Of all furniture forms, the chair may be paramount. While most other forms (apart from the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair can be viewed here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to developed forms including the bench and sofa, which should be regarded 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 stimulating as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and/or aesthetic item; it is historically an indicator of social ranking. At the past royal courts there were important differences between having a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to sit on a stool. Since the 20th century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been regarded as an indicator of superior status, as well as in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on an elevated level.
In a furniture creation, the chair is employed for a variety of various forms. There are chairs designed to suit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the olden days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has derived unique chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair kinds have adapted to conform to changing human uses. From its close relationship with man, the chair comes to its full importance only when used. Although it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there might be things inside or not, a chair is really seen and tested with a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter need the other. Thus the several limbs of the chair were given labels corresponding to the parts of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple work of a chair is to support our human body, its worth is evaluated principally on how suitably it fulfills this practical use. Within the construction of a chair, the chair maker is bound with particular static laws and principal measurements. Through these restrictions, however, the chair builder has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair extended over a period of several thousand years. There were cultures that created significant chair types, expressions of the premier task in the areas of technique and aesthetics. Within such civilisations, particular 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 upshot of careful design, were seen from tomb discoveries. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have four legs shaped similar to those of an animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. From this design a durable triangular form was crafted. There was apparently no particular change from the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular peasantry. The simple change exists in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the particulars of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was created for an easily packed seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool the type existed til much later times. But the stool also was created as the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical task as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can from today be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the form of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats were formed out of wood. The easy manufacture of the folding stool, composed of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, can be seen but some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this kind is the folding stool, of ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is found not as any ancient object still in form but as seen from a large amount of pictorial items. The most recognisable is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs can be visible. These creative legs were presumed to have been created from bent wood and were as such had great pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore extremely stable and were clearly pointed out.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek design; some models of seated Romans are evidence of a thicker and which appear to be a slightly less intricately built klismos. Both designs, light or heavy, were revived within the Classicist epoch. The klismos influence is evidenced in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in special kinds of profound iconicism within Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China isn’t able to be charted as well as in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of drawings and artworks was protected, displaying the inside and outside of Chinese houses and the designs of furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are a number of chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an amazing familiarity to designs of previous chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there were two particular chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This chair has been found both with and without arms although never without a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to hold up the back. In one image, it has been seen, the stiles could be delicately curved on top of the arms to conform to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its back). Together, all three parts are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of the Chinese back splat later had an introduction for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that could merely to a particular extent reinforce corner joints (and are loose in the result) represent a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or is given rounded edges—acknowledging perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have a plaited bottom. These chairs needed the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; when too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs probably were allowed only for older persons, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have been brought to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is intricately joined to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is usually designed with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the ultimate effect of these two furniture designs is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic issues are combined in a way that is all at once both naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the way that the individual members do not look to have been fixed by use of either glue or screws, but were mortised onto one another and locked into place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Paintings project a design of chair with a relatively unrefined 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 similar board in the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, in the same era, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be displayed in engravings of the inside 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 type of chair may also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not decided that the innovation actually began in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in impressive amounts, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself with its shapely proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that was, to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat suits 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 little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of fairly thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been taken away, and more upmarket designs may be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carvings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more open in design than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and won 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
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 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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