Of all furniture objects, the chair could be the most imperative. While the majority of other pieces (save the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is intended to be looked upon here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to developed items such as the bench or sofa, which can be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support and/or an aesthetic piece; it is historically a symbol of social hierarchy. From the Medieval royal courts there were social differences between being led to a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to use a stool. From the recent century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been a symbol of superior dignity, and in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a higher floor.
In a furniture creation, the chair is used for a range of different purposes. There are chairs designed to suit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In 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 make 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 and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has demanded special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair forms have changed to fit to different human uses. Due to its significant connection with man, the chair appears to its full purpose only when in employ. Although it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there are things inside or not, a chair is really seen best and fairly judged by a person using it, for chair and sitter need one another. Thus the several areas of the chair are labeled like the elements of a human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the clear job of your chair is to support our human body, its credit is judged basically by how well it does measure up to this practical use. In the creation of the chair, the designer is bound under particular static laws and principal measurements. Through these restrictions, however, the chair maker has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over an era of several thousand years. There were societies that held significant chair forms, as expressions of the topmost object in the spheres of handling and art. Among these such societies, a 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 construct of masterful make, are a finding from findings made in tombs. One of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have four legs formed similar to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. From this design a stable triangular form was crafted. There was apparently no marked difference in the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular populace. The only change was in the brand of ornamentation, in the selection of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was made as an easily stored seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool that kind stayed til much later periods. But the stool then also was created for the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical function as a folding stool being forgotten. This can today be found, 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 were constructed in the shape of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats were worked out of wood. The plain make of the folding stool, made of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric set between them, came again some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of this kind is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is found not from any ancient item still in form but found in a trove of pictorial material. The better recognised is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those would be seen. These curved legs were presumably created in bent wood and were likely to have been put under huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore extremely durable and were visibly denoted.
The Romans embued the Greek chair; quite a few statues of seated Romans show designs of a more heavyset and apparently somewhat less intricately constructed klismos. Both designs, the light and the heavy, were popularised during the Classicist epoch. The klismos influence can be found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some kinds of profound individuality around Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China can not be traced as long as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed series of drawings and paintings was protected, showing the interior and outside of Chinese homes and the kinds of furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are some chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that show an interesting resemblance to representations of older chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there were two standard chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair can be designed both with or without arms but always with a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to hold up the back. In one type, it has been seen, the stiles were slightly curved by the arms so as to sit right with the form of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its back). Each of the three limbs had been mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the idea of the back splat then had an introduction for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only just to a particular capability support corner joints (and are loose to top that off) are a design exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which finishes over the rounded staves. Members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—acknowledging perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; when too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs likely were kept only for older individuals, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It does not differ much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is usually seen with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resulting effect of these two furniture items is stylized. The construction and aesthetic elements are combined in a style that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual items do not look to have been fixed together by means of either glue or screws, but are mortised with one another and held in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Paintings show a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same period, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is found 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. While this type of chair is also seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not decided that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in considerable quantities, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up against 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 developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat adheres to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methods in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are constructed from wood of fairly thick density; but all the members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and more expensive chairs may be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engravings. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more variable in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and became the favourite 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
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 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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