for army officers. As a camp stool that chair continued for much later points in time. But the stool also was created for the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its technical function as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can today be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the structure of folding stools but are not able to be folded because the seats were created with wood. The plain build of the folding stool, made of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, was then seen but somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of those is the folding stool, made from ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not from any ancient fossil still in form but as seen in a trove of pictorial evidence. The better known is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area outside Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs could be visible. These unusual legs were considered to be manufactured out of bent wood and were likely to have been bore great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore extremely solid and were clearly pointed out.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek chair; a number of casts of seated Romans are designs of a denser and which appear to be a somewhat less intricately crafted klismos. Both styles, the light or heavy, were popularised during the Classicist epoch. The klismos chair can be found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some particular brands of marked iconicism in Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China cannot be charted as far as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken series of drawings and works of art had been kept, displaying the interior and outer parts of Chinese houses and the designs of furniture. Another preservation from the 16th century are a number of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that hold an interesting resemblance to representations of previous chairs.
As in Egypt, two chair designs dominated in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This chair has been found both with and without arms though always having the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one type, it has been seen, the stiles are slightly curved on top of the arms to fit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the back). Each of the three parts had been mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Though the style of a back splat exercised an introduction for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that only to a particular limit reinforce corner joints (and furthermore are loose additionally) signify a signature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which finishes over the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—a left over as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited form. These chairs demanded of the sitter to be stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs likely were kept for elderly people in the family, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It does not differ so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is elegantly affixed to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is generally designed with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resultant effect of both of these furniture items is stylized. The construction and decoration parts are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual parts do not seem to have been adjoined by use of either glue or screws, but were mortised with one another and locked into position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Works of art display a design of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture for traveling which, during the same period, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be displayed in engravings of the inside 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 type of chair might also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not believed that the form actually started in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in considerable quantities, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself with its elegant proportions and expensive 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 to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The model owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually 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 cover all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike principles even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them use wood of rather thick density; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and more expensive examples would be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used in place of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and found favour 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 reknowned 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 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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