From each of the furniture needs, the chair could be of most importance. While the majority of other items (except the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair can be viewed here in the general sense, from stool to throne to developed items such as a 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 clearly distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and an aesthetic artwork; it is also a signifier of social place. 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 use a stool. Since the 20th century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has become an identifier of superior standing, and in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a raised level.
As a furniture creation, the chair is employed for a range of various forms. There are chairs structured to match man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since historical days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has designated new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair kinds has changed to fit to different human needs. From its particular importance with man, the chair appears to its full importance only when utilised. Although it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there might be things inside or not, a chair is seen best and fairly judged by a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter complement one another. Thus the different limbs of the chair have been given labels corresponding to the areas of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal job of the chair is to support the body, its credit is valued principally from how fully it measures up to this practical purpose. Within the structure of the chair, the builder is limited within some static laws and principal measurements. Under these limitations, however, the chair maker has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair extends over dates of several thousand years. There existed civilizations that created significant chair forms, as expressive of the topmost work in the spheres of handling and design. Among these societies, individual 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of skilled craft, are today known from tombs. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair has four legs structured like those of a particular animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this design a solid triangular construction was made. There was in our view no notable difference in the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary populace. The real change lied in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the selection of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was crafted to be an easily portable seat for army officers. As a camp stool that stool stayed until much later points in time. But the stool also was designed as the use of a ceremonial seat, its original function as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can from evidence be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the construction of folding stools but can not be folded as the seats were worked from wood. The easy manufacture of the folding stool, composed of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric held between them, appeared some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of these is the folding stool, from ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient item still around but as seen from a trove of pictorial evidence. The best known is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs could be seen. These creative legs were possibly crafted from bent wood and were likely to have been needed to bear extreme pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very stable and were particularly denoted.
The Romans embued the Greek style; some models of seated Romans are evidence of a heavier and which appear to be a kind of more crudely designed klismos. Both features, light and heavy, were brought back as part of the Classicist era. The klismos influence is found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in particular forms of profound originality of Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as long as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken folio of images and artworks was kept, with images of the interior and exteriors of Chinese houses and their furniture. Kept also of the 16th century are a number of chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that display an interesting likeness to pictures of past chairs.
As were the designs in Egypt, there were two particular chair designs in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair can be found both with or without arms although never missing the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one image, it must be said, the stiles were marginally curved by the arms to fit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a back). Each of the three limbs had been mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the idea of the back splat then had a foundation for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that could merely to a limited extent embolden corner joints (and were loose in the result) signify a signature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or is given rounded edges—acknowledging perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited form. These chairs demanded of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; if too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a way of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs probably were only for older people in the family, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have taken to China from the West. It is not dissimilar so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is elegantly held to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is often provided with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the ultimate effect of these two furniture items is stylized. The structure and decoration parts are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the manner that the individual parts do not look to have been fixed by either glue or screws, but are mortised with one another and locked into its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Paintings show a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of tiny 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 portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same era, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is evidenced in engravings of the interiors of rich 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 may also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not determined that the style actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair will be 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 vast quantities, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of those chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its elegant proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of styles—that was, to say, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike practices despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of relatively thick density; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been taken away, and more upmarket chairs may be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carvings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and became the favourite 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 reknowned 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 styles 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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