Of all furniture objects, the chair may be the most important. While the majority of other objects (apart from the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is intended to be looked upon here in the general sense, from stool to throne to derivative kinds including a bench or sofa, which might be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently labeled.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as a creative art. The chair is not just a physical support or aesthetic piece; it historically is symbolic of social placement. Within the past royal courts there were significant connotations between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to utilise a stool. During the recent century, the director’s and manager’s chair has been seen as an identifier of superior position, and in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a raised platform.
As its furniture purpose, the chair is utilised for a variety of different models. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since historical days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has designated particular chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair types has perfected to fit to changing human uses. From its significant importance with man, the chair exists to its full meaning only when in use. Whereas it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there is anything inside or not, a chair is really seen and judged with a person utilising it, for chair and sitter require one another. Thus the various limbs of a chair have been labeled according to the names of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the basic job of your chair is to support your body, its value is valued primarily from how suitably it fulfills this practical role. In the design of a chair, the carpenter is limited with particular static legislation and principal measurements. Within these boundaries, however, the chair builder has great freedom.
The history of the chair lasted over an epoch of several thousand years. There were cultures that made distinctive chair forms, seen of the premier work in the areas of skill and creativity. In such cultures, 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of masterful design, were a finding from tombs. The first one of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair has four legs crafted as akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. In this way a stable triangular form was crafted. There was from our view no significant change between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical peasantry. The general variation lies in the complex ornamentation, in the particulars of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was crafted as an easily carried seat for army officers. As a camp stool the kind continued during much later days. But the stool also then existed in the task of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical task as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the construction of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats are formed with wood. The plain build of the folding stool, made of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, reappears somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of those is the folding stool, of ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient item still existing but as found in a trove of pictorial material. The most well known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs could be seen. These unique legs were likely to have been executed of bent wood and were thus put under a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore very solid and were clearly pointed out.
The Romans adopted the Greek style; quite a few casts of seated Romans offer designs of a denser and are a kind of more crudely built klismos. Both styles, the light or the heavy, were revived in the Classicist era. The klismos style can be evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some special types of marked uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be traced as far back as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full series of drawings and works of art was protected, with images of the inside and outside of Chinese homes and the furniture. Another preservation of the 16th century are a number of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that display an astonishing similarity to designs of past chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there were two iconic chair forms in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That chair can be found both with or without arms although never without its square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to hold up the back. In one design, it has been seen, the stiles are marginally curved on top of the arms to conform correctly to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its back). Together, all three areas were mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the innovation of the back splat later had an introduction for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could merely to a limited capability embolden corner joints (and were loose additionally) indicate a signature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes about the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or is given rounded edges—a left over perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and may have a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs most likely were reserved for the senior individuals, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have been brought to China from the West. It is akin much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is elegantly joined to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is more often than not designed with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resulting effect of these furniture designs is stylized. The constructive and decorative issues are combined in a way that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is a result of the way that the individual parts do not seem to have been fixed by means of either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and locked into position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Artworks project 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 the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same period, had 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 wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this style of chair can also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not believed that the form actually began in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in impressive quantities, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious 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 of styles—that was, to say, as created in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The design owes this popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat suits 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 tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike practices in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are constructed from wood of fairly thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and more upmarket chairs might be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carvings. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in style than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles through 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 popular 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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