From each of the furniture pieces, the chair may be of the 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 regarded here in the common sense, from stool to throne to further items like the bench and sofa, which may be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly labeled.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as a creative art. The chair is not simply a physical support or an aesthetic craft; it was historically an indicator of social rank. In the old royal courts there were plain distinctions between having a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to make do with a stool. Since the recent century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been regarded as an indicator of superior rank, and in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a high-set level.
In its furniture creation, the chair holds a number of various forms. There are chairs manufactured to suit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past times there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We have chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has derived special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair kinds have been evolved to conform to different human requirements. Due to its close relationship with man, the chair appears to its full advantage only when in employ. Whereas it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is seen best and tested with a person using it, because chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the individual limbs of a chair are labeled corresponding to the names of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious job of a chair is to support a body, its value is evaluated firstly for how completely it fulfills this practical use. Within the build of a chair, the builder is restricted within particular static laws and principal measurements. Through these limitations, however, the chair builder has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair extends over an era of several thousand years. There were cultures that have created individual chair shapes, expressions of the premier craft in the arenas of skill and design. Among those peoples, individual 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of masterful scheme, are today a finding from tomb discoveries. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have four legs designed similar to those of some animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this design a stable triangular design was created. There was from our knowledge no notable variation from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical people. The only difference exists in the level of ornamentation, in the selection of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was manufactured as an easily stored seat for officers. As a camp stool this form existed until much later periods. But the stool also was created for the use of a ceremonial seat, its technical task as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can today be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the shape of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats were created from wood. The simplistic manufacture of the folding stool, made of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric set between them, came up some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this type is the folding stool, made from ashwood, which can now be found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient item still extant but as found in a wealth of pictorial objects. The best known is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs were visible. These creative legs were likely to have been executed out of bent wood and were as such had to bear huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore super stable and were overtly indicated.
The Romans embued the Greek design; designs of statues of seated Romans offer chairs of a heavier and apparently slightly less delicately designed klismos. Both kinds, the light and the heavy, were popularised as part of the Classicist time. The klismos design is used in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some particular forms of considerable originality in Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be tracked as long as chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged collection of sketches and works of art had been kept, displaying the interiors and outer parts of Chinese houses and the kinds of furniture. Kept also of the 16th century are a trove of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an intriguing likeness to representations of older chairs.
As in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This chair was found both with or without arms however never missing the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to support the back. In one form, it has been seen, the stiles could be marginally curved on top of the arms to sit correctly with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the chairback). Each of the three sections were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Although the innovation of the back splat later had an inspiration for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that just to a particular capability stabilise corner joints (and furthermore were loose additionally) indicate a signature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—acknowledging perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and occasionally had a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to stay stiff and upright; when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs most likely were reserved only for the senior people, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have taken to China from the West. It is akin that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is delicately held to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is more often than not possessing metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resulting effect of these two furniture forms is stylized. The constructive and decoration aspects are combined in a style that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the way that the individual items do not appear to have been fixed by either glue or screws, but have been mortised with one another and fixed in position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Works of art display a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to bring out a pattern of little pads. The front board and a corresponding board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture while traveling which, in the same era, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is displayed in engravings of the interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this type of chair can also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not held that the form actually was born in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in vast numbers, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of 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 of forms—that is, as developed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike practices despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of fairly thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been cut away, and more upmarket chairs can be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engravings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in design than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and was popularised 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 reknowned 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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