Out of each of the furniture forms, the chair could be paramount. While most other items (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is meant to be viewed here in the general sense, from stool to throne to further kinds like the bench and sofa, which should be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly definitive.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support or aesthetic object; it is historically symbolic of social hierarchy. From the historical royal courts there were important distinctions between sitting on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to make do with a stool. Since the last century, a director’s and manager’s chair has risen an identifier of superior position, and in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
As its furniture form, the chair can be employed for a number of various models. There are chairs manufactured to suit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his position 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 have chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has derived unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair types has been changed to suit to different human desires. From its unique importance with man, the chair comes to its full significance only when in employ. Whereas it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there are things inside or not, a chair is really seen and fairly judged by a person using it, because chair and sitter need the other. Thus the different areas of the chair were given labels like the parts of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the clear work of your chair is to support our human body, its value is valued principally on how suitably it fulfills this practical use. In the construction of the chair, the chair maker is limited with particular static rules and principal measurements. Through these limitations, however, the chair creator has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair extended over dates of several thousand years. There are societies that had distinctive chair shapes, expressions of the premier endeavour in the areas of handling and design. Within those peoples, special note can 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 result of skilled make, are today known from tombs. First of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have four legs formed as akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this design a solid triangular design was obtained. There was from our view no marked variation in the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary peasantry. The general difference lied in the kind of ornamentation, in the selection of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was created as an easily portable seat for army. As a camp stool that kind stayed for much later points. But the stool also then was made as the task of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from evidence be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the construction of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats are created with wood. The simplistic build of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, is seen again but somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this form is the folding stool, made from ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is found not in any ancient object still existing but seen in a large amount of pictorial items. The archetype is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which were displayed. These odd legs were understood to have been executed of bent wood and were therefore put under great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore super stable and were plainly pointed out.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; quite a few casts of seated Romans show evidence of a heavier and apparently slightly less delicately built klismos. Both kinds, light and heavy, were revived within the Classicist era. The klismos design is known in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some special forms of marked originality of Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as far back as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken folio of sketches and paintings was kept, showing the interior and outside of Chinese households and the designs of furniture. Also kept since the 16th century are some chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that show an astonishing resemblance to representations of older chairs.
As were the designs in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair is found both with and without arms but never without the square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to give support to the back. In one design, though, the stiles are delicately curved over the arms so as to sit right with the form of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a back). Each of the three sections had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. While the innovation of the Chinese back splat later had an influence on English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden items that would only to a particular ability support corner joints (and are loose to top that off) represent a feature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which ends around the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or is given rounded edges—referable perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and might have had a plaited seat. These chairs needed the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a way of toppling. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs most likely were only for older family members, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have taken to China from the West. It does not vary much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is usually designed with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resultant effect of these two furniture forms is stylized. The construction and aesthetic aspects are combined in a manner that is at the same time naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual members do not look to have been adjoined 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 during the 17th century also put its signature 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 up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture for traveling which, at the same period, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be seen in engravings of the 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 might also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not determined that the form actually began 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 impressive amounts, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself by its elegant 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 of styles—that was, as brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and allows 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 are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof have wood of fairly thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and finer examples may be further embellished with special delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in style than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the aristocratic 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 commonly known and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
Within 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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