Out of each of the furniture forms, the chair might be of most importance. While most of the other objects (apart from the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is viewed here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to complex kinds for example a bench or sofa, which should be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously defined.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or aesthetic item; it can also be symbolic of social placement. Within the historical royal courts there were plain signifiers between sitting on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to make do with a stool. Since the past century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has become an indicator of superior standing, and even in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a higher floor.
In a furniture form, the chair ranges from a variety of various models. There are chairs designed to suit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). During historical times 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 four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has demanded particular chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All these chair shapes has evolved to conform to evolving human desires. From its unique link with man, the chair appears to its full purpose only when being used. While it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there are items inside or not, a chair is really seen best and judged best with a person using it, for chair and sitter complement the other. Thus the various elements of the chair were given names according to the names of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the basic purpose of a chair is to support the human body, its worth is tested principally from how fully it does measure up to this practical function. Within the construction of a chair, the builder is limited for some static law and principal measurements. Inside these regulations, however, the chair maker has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair lasted an epoch of several thousand years. There were cultures that have created significant chair types, as seen of the topmost object in the areas of handling and creativity. From such civilisations, a 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of masterful design, were seen from tomb discoveries. The first of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair had four legs structured akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this a stable triangular form was crafted. There seemed to be no significant differentiation from the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular people. The only variation exists in the kind of ornamentation, in the choice of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was developed as an easily portable seat for army. As a camp stool this chair persevered until much later periods of time. But the stool also then was made as the role of a ceremonial seat, its technical function as a folding stool being forgotten. This can now be seen, 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 were made in the form of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats were worked of wood. The simple make of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric held between them, appeared but some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of this kind is the folding stool, from ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient fossil still extant but found in a large amount of pictorial material. The most recognisable is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place by Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those could be displayed. These curving legs were most likely to have been created with bent wood and were probably subjected to huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore extremely durable and were overtly pointed out.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek designs; designs of casts of seated Romans are designs of a heavier and are a kind of crudely designed klismos. Both kinds, the light or the heavy, were brought back during the Classicist era. The klismos influence is used in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some particular types of profound originality around Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be traced as long as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken folio of sketches and artworks had been protected, detailing the interior and outside of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Preserved also since the 16th century are a collection of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that display an amazing familiarity to styles of past chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there were two iconic chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair can be constructed both with or without arms although always with its square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one kind, however, the stiles could be lightly curved on top of the arms in order to suit the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a chairback). Together, the three parts were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Though the design of this back splat then had a foundation for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that only just to a particular capability embolden corner joints (and furthermore are loose as well) indicate a feature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which finishes about the rounded staves. All members are round in section or is given rounded edges—acknowledging perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have had a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs probably were kept only for older individuals in the family, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have been brought to China from the West. It does not vary that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is intricately held to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of both furniture forms is stylized. The construction and aesthetic parts are combined in a style that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the manner that the individual items do not appear to have been held together by either glue or screws, but were mortised on one another and locked into its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Paintings show a design 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 show up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture for traveling which, during the same time, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be seen in engravings of interiors 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 kind of chair is also made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not determined that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in vast numbers, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up by 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 was, as brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The design owes such popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of relatively thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and finer examples might be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and found 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 commonly known and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
During 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 versions 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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