From each of the furniture items, the chair may be the most important. While most of the other objects (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is regarded here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to developed chairs such as a bench and sofa, which can be considered 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 stimulating as its history as art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support and/or aesthetic creation; it is historically semiotic of social hierarchy. In the Medieval royal courts there were social distinctions between sitting on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to make do with a stool. Since the 20th century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen iconic of superior dignity, like in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a higher floor.
In its furniture purpose, the chair is utilised for a wealth of various makes. There are chairs manufactured to fit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). During past days there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and/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.
Our modern lifestyle has demanded particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair types have evolved to match to changing human desires. Because of its particular connection with man, the chair exists to its full importance only when utilised. Though it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is really seen best and evaluated with a person using it, for chair and sitter need one another. Thus the several areas of a chair have been given names according to the elements of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first purpose of a chair is to support the human body, its credit is judged generally for how suitably it does measure up to this practical job. Within the build of the chair, the maker is restricted with the static law and principal measurements. Under these boundaries, however, the chair designer has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair extends over an era of several thousand years. There existed peoples that had unique chair types, seen of the foremost object in the arenas of handling and design. From these cultures, 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 structures of masterful make, are today found from discoveries made in tombs. The first of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have four legs formed akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this way a stable triangular construction was created. There was in our view no notable variation between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary peasantry. The only change existed in the brand of ornamentation, in the particulars of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was crafted to be an easily stored seat for army. As a camp stool that type persisted til much later periods. But the stool also was created as the task of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical role as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can already be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the construction of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats are made out of wood. The easy make of the folding stool, made of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric set between them, can be seen somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this form is the folding stool, made of ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is known not in any ancient item still around but from a large amount of pictorial evidence. The most well known is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs would be shown. These odd legs were most likely executed with bent wood and were as such 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 super stable and were clearly signified.
The Romans embued the Greek style; existing casts of seated Romans are designs of a more heavyset and apparently somewhat more crudely constructed klismos. Both types, the light and the heavy, were popularised as part of the Classicist era. The klismos design can be seen in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some particular types of marked originality around Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China cannot be charted as well as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed serial of images and works of art has been protected, displaying the interiors and outer parts of Chinese houses and the designs of furniture. Another preservation of the 16th century are a trove of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an intriguing familiarity to designs of past chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there were two particular chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That chair was found both with or without arms though always having the square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to hold up the back. In one form, though, the stiles are slightly curved on top of the arms in order to suit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of its chairback). Each of the three parts had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. While the innovation of the back splat exercised an influence on English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could merely to a restricted capability support corner joints (and furthermore were loose to top it off) represent a design solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or have rounded edges—acknowledging perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and had on occasion a plaited bottom. These chairs demanded of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a way of toppling. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs likely were reserved for senior individuals in the family, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It is akin so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is intricately joined to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is often designed with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resultant effect of both of these furniture forms is stylized. The constructive and decoration elements are combined in a style that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual items do not appear to have been fixed by means of either glue or screws, but are mortised with one another and fixed in position 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. Works of art show a design of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to bring up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same time, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the inside of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this type of chair can also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not determined that the form actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in impressive quantities, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that is, as brought out in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes this popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are constructed from wood of quite thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and more upmarket items may be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used in place of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and won 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 popular 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 brands 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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