Out of each of the furniture pieces, the chair might be the most imperative. While the majority of other items (except the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair can be regarded here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to complex makes like the bench and sofa, which might be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously labeled.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or aesthetic item; it is also symbolic of social standing. At the Medieval royal courts there were social signifiers between sitting on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to utilise a stool. From the last century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has become a symbol of superior dignity, and in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a raised floor.
As a furniture construction, the chair is utilised for a wealth of various models. There are chairs created to suit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the olden days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs 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 can have 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. Each and every one of these chair kinds have been perfected to match to differing human needs. For its unique importance with man, the chair exists to its full significance only when in use. While it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there are items inside or not, a chair is really understood and evaluated by a person utilising it, for chair and sitter require each other. Thus the several areas of the chair are given names corresponding to the parts of our human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the clear purpose of the chair is to support a human body, its credit is judged primarily by how fully it does measure up to this practical purpose. Within the design of the chair, the builder is limited by certain static law and principal measurements. Through these boundaries, however, the chair maker has great freedom.
The history of the chair extends over an era of several thousand years. There existed civilizations that had distinctive chair types, as seen of the topmost work in the spheres of skill and creativity. From these peoples, individual 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of expert scheme, are today seen from findings made in tombs. The first one of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair had four legs formed akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular structure was made. There was in our view no marked difference from the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary citizens. The real change was in the complexity of ornamentation, in the selection of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was created for an easily portable seat for army. As a camp stool this stool existed for much later periods. But the stool also was designed as the character of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical role as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from evidence be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the structure of folding stools but can not be folded as the seats were created from wood. The easy manufacture of the folding stool, composed of two frames that turn on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, reappeared but some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this type is the folding stool, of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is known not in any ancient object still in form but in a variety of pictorial evidence. The better recognised is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them were seen. These strange legs were most likely to be manufactured with bent wood and were thus had huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore super solid and were overtly indicated.
The Romans embued the Greek style; a number of statues of seated Romans offer chairs of a thicker and are a kind of less delicately built klismos. Both styles, light and heavy, were brought back within the Classicist time. The klismos style can be found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in particular brands of marked uniqueness of Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China isn’t able to be tracked as far as chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken serial of drawings and works of art has been preserved, showing the insides and outside of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are a number of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that display an astonishing resemblance to designs of past chairs.
As in Egypt, there were two iconic chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That chair can be constructed both with or without arms although never without its square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one kind, it has been seen, the stiles had been slightly curved on top of the arms to suit the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of the chairback). All three parts were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of the back splat later had an influence on English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that could merely to a limited extent embolden corner joints (and were loose to top it off) are a signature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends about the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or is given rounded edges—references perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have a plaited form. These chairs needed the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; if too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a habit of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs likely were kept for elderly family members, for they were respected greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have taken to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is elegantly held to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western point of view the ultimate effect of these two furniture items is stylized. The manufacture and decoration elements are combined in a way that is all at once naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the way that the individual parts do not appear to have been put together by either glue or screws, but were mortised into one another and held in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Paintings show a style 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 bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, at the same period, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is evidenced in engravings of the inside of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this type of chair may also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not determined that the innovation actually started in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in large amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself with its elegant 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 was, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back conceal 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 are made from wood of rather thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and finer examples may be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engraving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and was popular 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 versions 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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