Of all furniture forms, the chair may be the most imperative. While most of the other pieces (except the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is looked upon here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to derivative kinds such as the bench or sofa, which might 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 stimulating as its history as art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support and an aesthetic piece; it was also an indicator of social rank. At the historical royal courts there were plain connotations between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to make do with a stool. From the last century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been seen as iconic of superior position, like in democratic governments the speaker sits on a higher platform.
As its furniture creation, the chair is employed for a range of various models. There are chairs manufactured to suit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past times there were chairs for births (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We design 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, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has developed new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair forms have been adapted to suit to growing human desires. From its close relationship with man, the chair lives to its full importance only when being utilised. Although it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there are things inside or not, a chair is best seen and judged by a person using it, for chair and sitter require each other. Thus the individual areas of a chair are given names like the limbs of the human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the fundamental purpose of your chair is to support the human body, its value is tested primarily from how well it does fulfill this practical purpose. Within the construction of a chair, the chair maker is limited by some static law and principal measurements. Inside these limits, however, the chair creator has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair covered a period of several thousand years. There is evidence of civilizations that made unique chair types, as expressions of the principal object in the areas of skill and aesthetics. From these civilisations, a mention 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the objects of careful craft, were known from tombs. The first of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have four legs formed akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. In this design a strong triangular structure was crafted. There seemed to be no significant differentiation in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary people. The simple variation exists in the type of ornamentation, in the particulars of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was crafted to be an easily packed seat for officers. As a camp stool that chair persevered during much later periods. But the stool also then existed in the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its technical history as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be observed, 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 in the structure of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats are worked of wood. The plain build of the folding stool, being of two frames that spin on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric set between them, came up but some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of those is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not with any ancient object still existing but in a variety of pictorial items. The most well known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which could be shown. These unusual legs were understood to have been manufactured out of bent wood and were therefore bore great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore very durable and were overtly signified.
The Romans emulated the Greek chair; quite a few casts of seated Romans show chairs of a thicker and which appear to be a kind of less intricately built klismos. Both styles, light and heavy, were brought back within the Classicist time. The klismos chair can be found in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some special forms of notable uniqueness within Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China isn’t able to be tracked as far as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed serial of images and works of art had been kept, detailing the interior and exteriors of Chinese houses and their furniture. Also kept of the 16th century are a number of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that hold an interesting similarity to representations of past chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there existed two iconic chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That chair has been designed both with and without arms however never without its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to firm the back. In one style, however, the stiles were delicately curved on top of the arms in order to sit right with the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of the chairback). All three parts had been mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Although the design of this back splat exercised a foundation for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only just to a restricted limit stabilise corner joints (and were loose into the bargain) indicate an element particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops about the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or is given rounded edges—referable perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and might have had a plaited seat. These chairs needed the sitter to be stiff and upright; for when too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs probably were kept only for elderly people in the family, for they were respected greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have come to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is intricately joined to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is more often than not provided with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resultant effect of these furniture styles is stylized. The manufacture and aesthetic parts are combined in a style that is all at once both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual items do not look to have been put together by use of either glue or screws, but had been mortised with one another and locked into place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left its name on the chair. Paintings project a design of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, in the same era, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be seen in engravings of the interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this type 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 was born in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in large numbers, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of 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 was, to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and grants 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 found between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methodology in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof employ wood of rather thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and finer designs can be further embellished with special delicate and decorative engraving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which came from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and won favour in many 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 popular 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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