From each of the furniture pieces, the chair could be of most importance. While most other items (save for the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair can be used here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to developed kinds such as 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 evidently definitive.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and aesthetic item; it was historically semiotic of social hierarchy. At the Medieval royal courts there were plain differences between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or having to squat on a stool. In the 20th century, a director’s or manager’s chair has developed an indicator of superior rank, and even in democratic governments the speaker sits on a high-set level.
As a furniture form, the chair can be utilised for a wealth of different makes. There are chairs created to match man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical times there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); in 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 make chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has derived special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair forms has been perfected to conform to changing human uses. From its unique importance with man, the chair appears to its full importance only when utilised. Although it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there are items inside or not, a chair is really understood and judged by a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the several areas of a chair have been given names corresponding to the elements of our human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the fundamental role of your chair is to support our body, its worth is valued generally from how suitably it does fulfill this practical job. Within the design of the chair, the builder is limited within certain static laws and principal measurements. Within these limitations, however, the chair creator has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair is an epoch of several thousand years. There are peoples that made significant chair forms, as expressions of the highest endeavour in the areas of craft and creativity. Among those civilisations, special mention must 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of skilled scheme, were a finding from tomb findings. One of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair had four legs crafted as akin to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this way a strong triangular form was made. There was to our understanding no notable difference between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common citizens. The simple difference lies in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the particulars of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was developed to be an easily stored seat for officers. As a camp stool this type stayed around during much later times. But the stool then existed in the task of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical task as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can already be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the form of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats are formed from wood. The plain build of the folding stool, made of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, is seen again somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of these is the folding stool, of ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not from any ancient item still around but as in a large amount of pictorial material. The iconic kind is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those were shown. These creative legs were likely to have been created with bent wood and were as such put under great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore super solid and were particularly pointed out.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek designs; quite a few casts of seated Romans are evidence of a heavier and are a somewhat less intricately crafted klismos. Both styles, the light and heavy, were seen again within the Classicist era. The klismos influence is seen in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in special brands of considerable originality around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be traced as well as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken serial of drawings and artworks has been kept, with images of the interior and exterior of Chinese buildings and the designs of furniture. Also kept from the 16th century are a trove of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that show an astonishing similarity to designs of older chairs.
Same as in Egypt, two chair designs dominated in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This chair has been designed both with and without arms although always with the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to give support to the back. In one form, it has been found, the stiles are slightly curved on top of the arms for the purpose of conform to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its chairback). Each of the three parts had been mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Though the idea of the Chinese back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden items that merely to a restricted limit embolden corner joints (and were loose into the bargain) signify a feature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which finishes over the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or possesses rounded edges—acknowledging as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to collapse. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs likely were reserved only for elderly people, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have travelled to China from the West. It is not dissimilar very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is generally designed with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the ultimate effect of these two furniture forms is stylized. The structure and decorative issues are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual items do not look to have been fixed by means of either glue or screws, but were mortised onto one another and locked into position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Paintings project a type of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, in the same era, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is found in engravings of the interior of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this style of chair can also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not certain that the style actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in vast quantities, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself with its harmonious proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of styles—that is, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The model owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike principles in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of quite thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been sanded away, and finer examples can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for any 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 varied in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the most distinguished 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 popular 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 products 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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