Out of all furniture needs, the chair might be of most importance. While most other items (save the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair can be viewed here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to further forms like the bench and sofa, which might be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously labeled.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support or an aesthetic piece of art; it historically is symbolic of social rank. Within the Medieval royal courts there were important connotations between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to use a stool. Since the past century, a director’s and manager’s chair has become an indicator of superior standing, and even in democratic governments the speaker sits on a high-set level.
As its furniture form, the chair can be employed for a variety of various models. There are chairs designed to fit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since historical days there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); during 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 can have chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has demanded particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair types has been adapted to match to changing human needs. From its unique link with man, the chair exists to its full meaning only when being used. While it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is really understood and fairly tested by a person utilising it, because chair and sitter suit the other. Thus the individual elements of a chair were given names according to the parts of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elemental job of your chair is to support a body, its worth is tested basically from how suitably it does measure up to this practical role. In the construction of a chair, the maker is limited under some static laws and principal measurements. Through these boundaries, however, the chair designer has large freedom.
The history of the chair extended over dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of civilizations that had distinctive chair shapes, seen of the highest work in the spheres of handling and art. Among these such societies, special note should 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 objects of skilled scheme, are a finding from tomb discoveries. One of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair has four legs structured as akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this a solid triangular structure was crafted. There was apparently no particular change in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common people. The only difference exists in the decorative ornamentation, in the particulars of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was manufactured as an easily stored seat for army officers. As a camp stool the chair stayed around until much later points in time. But the stool then also was made as the use of a ceremonial seat, its technical task as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be observed, 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 constructed in the structure of folding stools but are not able to be folded because the seats are worked out of wood. The simplistic build of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, then came up somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this form is the folding stool, of ashwood, which can now be found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is known not with any ancient object still around but found in a variety of pictorial evidence. The archetype is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them would be shown. These odd legs were presumed to have been executed out of bent wood and were likely to have been needed to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore super strong and were particularly denoted.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek designs; designs of casts of seated Romans are designs of a denser and apparently kind of less intricately crafted klismos. Both types, the light and heavy, were brought back during the Classicist time. The klismos design is evidenced in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some brands of notable uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China cannot be charted as far back as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken collection of drawings and artworks has been kept safe, showing the interiors and outside of Chinese homes and the designs of furniture. Preserved also of the 16th century are a trove of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an astonishing familiarity to images of older chairs.
As were the designs in Egypt, there was two major chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That chair has been constructed both with or without arms although always having the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to give support to the back. In one style, though, the stiles could be lightly curved above the arms in order to fit the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a chairback). Together, the three sections were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Though the innovation of this back splat had a foundation for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that would only to a particular extent support corner joints (and furthermore are loose as well) represent a signature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which stops about the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or have rounded edges—references maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and had on occasion a plaited seat. These chairs needed the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; if too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs most likely were kept only for senior family members, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It does not differ very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is delicately held to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resulting effect of these two furniture designs is stylized. The manufacture and decoration aspects are combined in a manner that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the way that the individual members do not look to have been affixed by either glue or screws, but are mortised on one another and fixed in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left its name on the chair. Artworks show a style of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same period, had the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be seen in engravings of 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 type of chair may also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not held that the innovation actually started in The Netherlands. Generally, 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 made in considerable quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of those chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by its harmonious proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that is to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike principles in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof have wood of quite thick density; but every member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and more expensive designs can be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and was popularised 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 well-known and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
During 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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