From all the furniture forms, the chair may be the paramount one. While most other objects (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair must be regarded here in the general sense, from stool to throne to developed types like the bench or sofa, which can be viewed 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 interesting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support and an aesthetic creation; it is also symbolic of social standing. In the historical royal courts there were plain distinctions between being seated on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to utilise a stool. Since the last century, the director’s and manager’s chair has risen a symbol of superior rank, like in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a higher platform.
As a furniture creation, the chair holds a wealth of different makes. There are chairs structured to fit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (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. There are chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has derived particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair forms has perfected to conform to growing human desires. Because of its close connection with man, the chair appears to its full significance only when being used. Although it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there are items inside or not, a chair is really seen best and fairly regarded with a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter complement one another. Thus the different elements of a chair are labeled corresponding to the names of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first role of your chair is to support a body, its worth is judged primarily for how suitably it fulfills this practical job. Within the build of the chair, the maker is restricted for particular static rules and principal measurements. Through these rules, however, the chair maker has great freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over a period of several thousand years. There were societies that had individual chair types, as seen of the topmost craft in the areas of craft and design. Out of these cultures, individual 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 careful make, are now seen from tombs. The first one of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair has four legs designed not unlike those of a particular animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this design a solid triangular structure was obtained. There seemed to be no particular differentiation from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary populace. The main difference existed in the decorative ornamentation, in the evidence of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was crafted as an easily carried seat for army. As a camp stool the chair existed til much later points. But the stool then was created for the character of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can now be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the form of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats are made of wood. The simplistic manufacture of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, then came again at some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this form is the folding stool, made from ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not with any ancient fossil still extant but as seen from a large amount of pictorial items. The iconic kind is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place 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 are displayed. These odd legs were most likely to have been created from bent wood and were therefore had to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore extremely solid and were clearly signified.
The Romans emulated the Greek design; quite a few casts of seated Romans display chairs of a heavier and which appear to be a rather more crudely constructed klismos. Both features, the light or heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist epoch. The klismos influence can be found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in particular forms of marked originality of Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be followed as well as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed serial of drawings and artworks has been protected, detailing the interior and outside of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Also kept since the 16th century are a number of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that display an interesting familiarity to images of ancient chairs.
Same as in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That chair is seen both with and without arms but never without the square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to hold up the back. In one design, it has been found, the stiles had been lightly curved over the arms in order to sit right with the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of the chairback). Together, all three parts had been mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the innovation of a back splat later had an inspiration for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that could only to a particular extent embolden corner joints (and then were loose in the bargain) indicate a signature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which finishes over the rounded staves. Members are round in section or has rounded edges—acknowledging perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; when too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs most likely were kept for elderly persons in the family, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have come to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is intricately joined to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is more often than not seen with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the ultimate effect of both these furniture styles is stylized. The constructive and decorative issues are combined in a manner that is all at once naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual parts do not seem to have been affixed with either glue or screws, but had been mortised on one another and held in position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its name on the chair. Paintings project a design of chair with a relatively brusque 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. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, in the same era, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is 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. Although this design of chair is also made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not held that the style actually started in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in vast numbers, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of those chairs lined up along a wall. The design asserts itself with its shapely proportions and delicate 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 is to say, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike methodology in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of fairly thick dimensions; but all the members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been sanded away, and finer chairs would be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engraving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more variable in design than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which came from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and was popularised 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 reknowned 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 products 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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