Out of all furniture forms, the chair could be primary. While most of the other items (except the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is meant to be looked upon here in the general sense, from stool to throne to developed pieces 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 evidently defined.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and aesthetic piece of art; it was also semiotic of social placement. In the Medieval royal courts there were clear signifiers between sitting on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to cope with a stool. In the 20th century, a director’s or manager’s chair has become a signifier of superior status, as well as in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
In its furniture purpose, the chair can be employed for a wealth of different models. There are chairs structured to match man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since past times 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 make chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has demanded special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair shapes has adapted to fit to changing human uses. Due to its unique importance with man, the chair exists to its full advantage only when in employ. While it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there might be items inside or not, a chair is best seen and regarded best by a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter complement the other. Thus the various areas of the chair have been given labels as the limbs of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary job of a chair is to support our body, its worth is evaluated basically for how suitably it measures up to this practical purpose. In the creation of the chair, the maker is limited in some static rules and principal measurements. Under these limits, however, the chair designer has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair lasted dates of several thousand years. There are societies that had made unique chair forms, as expressive of the topmost object in the areas of craft and aesthetics. From these such peoples, particular note can 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of skilled design, are now known from tomb discoveries. The first of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs crafted not unlike those of an animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this a solid triangular design was obtained. There was from our view no particular variation between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary peasantry. The simple variation lied in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the particulars of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was made as an easily portable seat for army officers. As a camp stool that type persevered during much later points. But the stool then was made as the character of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical task as a folding stool being forgotten. This can today be observed, 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 were made in the construction of folding stools but can not be folded as the seats were made with wood. The simple structure of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that spin on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric set between them, can be seen somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this kind is the folding stool, of ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is found not as any ancient fossil still around but as seen in a variety of pictorial items. The best known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area by Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs were visible. These curving legs were presumably executed from bent wood and were likely to have been bore a large amount of pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore super solid and were overtly denoted.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; quite a few casts of seated Romans are chairs of a denser and are a rather less intricately designed klismos. Both designs, the light or the heavy, were brought back in the Classicist time. The klismos style is found in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in particular forms of profound originality around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be tracked as well as the progression of the chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed collection of drawings and works of art has been preserved, with images of the insides and outer parts of Chinese houses and the kinds of furniture. Kept also since the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that show an amazing similarity to designs of ancient chairs.
Just like in Egypt, two chair designs persisted in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair has been seen both with or without arms although never missing a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to give support to the back. In one form, it must be said, the stiles could be lightly curved on top of the arms in order to fit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of its chairback). All three parts had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Though the style of the Chinese back splat later had an inspiration for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that merely to a restricted capability reinforce corner joints (and were loose in the result) are a signature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which stops over the rounded staves. All members are round in section or is given rounded edges—an acknowledgement as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and occasionally had a plaited form. These chairs demanded of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to collapse. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs probably were reserved for senior persons in the family, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have come to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is intricately affixed to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is more often than not provided with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the ultimate effect of both these furniture forms is stylized. The construction and aesthetic aspects are combined in a style that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the manner that the individual parts do not look to have been fixed together by use of either glue or screws, but were mortised with one another and fixed in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Paintings display a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same period, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be displayed in engravings of the interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this kind of chair can also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not held that the design actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in impressive numbers, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself with its shapely 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 of styles—that is, as brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The chair owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat adheres to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting 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 achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike methods in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of rather thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been cut away, and finer designs might be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carvings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used in place of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in style than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and became the preference 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 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 brands 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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