Out of all furniture forms, the chair may be the most imperative. While many other items (except the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair must be regarded here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to derivative pieces for example a 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 labeled.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and aesthetic artwork; it was historically semiotic of social ranking. At the old royal courts there were important differences between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to use a stool. From the last century, a director’s or manager’s chair has been regarded as an indicator of superior position, as well as in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
As its furniture construction, the chair can be employed for a variety of variations. There are chairs structured to suit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). During past days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (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 can make chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has designated particular chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair shapes has evolved to match to differing human requirements. Because of its unique importance with man, the chair appears to its full purpose only when being utilised. Whereas it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there might be items inside or not, a chair is really seen and fairly judged by a person using it, because chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the individual areas of the chair have been given names as the parts of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious role of the chair is to support a human body, its value is evaluated generally for how fully it fulfills this practical use. In the structure of the chair, the designer is restricted by the static law and principal measurements. Inside these regulations, however, the chair maker has large freedom.
The history of the chair extends over dates of several thousand years. There are cultures that have created significant chair types, as expressions of the leading work in the arenas of handling and art. Among these such cultures, a mention must 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 skilled make, are a finding from tomb discoveries. The first one of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair had four legs structured like those of a designated animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this design a durable triangular structure was made. There was apparently no particular difference between the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical peasantry. The real variation existed in the level of ornamentation, in the choice of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was designed as an easily carried seat for army officers. As a camp stool the form existed til much later points. But the stool also was made for the character of a ceremonial seat, its original task as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the form of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats were made from wood. The simple build of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric set between them, came up some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of this form is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient fossil still existing but as in a wealth of pictorial objects. The significant kind is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place near Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs were shown. These creative legs were presumed to be created from bent wood and were therefore subjected to huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore extremely stable and were clearly pointed out.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; designs of statues of seated Romans offer evidence of a thicker and are a kind of more crudely constructed klismos. Both types, the light or the heavy, were seen again within the Classicist period. The klismos influence is found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some particular types of profound uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China cannot be traced as far back as the progression of the chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of drawings and paintings had been kept safe, detailing the interior and exteriors of Chinese homes and the kinds of furniture. Preserved also of the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an astonishing similarity to images of ancient chairs.
Same as in Egypt, there existed two particular chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair can be found both with and without arms however never without the square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to give support to the back. In one design, it must be said, the stiles were marginally curved above the arms so as to conform correctly to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of the chairback). Together, all three areas had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Although the innovation of the back splat exercised an introduction for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden items that merely to a particular capability support corner joints (and furthermore are loose to top it off) represent a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which closes upon the rounded staves. Members are round in section or have rounded edges—acknowledging perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and might have had a plaited form. These chairs demanded of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for if too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs likely were reserved only for elderly people in the family, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It does not vary that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is elegantly joined to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is more often than not possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the overall effect of both of these furniture designs is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic aspects are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual members do not appear to have been put together by use 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 in the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Artworks show a type of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring out a pattern of tiny 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 a portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same period, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be seen 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 style of chair is also seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not determined that the innovation actually originated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in large numbers, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself with its harmonious 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 style—that is to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes its popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat suits 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 small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike methodology in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of rather thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and more upmarket examples might be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engravings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for all 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 varied in style than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and found favour 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 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 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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