Of all furniture objects, the chair may be of the most importance. While many other forms (apart from the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair was viewed here in the general sense, from stool to throne to complex forms 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 obviously distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not only a physical support or aesthetic craft; it historically is an indicator of social status. From the past royal courts there were clear differences between being led to a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to squat on a stool. In the 20th century, a director’s or manager’s chair has been seen as an indicator of superior position, and in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a high-set level.
As a furniture creation, the chair encompasses a wealth of different models. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past times there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has derived unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair forms has been adapted to suit to different human needs. Because of its unique importance with man, the chair lives to its full advantage only when being used. Although it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there might be things inside or not, a chair is really seen and clearly evaluated with a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter suit each other. Thus the several limbs of the chair were labeled like the elements of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious role of the chair is to support our human body, its worth is valued primarily by how suitably it does measure up to this practical role. In the construction of the chair, the chair maker is bound in some static regulation and principal measurements. Through these restrictions, however, the chair builder has great freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over dates of several thousand years. There were peoples that have created individual chair shapes, as seen of the foremost work in the spheres of technique and art. In these cultures, particular 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of careful craft, are now known from tomb findings. One of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair has four legs designed as akin to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular form was obtained. There was in our understanding no noteworthy variation in the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary non-royals. The general difference lies in the brand of ornamentation, in the choice of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was designed for an easily stored seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool that chair existed til much later points. But the stool also then took on the role of a ceremonial seat, its original function as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can already be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed 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 not be folded because the seats are formed of wood. The easy make of the folding stool, composed of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric set between them, came up but somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of these is the folding stool, made from ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is known not with any ancient object still existing but as seen from a large amount of pictorial evidence. The most recognisable is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location by Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs were shown. These strange legs were thought to be crafted from bent wood and were probably needed to bear extreme pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very strong and were plainly drawn.
The Romans embued the Greek chair; a number of statues of seated Romans offer examples of a more heavyset and are a kind of crudely built klismos. Both types, the light or the heavy, were brought back within the Classicist epoch. The klismos influence is used in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some particular kinds of marked individuality of Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China isn’t able to be tracked as long as chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken series of sketches and works of art has been preserved, displaying the interiors and outside of Chinese households and their furniture. Also kept of the 16th century are a trove of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an astonishing familiarity to styles of past chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This chair has been designed both with or without arms although always with a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one type, however, the stiles had been delicately curved above the arms in order to conform correctly to the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of its back). Each of the three limbs were mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Though the style of this back splat exercised a foundation for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that only just to a particular extent stabilise corner joints (and then were loose to top that off) indicate a feature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which stops around the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or have rounded edges—an acknowledgement perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and had on occasion a plaited form. These chairs required the sitter to be stiff and upright; if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs probably were kept only for older people in the family, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is generally seen with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resulting effect of these furniture forms is stylized. The structure and decoration elements are combined in a manner that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual items do not seem to have been constructed by use of either glue or screws, but had been mortised on one another and locked into its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Artworks project 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 between, stitched to bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture in traveling which, in the same time, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be found in engravings of interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this type of chair is also made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not believed that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in considerable quantities, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself by its shapely 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 form—that is, as created in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes its popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methodology in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are made from wood of relatively thick density; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and more expensive items might be further embellished with special delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used in place of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and won 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 well-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 styles 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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