From each of the furniture needs, the chair might be the most imperative. While many other forms (apart from the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair must be looked upon here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to further makes such as a 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 overtly distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support or an aesthetic artwork; it is also an indicator of social ranking. At the historical royal courts there were plain differences between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to squat on a stool. Since the last century, the director’s or manager’s chair has developed iconic of superior dignity, and even in democratic governments the speaker sits on a higher level.
In its furniture construction, the chair holds a wealth of different forms. There are chairs structured to match man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since the past there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has designated new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair forms has evolved to fit to different human needs. Because of its close link with man, the chair appears to its full meaning only when used. Though it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there might be items inside or not, a chair is understood and judged best with a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter require the other. Thus the individual elements of the chair have been given labels likened to the limbs of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple purpose of your chair is to support the body, its credit is evaluated primarily by how fully it fulfills this practical job. Within the construction of a chair, the chair maker is limited with the static rules and principal measurements. In these restrictions, however, the chair builder has large freedom.
The history of the chair covered a period of several thousand years. There are cultures that have created distinctive chair shapes, as seen of the leading task in the arenas of skill and creativity. Within those cultures, particular note 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 structures of masterful scheme, are now found from tombs. 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 formed not unlike those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. From this a solid triangular form was obtained. There was to our knowledge no significant change in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular non-royals. The main variation lied in the decorative ornamentation, in the selection of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was crafted for an easily packed seat for soldiers. As a camp stool that chair stayed around during much later times. But the stool then was designed for the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original job as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can now be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the shape of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats were worked from wood. The easy construction of the folding stool, being of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric set between them, can be seen somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of those is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient fossil still around but as seen in a large amount of pictorial items. The most recognisable is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area near Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those are displayed. These unusual legs were possibly manufactured from bent wood and were probably bore great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore very durable and were visibly denoted.
The Romans adopted the Greek style; a number of statues of seated Romans are evidence of a thicker and which appear to be a kind of less intricately crafted klismos. Both types, the light or heavy, were popularised within the Classicist time. The klismos style is used in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular types of profound individuality around Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China can not be tracked as long as that of Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed folio of sketches and artworks had been protected, detailing the inside and exteriors of Chinese households and their furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are a trove of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an interesting familiarity to representations of past chairs.
As in Egypt, there were two iconic chair forms in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That chair was constructed both with or without arms though never without a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to firm the back. In one form, it has been seen, the stiles are delicately curved over the arms for the purpose of fit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of its chairback). Together, all three parts had been mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Although the style of the Chinese back splat then had an inspiration for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden items that would merely to a particular limit reinforce corner joints (and were loose in the result) are a feature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes upon the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or possesses rounded edges—references as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and might have had a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs presumably were kept only for the senior family members, for they were respected greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have come to China from the West. It is not dissimilar very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is delicately joined to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resulting effect of both furniture styles is stylized. The structure and aesthetic elements are combined in a style that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual parts do not appear to have been joined together by either glue or screws, but are mortised onto 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. Artworks project a style of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same time, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be evidenced in engravings of interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this design of chair can also be seen 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. Typically, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of thin dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in impressive quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of these chairs lined up against a wall. The form 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 of styles—that was, as created in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat adheres to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof use wood of rather thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and finer designs might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more open in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and found 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 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 brands 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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