From each of the furniture needs, the chair could be the most important. While most other objects (apart from the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is said here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to complex items such as the bench and sofa, which may be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently defined.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support or aesthetic craft; it was historically a symbol of social rank. From the historical royal courts there were clear distinctions between being seated on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to squat on a stool. From the last century, the director’s and manager’s chair has risen an identifier of superior status, as well as in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on an elevated floor.
In a furniture construction, the chair can be utilised for a number of various purposes. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From historical days there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has demanded unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair types has been perfected to suit to changing human needs. Due to its unique relationship with man, the chair comes to its full purpose only when used. Whereas it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there might be things inside or not, a chair is really seen and judged best by a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter need each other. Thus the different areas of a chair are given names as the parts of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal work of your chair is to support a human body, its worth is tested basically by how fully it fulfills this practical job. Within the creation of a chair, the chair maker is restricted under the static rules and principal measurements. Through these regulations, however, the chair creator has large freedom.
The history of the chair extended over an epoch of several thousand years. There is evidence of peoples that had made distinctive chair forms, seen of the foremost object in the industries of craft and creativity. Out of those societies, particular note 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of careful scheme, are now found from tomb findings. The first of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have four legs structured as akin to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this a durable triangular design was crafted. There was in our understanding no significant difference between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common non-royals. The real change existed in the decorative ornamentation, in the selection of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was crafted for an easily stored seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool the form stayed around for much later points in time. But the stool then also was designed as the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its technical role as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today 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 are constructed in the structure of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats are formed of wood. The easy construction of the folding stool, made of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, was seen again at some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this kind is the folding stool, of ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is found not in any ancient fossil still extant but in a variety of pictorial material. The most well known is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs were displayed. These unusual legs were probably created out of bent wood and were therefore had to bear great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super strong and were plainly drawn.
The Romans embued the Greek style; existing models of seated Romans are examples of a heavier and apparently slightly more crudely constructed klismos. Both features, the light or the heavy, were brought back in the Classicist era. The klismos design can be evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some brands of notable iconicism of Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China cannot be traced as well as that of Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged collection of sketches and artworks had been kept safe, with images of the interior and exteriors of Chinese households and their furniture. Also preserved of the 16th century are a number of chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an interesting resemblance to styles of previous chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, two chair designs persisted in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This chair has been designed both with or without arms though always with a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to support the back. In one kind, however, the stiles could be slightly curved above the arms to sit right with the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the back). The three limbs were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Though the innovation of the Chinese back splat later had an inspiration for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that just to a restricted extent stabilise corner joints (and were loose as a result) represent an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops over the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or is given rounded edges—references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to be stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a way of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs most likely were only for elderly persons in the family, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It is akin so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is often seen with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of these furniture items is stylized. The structure and decoration aspects are combined in a manner that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual parts do not seem to have been constructed with either glue or screws, but are mortised on one another and held in its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Artworks display a kind of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a similar board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same time, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is evidenced in engravings of interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this type of chair is also found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not held that the innovation actually began in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in considerable amounts, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of these chairs lined up along a wall. The design asserts itself with its elegant proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that is, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes this popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike methods in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are made from wood of quite thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and more upmarket items can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engraving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and found favour 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 popularised 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 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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