From all the furniture items, the chair might be the paramount one. While the majority of other forms (apart from the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair should be regarded here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to further types such as a bench or sofa, which might be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not only a physical support and aesthetic artwork; it can also be symbolic of social status. From the historical royal courts there were plain differences between possessing a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, and having to squat on a stool. From the 20th century, the director’s and manager’s chair has developed a symbol of superior rank, and in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
As its furniture purpose, the chair can be used for a variety of various models. There are chairs created to fit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In the past there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has developed particular chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair kinds have been evolved to conform to different human desires. Due to its significant importance with man, the chair comes to its full purpose only when utilised. Though it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is understood best and judged best by a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter need one another. Thus the several parts of the chair have been named likened to the names of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original function of a chair is to support our body, its credit is valued principally for how well it measures up to this practical job. Within the structure of a chair, the maker is bound within certain static law and principal measurements. In these limitations, however, the chair maker has large freedom.
The history of the chair lasted an epoch of several thousand years. There existed civilizations that had made individual chair shapes, seen of the highest endeavour in the arenas of skill and creativity. Among such societies, individual mention 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 result of careful craft, were found from findings made in tombs. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair has four legs crafted similar to those of some animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this design a durable triangular structure was obtained. There seems to be no particular variation between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical citizens. The real change was in the type of ornamentation, in the evidence of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was made for an easily packed seat for officers. As a camp stool this chair continued until much later points in time. But the stool then was created for the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its technical role as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can now be observed, 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 are made in the form of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats are created with wood. The easy construction of the folding stool, made of two frames that spin on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric held between them, came up some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this kind is the folding stool, made from ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is known not as any ancient object still extant but as in a variety of pictorial objects. The significant kind is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which would be visible. These curved legs were likely to be crafted with bent wood and were as such bore great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore super strong and were particularly drawn.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; some models of seated Romans are evidence of a more heavyset and apparently rather crudely constructed klismos. Both styles, the light or the heavy, were popularised during the Classicist period. The klismos chair is used in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of notable uniqueness within Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China can not be followed as far as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken folio of drawings and artworks had been protected, displaying the interiors and outer parts of Chinese houses and the furniture. Preserved also since the 16th century are a number of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an astonishing likeness to images of past chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there existed two iconic chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That chair is seen both with and without arms however never missing the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one type, though, the stiles are slightly curved on top of the arms for the purpose of suit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a back). The three areas had been mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Although the design of this back splat exercised an introduction for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden members that would only to a particular extent support corner joints (and furthermore are loose into the bargain) represent a design exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends upon the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or has rounded edges—referable maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; when too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs likely were only for senior persons in the family, for they were respected greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have taken to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is elegantly joined to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is generally designed with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the ultimate effect of these furniture styles is stylized. The construction and decorative parts are combined in a style that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual items do not appear to have been held together by use of either glue or screws, but were mortised on one another and fixed in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Artworks project a style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board from the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same era, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is displayed in engravings of the inside of rich 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 may also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not believed that the innovation actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Generally, 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 produced in large numbers, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its shapely proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of styles—that is, as created in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes its popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat suits 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 made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike practices despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them use wood of relatively thick dimensions; but all the members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and finer examples might be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engravings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and was popular 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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