From each of the furniture objects, the chair may be the imperative one. While most of the other objects (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair must be looked upon here in the common sense, from stool to throne to derivative forms for example the bench and sofa, which should be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support or an aesthetic creation; it historically is a symbol of social placement. From the Medieval royal courts there were significant signifiers between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to make do with a stool. From the recent century, the director’s and manager’s chair has become an indicator of superior standing, and in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a raised platform.
As its furniture construction, the chair holds a variety of different purposes. There are chairs designed to suit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the past there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); during 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. We can have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has developed particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair kinds have been evolved to suit to differing human uses. From its unique connection with man, the chair exists to its full importance only when utilised. Whereas it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there are things inside or not, a chair is understood best and fairly evaluated by a person using it, because chair and sitter suit the other. Thus the different parts of the chair are given labels like the elements of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple job of your chair is to support the body, its worth is tested generally by how suitably it measures up to this practical use. Within the construction of a chair, the maker is limited under the static law and principal measurements. Through these regulations, however, the chair maker has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair extends over an epoch of several thousand years. There are civilizations that had made distinctive chair types, expressions of the topmost work in the areas of handling and creativity. In such societies, individual 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of masterful scheme, are known from tomb findings. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed as akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this design a stable triangular construction was created. There was from our view no marked differentiation from the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical non-royals. The main change was in the type of ornamentation, in the choice of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was developed for an easily stored seat for army. As a camp stool that stool persevered for much later periods of time. But the stool also then was designed for the character of a ceremonial seat, its technical function as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can today be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the structure of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats are created from wood. The simplistic manufacture of the folding stool, being of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, appeared some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of this type is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not from any ancient item still extant but as found in a wealth of pictorial items. The most recognisable is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs can be seen. These strange legs were likely to have been executed out of bent wood and were in that case put under huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore very stable and were particularly denoted.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; quite a few statues of seated Romans are designs of a heavier and are a kind of crudely designed klismos. Both types, the light or the heavy, were popularised as part of the Classicist epoch. The klismos chair is found in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some brands of considerable iconicism of Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be followed as well as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged serial of sketches and artworks has been preserved, detailing the interior and outer parts of Chinese homes and their furniture. Another preservation from the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that hold an astonishing likeness to designs of older chairs.
As were the designs in Egypt, there were two standard chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair has been constructed both with and without arms but never missing a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to give support to the back. In one design, it has been seen, the stiles could be delicately curved by the arms for the purpose of fit the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a chairback). Together, all three parts had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of a back splat exercised an influence on English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that just to a restricted limit embolden corner joints (and were loose as well) indicate an element signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes about the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or have rounded edges—references perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and may have a plaited seat. These chairs required of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs likely were reserved only for elderly people, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have been brought to China from the West. It is akin much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is intricately joined to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is usually possessing metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resultant effect of these two furniture forms is stylized. The construction and aesthetic issues are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual members do not seem to have been put together by either glue or screws, but were mortised onto one another and held in its 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. Artworks project a type of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to bring out a pattern of little pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture for traveling which, at the same era, had 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 interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this style of chair is also made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not certain that the innovation actually began in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in vast amounts, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of these chairs lined up against a wall. The design asserts itself with its harmonious proportions and delicate 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 was, to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of relatively thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been taken away, and more expensive chairs can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engravings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in design than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the highest 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 well-known 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 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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