Of all furniture items, the chair may be primary. While many other forms (apart from the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is meant to be viewed here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to complex pieces for example the bench and sofa, which might be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently defined.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and aesthetic item; it historically is a symbol of social rank. In the old royal courts there were significant distinctions between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to utilise a stool. From the last century, the director’s and manager’s chair has been regarded as a symbol of superior rank, as well as in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a raised level.
In its furniture form, the chair is utilised for a range of different models. There are chairs created to match man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since the olden days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We design 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 and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has designated new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair kinds has evolved to conform to changing human requirements. Due to its significant importance with man, the chair appears to its full purpose only when used. While it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is understood and regarded best by a person utilising it, because chair and sitter suit the other. Thus the individual areas of a chair have been labeled likened to the areas of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elemental purpose of a chair is to support a human body, its value is valued firstly from how fully it does measure up to this practical function. Within the design of the chair, the builder is restricted in some static legislation and principal measurements. Within these limitations, however, the chair designer has great freedom.
The history of the chair lasted an epoch of several thousand years. There are civilizations that have created individual chair types, as expressive of the leading work in the areas of handling and aesthetics. From these societies, particular note can 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 objects of expert craft, were known from tombs. The first one of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have had four legs structured like those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. From this design a strong triangular form was obtained. There was from our knowledge no notable variation between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common peasantry. The main change was in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the selection of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was created for an easily portable seat for army. As a camp stool that chair continued for much later periods of time. But the stool then also was created for the role of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can today be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the structure of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats are formed with wood. The simple structure of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that spin on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric set between them, also appeared somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this form is the folding stool, from ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not in any ancient object still extant but as in a wealth of pictorial items. The most recognisable is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location outside Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those would be shown. These strange legs were thought to have been executed from bent wood and were therefore had great pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore very stable and were particularly indicated.
The Romans adopted the Greek design; designs of casts of seated Romans are evidence of a more heavyset and are a somewhat less delicately designed klismos. Both designs, light or heavy, were popularised in the Classicist era. The klismos influence is used in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some types of considerable individuality of Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China cannot be traced as far as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken serial of images and artworks had been protected, displaying the interiors and outside of Chinese houses and the furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are some chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that hold an intriguing similarity to designs of past chairs.
As were the designs in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair has been found both with or without arms although never missing a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to hold up the back. In one design, it has been found, the stiles had been lightly curved above the arms to conform to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the chairback). The three areas were mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Though the design of a back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that could merely to a limited limit support corner joints (as well as being loose as a result) are a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which stops about the rounded staves. All members are round in section or has rounded edges—references as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited texture. These chairs required the sitter to be stiff and upright; for if too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs most likely were kept only for the senior persons in the family, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have travelled to China from the West. It does not vary very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is prettily affixed to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is more often than not designed with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the ultimate effect of these two furniture items is stylized. The construction and aesthetic parts are combined in a style that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual members do not look to have been adjoined by either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and fixed in place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Paintings display a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, in the same time, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is displayed 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. While this type of chair is also seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not held that the innovation actually was born in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in large amounts, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself by its shapely proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that is, as brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes its popularity to a combination of leisure and elegance. 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 small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike practices in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of relatively thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been sanded away, and more expensive items would be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engraving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and found favour 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 commonly known 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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