Out of all furniture needs, the chair may be paramount. While the majority of other items (apart from the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is regarded here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to complex types including a bench and sofa, which may be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently labeled.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support or an aesthetic creation; it is also semiotic of social rank. From the past royal courts there were plain differences between being led to a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to cope with a stool. In the last century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been seen as iconic of superior standing, as well as in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a raised level.
As its furniture form, the chair holds a range of different models. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). During past times there were chairs for birthing (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 four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We have chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has derived unique chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair shapes have perfected to fit to different human requirements. Because of its significant importance with man, the chair appears to its full importance only when being utilised. Though it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there are items inside or not, a chair is best seen and clearly evaluated by a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter require each other. Thus the individual elements of the chair were labeled corresponding to the parts of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary function of a chair is to support a body, its worth is tested primarily from how suitably it measures up to this practical role. Within the creation of the chair, the chair maker is bound for particular static regulations and principal measurements. Through these limitations, however, the chair creator has great freedom.
The history of the chair lasted an epoch of several thousand years. There is evidence of cultures that had made significant chair shapes, as expressive of the topmost task in the arenas of handling and art. Out of these cultures, individual mention 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 result of expert make, were a finding from discoveries made in tombs. The first of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have four legs shaped akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. From this a stable triangular design was obtained. There appears to be no particular differentiation in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular people. The simple change exists in the brand of ornamentation, in the choice of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was manufactured to be an easily portable seat for army officers. As a camp stool that form continued til much later points. But the stool then was designed for the character of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical history as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can already be found, 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 in the shape of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats were made with wood. The easy manufacture of the folding stool, made of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, also appeared at some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of those is the folding stool, made of ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient item still existing but as seen in a variety of pictorial evidence. The better recognised is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which were visible. These curving legs were likely to have been crafted in bent wood and were likely to have been needed to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super durable and were clearly pointed out.
The Romans emulated the Greek design; evidence of casts of seated Romans display evidence of a thicker and which appear to be a somewhat more crudely built klismos. Both kinds, the light and heavy, were seen again in the Classicist time. The klismos chair can be found in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of considerable individuality in Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China can not be traced as long as chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full folio of images and artworks had been preserved, displaying the interiors and exterior of Chinese homes and their furniture. Kept also since the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an amazing resemblance to images of older chairs.
As in Egypt, there were two standard chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That chair is designed both with and without arms although never without its square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to hold up the back. In one style, it must be said, the stiles are delicately curved by the arms in order to conform correctly to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a back). All three limbs had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. While the innovation of the back splat had an influence on English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that merely to a restricted ability support corner joints (and then were loose to top that off) represent a feature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which ends around the rounded staves. All members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—an acknowledgement perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and occasionally had a plaited seat. These chairs needed the sitter to be stiff and upright; when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to collapse. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs probably were kept only for elderly individuals, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have taken to China from the West. It does not vary much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is elegantly affixed to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is generally designed with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of these furniture items is stylized. The construction and aesthetic elements are combined in a way that is all at once naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual members do not appear to have been fixed by means of either glue or screws, but are mortised with one another and fixed in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Artworks show a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, at the same time, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is seen in engravings of interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this style 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 design actually began in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in impressive quantities, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of such chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself by its shapely 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 to say, as brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike methodology despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of fairly thick density; but all the members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and more upmarket items can be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carvings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in design than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and became the favourite 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 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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