Out of each of the furniture pieces, the chair might be paramount. While many other forms (apart from the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair can be said here in the general sense, from stool to throne to complex types such as a bench or sofa, which may be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly defined.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not just a physical support and an aesthetic craft; it was also a symbol of social hierarchy. In the past royal courts there were significant signifiers between being seated on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to sit on a stool. In the last century, a director’s or manager’s chair has developed an indicator of superior status, as well as in democratic governments the speaker sits on a higher level.
As a furniture purpose, the chair ranges from a number of different models. There are chairs manufactured to match man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past days there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has derived special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair kinds have been adapted to suit to changing human needs. Because of its significant connection with man, the chair lives to its full advantage only when being utilised. Although it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there might be anything inside or not, a chair is seen best and evaluated by a person utilising it, for chair and sitter need the other. Thus the several areas of a chair are given names likened to the elements of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple role of your chair is to support a body, its worth is valued basically on how well it does fulfill this practical use. Within the structure of the chair, the maker is bound with certain static regulations and principal measurements. Within these restrictions, however, the chair builder has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair covered a period of several thousand years. There is evidence of peoples that held distinctive chair types, as seen of the foremost endeavour in the industries of craft and aesthetics. Among these peoples, a mention must 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of masterful craft, are found from tomb findings. One of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair had four legs designed similar to those of an animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this design a durable triangular design was created. There was from our view no marked differentiation between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary peasantry. The simple variation lies in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the evidence of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was designed for an easily stored seat for soldiers. As a camp stool the stool persevered during much later points in time. But the stool then played the character of a ceremonial seat, its technical function as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can from evidence be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the shape of folding stools but can not be folded as the seats are created out of wood. The simplistic manufacture of the folding stool, composed of two frames that turn on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, then came up but somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of this type is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is found not as any ancient object still around but in a large amount of pictorial items. The most well known is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which are visible. These curving legs were probably crafted out of bent wood and were therefore bore extreme pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore very durable and were overtly signified.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; designs of casts of seated Romans display examples of a thicker and which appear to be a slightly more crudely constructed klismos. Both styles, the light and the heavy, were seen again in the Classicist era. The klismos influence is seen in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in particular forms of notable originality of Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China cannot be followed as far as that of Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of sketches and paintings was preserved, detailing the interiors and exterior of Chinese houses and the designs of furniture. Also kept since the 16th century are some chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that display an intriguing similarity to images of past chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there were two particular chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That chair was designed both with or without arms although never without its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one style, it must be said, the stiles had been delicately curved above the arms to suit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the back). Together, the three areas had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. While the style of this back splat later had an inspiration for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that would merely to a restricted capability support corner joints (and are loose as a result) are a signature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes around the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or have rounded edges—references perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and occasionally had a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to collapse. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs probably were only for senior family members, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have come to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is intricately held to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resulting effect of both these furniture styles is stylized. The construction and decoration issues are combined in a way that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the fact that the individual members do not seem to have been held together by either glue or screws, but are mortised on one another and held in place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its name on the chair. Paintings show a design of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily 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 type of chair can be evidenced 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 design of chair is also found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not held that the style actually was born in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in vast quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of such chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself with its elegant proportions and fine 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 brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of relatively thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and more upmarket chairs may be further embellished with special delicate and decorative engraving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and was popularised 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 popular 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 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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