Out of each of the furniture items, the chair could be the paramount one. While the majority of other objects (save the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is meant to be used here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to complex types such as the bench and 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 evidently distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support or aesthetic piece; it is historically an indicator of social hierarchy. In the Medieval royal courts there were clear signifiers between possessing a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to use a stool. From the past century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been an identifier of superior position, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a raised floor.
In a furniture creation, the chair is employed for a wealth of variations. There are chairs created to suit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). During past times there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We have chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has derived unique chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair shapes have changed to conform to growing human requirements. From its significant link with man, the chair appears to its full advantage only when utilised. Whereas it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there are items inside or not, a chair is best seen and fairly evaluated with a person utilising it, for chair and sitter require one another. Thus the several parts of the chair are given labels like the names of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elemental function of your chair is to support our human body, its worth is tested primarily on how fully it does fulfill this practical role. Within the build of a chair, the chair maker is bound with certain static rules and principal measurements. In these boundaries, however, the chair builder has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair extended over an era of several thousand years. There are peoples that made individual chair types, as seen of the highest craft in the areas of technique and creativity. In these cultures, 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of careful design, were seen from tombs. The 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 shaped not unlike those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. From this design a solid triangular design was crafted. There was to our knowledge no notable difference from the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular peasantry. The simple change lies in the level of ornamentation, in the choice of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was manufactured to be an easily carried seat for army. As a camp stool the chair persisted til much later days. But the stool also took on the task of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical role as a folding stool being forgotten. This can today be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the structure of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats are made of wood. The easy structure of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric held between them, reappeared but some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of these is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is known not from any ancient fossil still existing but from a wealth of pictorial items. The best recognised is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs could be visible. These creative legs were most likely to have been executed of bent wood and were therefore put under extreme pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very durable and were particularly signified.
The Romans embued the Greek style; designs of statues of seated Romans display chairs of a thicker and apparently somewhat crudely designed klismos. Both designs, the light and the heavy, were brought back in the Classicist epoch. The klismos chair is used in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in special forms of profound iconicism of Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China can not be followed as well as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of images and works of art has been protected, with images of the interior and exteriors of Chinese buildings and the kinds of furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are a trove of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that display an intriguing likeness to images of previous chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, two particular chair forms existed in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That chair can be constructed both with or without arms although never without the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to firm the back. In one style, though, the stiles were slightly curved by the arms so as to suit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the back). The three parts had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Though the design of this back splat later had an introduction for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden members that merely to a particular capability embolden corner joints (and furthermore were loose into the bargain) are an element particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which stops upon the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or has rounded edges—referable perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have had a plaited bottom. These chairs demanded of the sitter to be stiff and upright; when too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs likely were kept for senior individuals, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have taken to China from the West. It is not dissimilar that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is elegantly affixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is often designed with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resultant effect of both of these furniture designs is stylized. The constructive and decorative parts are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the manner that the individual parts do not seem to have been fixed by either glue or screws, but had been mortised on one another and fixed in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Artworks display a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same time, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is displayed in engravings of interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this style of chair may also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not certain that the form actually began in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself by its shapely proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that is, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The model owes the popularity to a combination of leisure and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed seated 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 made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike principles in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are made from wood of fairly thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and more upmarket chairs can be further embellished with special delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles throughout 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 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 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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