Out of all furniture items, the chair might be the most important. While many other items (save for the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair must be used here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to derivative chairs including the bench or 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 defined.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support or an aesthetic piece of art; it can also be semiotic of social ranking. In the old royal courts there were plain differences between sitting on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to use a stool. In the recent century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen an indicator of superior dignity, and even in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on an elevated level.
As a furniture creation, the chair holds a variety of variations. There are chairs structured to suit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the past there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has derived unique chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair kinds have been adapted to fit to different human uses. Because of its unique connection with man, the chair exists to its full importance only when being utilised. Whereas it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there might be things inside or not, a chair is really seen best and fairly evaluated by a person using it, because chair and sitter complement the other. Thus the individual parts of the chair are named like the parts of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary work of your chair is to support our body, its credit is valued firstly for how completely it does measure up to this practical function. Within the construction of a chair, the designer is bound in particular static regulation and principal measurements. Within these limitations, however, the chair designer has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair extends over an era of several thousand years. There were civilizations that created significant chair types, expressive of the topmost craft in the spheres of handling and creativity. Within such civilisations, special mention needs to 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 construct of careful design, are a finding from findings made in tombs. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair has four legs formed similar to those of an animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this way a durable triangular construction was obtained. There was to all appearances no noteworthy differentiation from the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical non-royals. The only difference exists in the level of ornamentation, in the evidence of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was manufactured to be an easily carried seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool that type stayed around for much later points in time. But the stool then also was made as the role of a ceremonial seat, its technical function as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the shape of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats are made out of wood. The easy manufacture of the folding stool, composed of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, reappears some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this form is the folding stool, made from ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not as any ancient item still around but seen in a variety of pictorial evidence. The significant kind is the klismos seen 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 them can be visible. These creative legs were likely to have been created of bent wood and were in that case had to bear a large amount of pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore very stable and were visibly drawn.
The Romans adopted the Greek design; quite a few statues of seated Romans offer designs of a more heavyset and which appear to be a rather less delicately built klismos. Both features, the light or the heavy, were popularised within the Classicist time. The klismos style is known in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in special types of marked individuality in Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China isn’t able to be followed as well as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed folio of images and paintings was kept, with images of the inside and exterior of Chinese households and their furniture. Also kept since the 16th century are a trove of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that show an amazing likeness to representations of previous chairs.
Same as in Egypt, there existed two standard chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That chair was constructed both with and without arms but never without the square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to give support to the back. In one design, however, the stiles could be lightly curved over the arms in order to conform correctly to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a back). The three sections were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the design of the back splat exercised an influence on English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden items that could only to a particular extent support corner joints (and then were loose to top that off) represent a design solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops around the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or is given rounded edges—referable perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and had on occasion a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for if too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs likely were reserved only for older family members, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have travelled to China from the West. It is not dissimilar that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is intricately joined to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is usually provided with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the overall effect of these furniture styles is stylized. The construction and aesthetic issues are combined in a style that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the fact that the individual parts do not look to have been adjoined by means of either glue or screws, but were mortised into one another and locked into position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Works of art project a style of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, in the same time, possessed the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be found in engravings of the interior of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this kind of chair can also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not certain that the style actually started in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable quantities, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The design 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 was, as created in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes its popularity to a combination of leisure and charm. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike methods in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof have wood of quite thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been cut away, and more expensive examples may be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes used in place of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more open in design than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and was popular 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
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 products 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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