From each of the furniture objects, the chair may be the primary one. While most other items (except the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is meant to be viewed here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to complex makes such as a bench or 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 evidently definitive.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support or an aesthetic creation; it historically was an indicator of social ranking. Within the old royal courts there were clear differences between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to make do with a stool. During the past century, the director’s and manager’s chair has risen iconic of superior rank, and even in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a higher platform.
As its furniture construction, the chair is employed for a number of different purposes. There are chairs created to fit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since historical days there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). There are 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 for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has designated unique chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair types has changed to suit to growing human requirements. From its particular association with man, the chair lives to its full significance only when being utilised. Though it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is really seen and judged best by a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the several limbs of a chair are given labels like the parts of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original role of your chair is to support our human body, its worth is evaluated principally by how well it fulfills this practical purpose. Within the structure of the chair, the maker is bound by some static rules and principal measurements. Through these boundaries, however, the chair designer has great freedom.
The history of the chair covers a period of several thousand years. There existed civilizations that held distinctive chair types, as expressions of the principal object in the spheres of technique and art. Out of those cultures, special note 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of careful design, are known from discoveries made in tombs. The first of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair has four legs structured similar to those of an animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this way a solid triangular structure was crafted. There was from our knowledge no particular change in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary citizens. The main difference lies in the brand of ornamentation, in the evidence of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was developed for an easily stored seat for army. As a camp stool this form persevered for much later periods. But the stool then was created as the task of a ceremonial seat, its original task as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can already be found, 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 were made in the shape of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats are formed with wood. The simple build of the folding stool, composed of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric held between them, reappears but somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this kind is the folding stool, made of ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is known not with any ancient specimen still extant but seen in a large amount of pictorial objects. The significant kind is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those would be displayed. These curved legs were possibly created from bent wood and were probably bore extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very strong and were particularly signified.
The Romans emulated the Greek designs; designs of models of seated Romans are evidence of a more heavyset and are a somewhat crudely designed klismos. Both types, the light or heavy, were brought back within the Classicist period. The klismos influence can be found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of marked individuality in Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China can not be traced as far as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken serial of images and paintings was protected, with images of the insides and outside of Chinese homes and the furniture. Another preservation since the 16th century are some chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that display an interesting likeness to representations of previous chairs.
As in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair was found both with or without arms but always having its square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to firm the back. In one style, it has been seen, the stiles could be lightly curved by the arms to sit right with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of its back). Together, all three parts were mortised into the yoke-like top rail. While the design of a back splat exercised a foundation for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could merely to a particular limit support corner joints (and then were loose as a result) signify an element signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which closes around the rounded staves. Members are round in section or is given rounded edges—acknowledging as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and had on occasion a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; for when too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs most likely were only for senior members of the family, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is prettily affixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is generally seen with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the overall effect of both furniture designs is stylized. The structure and decoration aspects are combined in a style that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual members do not look to have been put together by use of either glue or screws, but are mortised with one another and locked into position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Works of art project a type of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same time, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the inside of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this style of chair might also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not decided that the form actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in vast amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of such chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that is to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes its popularity to a combination of comfort 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 on the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methods in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are constructed from wood of relatively thick measurements; but all the members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and more upmarket chairs may be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engravings. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and became the favourite 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 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 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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