Of all furniture pieces, the chair might be primary. While many other forms (apart from the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is said here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to complex makes for example a bench or sofa, which might be seen 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 stimulating as its history as art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and/or an aesthetic item; it is also symbolic of social rank. At the past royal courts there were significant signifiers between being led to a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to make do with a stool. During the 20th century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has become an indicator of superior standing, and in democratic governments the speaker sits on a raised level.
In a furniture form, the chair is utilised for a range of different models. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since the past there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has developed particular chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair forms has been evolved to fit to differing human desires. Due to its unique importance with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when in use. While it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there might be things inside or not, a chair is understood and judged best by a person using it, because chair and sitter require the other. Thus the individual elements of the chair are labeled corresponding to the elements of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the fundamental work of the chair is to support the human body, its credit is tested firstly by how well it does measure up to this practical purpose. Within the build of a chair, the builder is bound for some static rules and principal measurements. Under these rules, however, the chair maker has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair lasted an epoch of several thousand years. There is evidence of peoples that had made distinctive chair shapes, as expressions of the premier craft in the arenas of skill and design. Among these cultures, particular 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of masterful scheme, are a finding from discoveries made in tombs. The first of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have four legs shaped as akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. From this design a stable triangular construction was made. There was to our understanding no particular differentiation in the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical citizens. The general difference exists in the level of ornamentation, in the particulars of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was developed for an easily carried seat for army. As a camp stool that kind stayed around until much later points in time. But the stool then also was created for the use of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical history as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the structure of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats were worked from wood. The easy structure of the folding stool, composed of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric held between them, can be seen somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of those is the folding stool, from ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not as any ancient fossil still around but as in a wealth of pictorial material. The best recognised is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those can be shown. These unusual legs were understood to have been created out of bent wood and were in that case bore huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore very strong and were overtly signified.
The Romans embued the Greek chair; designs of casts of seated Romans display evidence of a heavier and which appear to be a rather less intricately built klismos. Both designs, the light or the heavy, were brought back within the Classicist era. The klismos style can be found in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in particular kinds of marked uniqueness within Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China cannot be traced as long as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken folio of drawings and artworks had been preserved, with images of the interior and exterior of Chinese households and the kinds of furniture. Another preservation from the 16th century are some chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an interesting similarity to styles of older chairs.
Like in Egypt, two chair designs persisted in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This chair has been constructed both with and without arms although always having a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to support the back. In one style, though, the stiles had been slightly curved above the arms for the purpose of conform correctly to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the chairback). Each of the three limbs are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of a back splat later had a foundation for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could only to a limited ability stabilise corner joints (and then are loose as well) represent a feature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or have rounded edges—an acknowledgement perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and occasionally had a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs presumably were only for the senior members of the family, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have come to China from the West. It does not differ very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is often seen with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resultant effect of both furniture items is stylized. The manufacture and decoration aspects are combined in a way that is all at once both naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual members do not appear to have been fixed by use of either glue or screws, but have been mortised onto one another and held in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Works of art project a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, in 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 found in engravings of the interior of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this design of chair is also found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not certain that the innovation actually began in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable amounts, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself by its elegant proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that is, as created in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The model owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. 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 small upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methodology in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them have wood of fairly thick density; but every member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and more upmarket items might be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engravings. 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; cane is in some cases used instead of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and became the preference 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 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 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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