Out of each of the furniture pieces, the chair could be the primary one. While most of the other forms (save the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is meant to be said here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to developed makes such as the bench and sofa, which can be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly definitive.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not simply a physical support or aesthetic piece of art; it historically is semiotic of social status. In the historical royal courts there were important distinctions between being led to a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to squat on a stool. During the recent century, the director’s or manager’s chair has become a signifier of superior dignity, as well as in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
In its furniture creation, the chair is employed for a variety of different purposes. There are chairs designed to suit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical times there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used 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 up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has designated particular chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair shapes have been adapted to match to differing human desires. For its particular association with man, the chair comes to its full significance only when being used. Though it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there might be items inside or not, a chair is really seen and clearly evaluated with a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter complement one another. Thus the several elements of the chair are given labels like the elements of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the fundamental role of the chair is to support your body, its value is tested principally for how fully it does fulfill this practical function. Within the construction of a chair, the maker is bound within particular static law and principal measurements. Inside these limitations, however, the chair designer has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair is a period of several thousand years. There existed peoples that had made iconic chair shapes, expressions of the highest work in the arenas of skill and art. Among these societies, individual 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of careful make, are now seen from tomb discoveries. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have four legs crafted akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this a stable triangular construction was created. There appeared to be no notable differentiation between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary peasantry. The main variation was in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the evidence of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was created to be an easily portable seat for soldiers. As a camp stool that type stayed until much later points. But the stool also then was created for the task of a ceremonial seat, its technical history as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can now be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the shape of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats were made with wood. The simplistic structure of the folding stool, composed of two frames that turn on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, also appeared but somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of those is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is known not with any ancient fossil still in form but seen in a wealth of pictorial items. The better recognised is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those would be visible. These odd legs were probably manufactured from bent wood and were therefore put under a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore super strong and were plainly signified.
The Romans embued the Greek chair; existing models of seated Romans are evidence of a more heavyset and apparently rather less delicately built klismos. Both designs, the light or heavy, were revived during the Classicist epoch. The klismos chair can be evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in special brands of notable iconicism of Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as well as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of drawings and works of art has been preserved, displaying the interiors and outside of Chinese houses and the kinds of furniture. Kept also since the 16th century are some chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that display an amazing similarity to representations of ancient chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there were two iconic chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair was designed both with or without arms but never missing the square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to give support to the back. In one design, however, the stiles had been lightly curved above the arms to suit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the chairback). Each of the three parts are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Though the design of the back splat had a foundation for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that could only to a restricted limit support corner joints (and are loose in the bargain) are an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which closes upon the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or has rounded edges—a left over perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and occasionally had a plaited bottom. These chairs demanded of the sitter to be stiff and upright; for when too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a way of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs likely were reserved for the senior individuals in the family, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have been brought to China from the West. It does not vary that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is delicately affixed to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is generally seen with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resultant effect of both these furniture designs is stylized. The constructive and decoration issues are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual items do not appear to have been put together by means of either glue or screws, but are mortised into one another and held in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Artworks project a style 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 bring up a pattern of small 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 readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same period, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is evidenced 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. Although this kind of chair is also made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not held that the design actually started in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast numbers, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of these chairs lined up against a wall. The style asserts itself by its elegant proportions and fine 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, as brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are made from wood of rather thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been sanded away, and finer designs may be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engraving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and was popular in several 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
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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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