Of all furniture items, the chair could be paramount. While most of the other pieces (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair must be viewed here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to derivative chairs for example the bench and sofa, which should be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly definitive.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support or aesthetic item; it was also semiotic of social place. Within the old royal courts there were clear differences between possessing a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to make do with a stool. During the past century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been seen as an indicator of superior rank, and in democratic governments the speaker sits on a higher floor.
As a furniture construction, the chair is utilised for a range of different models. There are chairs created to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the past there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (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. We have chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has designated particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair types has changed to fit to evolving human needs. Because of its significant importance with man, the chair lives to its full importance only when utilised. Though it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is really understood and clearly evaluated with a person utilising it, because chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the individual areas of the chair were given names according to the elements of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal role of your chair is to support a human body, its worth is tested basically by how completely it does fulfill this practical job. In the construction of a chair, the designer is bound by particular static regulation and principal measurements. Through these rules, however, the chair maker has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair covers dates of several thousand years. There were peoples that have created distinctive chair types, expressive of the leading endeavour in the spheres of craft and aesthetics. Within those societies, a mention 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of skilled make, are today a finding from tombs. The first of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair had four legs designed as akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this design a solid triangular form was created. There was from our view no marked difference between the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common populace. The real change was in the kind of ornamentation, in the evidence of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was created as an easily portable seat for officers. As a camp stool this kind persisted until much later points in time. But the stool then was created for the use of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical role as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can from evidence be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the form of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats were worked out of wood. The plain manufacture of the folding stool, made of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, came up at some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of these is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not in any ancient specimen still around but as seen in a large amount of pictorial items. The most recognisable is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs were visible. These unique legs were presumed to be manufactured of bent wood and were in that case bore huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very strong and were particularly drawn.
The Romans emulated the Greek design; designs of statues of seated Romans display designs of a more heavyset and which appear to be a slightly less delicately built klismos. Both types, the light or the heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist period. The klismos style is found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some special types of marked uniqueness of Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China can not be tracked as well as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full collection of images and paintings has been kept safe, displaying the interiors and outside of Chinese homes and the furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are some chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that hold an intriguing likeness to representations of past chairs.
Like in Egypt, there was two major chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That chair was constructed both with and without arms however never missing the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one image, however, the stiles could be delicately curved over the arms to sit correctly with the form of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a back). The three parts are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. While the style of the Chinese back splat exercised an introduction for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that merely to a limited capability stabilise corner joints (and then were loose into the bargain) indicate a signature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which closes around the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or have rounded edges—references maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have had a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to be stiff and upright; if too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs presumably were only for senior individuals, for they were respected greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It does not differ very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is delicately affixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is more often than not possessing metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the overall effect of these furniture designs is stylized. The construction and aesthetic aspects are combined in a manner that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual members do not look to have been fixed by use of either glue or screws, but have been mortised into one another and fixed in place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Works of art display a design of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when 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 can be evidenced in engravings of the interior of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this design of chair can also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not determined that the innovation actually was born in The Netherlands. Usually, 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 obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in considerable amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The design asserts itself by its harmonious proportions and delicate 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 the popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike methods despite 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 extraneous wood has been taken away, and more upmarket designs would be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engraving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and was popularised 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 reknowned 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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