Out of each of the furniture needs, the chair could be of the most importance. While the majority of other forms (save for the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is meant to be used here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to complex makes such as the bench or sofa, which should be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously definitive.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support or aesthetic object; it historically is symbolic of social standing. From the past royal courts there were clear signifiers between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to utilise a stool. In the past century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been iconic of superior position, and even in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on an elevated level.
As its furniture form, the chair holds a range of various purposes. There are chairs created to suit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In the olden days 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, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has developed new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair kinds has been perfected to suit to growing human needs. For its particular relationship with man, the chair exists to its full importance only when utilised. Whereas it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is understood and evaluated by a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter complement the other. Thus the various parts of the chair were labeled corresponding to the areas of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elemental purpose of your chair is to support the body, its value is evaluated primarily for how well it does fulfill this practical use. Within the design of the chair, the chair maker is restricted under particular static law and principal measurements. Within these regulations, however, the chair builder has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of cultures that created unique chair forms, as expressive of the principal object in the areas of handling and art. Out of those peoples, a note 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of masterful make, are now a finding from tomb findings. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair has four legs designed similar to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular construction was obtained. There seems to be no particular differentiation in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common people. The simple difference existed in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the selection of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was designed for an easily packed seat for army. As a camp stool that type persisted for much later periods of time. But the stool also then took on the task of a ceremonial seat, its technical history as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can already be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the form of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats are worked from wood. The plain manufacture of the folding stool, being of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, was then seen some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this kind is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient object still extant but as seen from a trove of pictorial items. The best known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground by Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of which could be shown. These unusual legs were presumably executed out of bent wood and were in that case needed to bear extreme pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore extremely stable and were visibly pointed out.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek design; quite a few statues of seated Romans show evidence of a thicker and in appearance rather more crudely constructed klismos. Both designs, light or heavy, were seen again during the Classicist era. The klismos influence is evidenced in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of considerable originality of Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China cannot be followed as long as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of sketches and paintings had been kept safe, with images of the insides and exterior of Chinese homes and the kinds of furniture. Also kept since the 16th century are a number of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that display an astonishing likeness to images of previous chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, two chair forms persisted in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair is seen both with or without arms though never missing the square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to give support to the back. In one image, it has been found, the stiles are delicately curved on top of the arms to sit correctly with the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the chairback). Each of the three sections had been mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of this back splat had a foundation for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that only to a limited limit support corner joints (and were loose as a result) represent an element signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which ends about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or have rounded edges—references as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and occasionally had a plaited seat. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; if too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs likely were reserved only for the senior members of the family, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have come to China from the West. It is not dissimilar so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is elegantly held to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is generally designed with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the ultimate effect of both furniture forms is stylized. The structure and decoration parts are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual members do not look to have been joined together by either glue or screws, but were mortised into one another and locked into place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Artworks show a style of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to bring out a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same era, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be seen in engravings of interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this type of chair can also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not held that the style actually started in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in large numbers, as evidenced 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 by 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 form—that is, as brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof employ wood of quite thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and more upmarket designs might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carvings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and became the preference 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 well-known 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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