Out of each of the furniture needs, the chair could be the primary one. While many other pieces (save for the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is looked upon here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to further forms like a bench and sofa, which can be viewed 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 interesting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not only a physical support and/or aesthetic object; it is historically a symbol of social rank. Within the historical royal courts there were clear distinctions between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to cope with a stool. Since the 20th century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been seen as iconic of superior standing, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
As a furniture construction, the chair can be used for a wealth of different models. There are chairs structured to suit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). During past times there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (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 developed unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair kinds has been changed to suit to evolving human requirements. Because of its unique connection with man, the chair lives to its full importance only when utilised. Whereas it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there is anything inside or not, a chair is understood and fairly regarded by a person using it, because chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the individual parts of the chair were labeled as the areas of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elemental purpose of your chair is to support our body, its value is tested primarily by how fully it fulfills this practical function. In the construction of the chair, the carpenter is restricted under certain static regulations and principal measurements. Through these rules, however, the chair maker has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over an era of several thousand years. There existed peoples that made unique chair shapes, expressions of the principal craft in the arenas of skill and aesthetics. Within these civilisations, particular 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of careful scheme, are today found from findings made in tombs. First of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have had four legs shaped akin to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. From this a solid triangular design was created. There was from our understanding no marked variation in the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary citizens. The general change lies in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the particulars of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was made to be an easily packed seat for army officers. As a camp stool this kind persevered until much later periods of time. But the stool then also was made for the role of a ceremonial seat, its technical task as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today be found, 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 constructed in the structure of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats are created of wood. The plain make of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric set between them, is seen at some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this form is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient fossil still in form but as in a trove of pictorial items. The best known is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground near Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which are displayed. These curving legs were considered to be crafted of bent wood and were likely to have been put under huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore extremely strong and were overtly pointed out.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek design; quite a few casts of seated Romans offer examples of a denser and in appearance slightly crudely constructed klismos. Both types, the light and the heavy, were brought back within the Classicist period. The klismos influence is seen in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some forms of notable individuality within Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China cannot be tracked as long as chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken collection of images and paintings was kept, detailing the inside and exterior of Chinese houses and their furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are some chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that display an amazing familiarity to designs of ancient chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there existed two iconic chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That chair was found both with or without arms although never missing its square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to give support to the back. In one design, it has been seen, the stiles had been lightly curved on top of the arms to fit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a chairback). Together, all three areas were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Though the innovation of this back splat had an inspiration for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that merely to a restricted ability reinforce corner joints (and were loose to top it off) signify a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes upon the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—acknowledging maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and occasionally had a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; when too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs likely were reserved only for the senior people, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have come to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is prettily affixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is often provided with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the overall effect of both furniture forms is stylized. The manufacture and decorative aspects are combined in a style that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual items do not appear to have been affixed by use of either glue or screws, but are mortised onto one another and fixed in its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Paintings project a kind of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, in the same time, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this kind of chair is also made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not decided that the innovation actually originated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in considerable numbers, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by its elegant proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that was, as brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and charm. 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 tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof employ wood of relatively thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been sanded away, and more expensive chairs can be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carvings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles through 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 well-known 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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