Of all furniture forms, the chair may be of most importance. While most other items (save for the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair was looked upon here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to developed types including 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 clearly distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not just a physical support or aesthetic creation; it was historically a symbol of social rank. In the old royal courts there were plain differences between sitting on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to squat on a stool. From the 20th century, the director’s and manager’s chair has been a signifier of superior status, and in democratic governments the speaker sits on a higher level.
In its furniture creation, the chair can be used for a variety of different models. There are chairs manufactured to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). In the olden days 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. We can have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has derived particular chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All these chair forms has perfected to fit to differing human needs. Because of its significant link with man, the chair exists to its full meaning only when in employ. Although it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there is anything inside or not, a chair is really understood and fairly evaluated by a person utilising it, for chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the different elements of a chair were given names corresponding to the parts of a human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal role of your chair is to support a human body, its value is valued primarily by how well it does fulfill this practical job. Within the manufacture of a chair, the builder is bound with certain static regulations and principal measurements. In these limits, however, the chair builder has large freedom.
The history of the chair extended over an era of several thousand years. There are civilizations that held individual chair forms, seen of the premier task in the industries of skill and art. Out of those civilisations, individual 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of careful craft, are found from findings made in tombs. One of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs structured similar to those of an animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this way a strong triangular structure was created. There was apparently no particular variation between the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary peasantry. The only change existed in the level of ornamentation, in the evidence of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was developed for an easily carried seat for army officers. As a camp stool the kind existed until much later points. But the stool then also took on the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical task as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can from evidence be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the structure of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats were created of wood. The simplistic make of the folding stool, composed of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, also appeared but somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of this form is the folding stool, of ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is found not as any ancient item still in form but as seen in a wealth of pictorial objects. The most well known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them could be visible. These unique legs were considered to be executed with bent wood and were thus put under extreme pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore extremely strong and were plainly indicated.
The Romans embued the Greek chair; existing models of seated Romans are chairs of a heavier and which appear to be a kind of less delicately constructed klismos. Both designs, the light or the heavy, were revived within the Classicist time. The klismos style can be found in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some types of notable individuality around Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be charted as long as the progression of the chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken collection of sketches and works of art was kept safe, with images of the interior and exteriors of Chinese homes and the kinds of furniture. Also preserved from the 16th century are a trove of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that display an astonishing familiarity to designs of past chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there was two major chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair can be constructed both with or without arms but always with the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to firm the back. In one image, it has been seen, the stiles were slightly curved by the arms in order to sit correctly with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of its chairback). Each of the three limbs had been mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Although the style of this back splat had a foundation for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that merely to a particular capability support corner joints (and are loose into the bargain) indicate a feature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends about the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—an acknowledgement perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and had on occasion a plaited seat. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs likely were kept for older members of the family, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have travelled to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is intricately affixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is more often than not seen with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resulting effect of both these furniture items is stylized. The construction and aesthetic aspects are combined in a style that is at the same time naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual parts do not appear to have been fixed by use of either glue or screws, but were mortised on one another and held in position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Paintings project a design 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 similar board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same time, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be found in engravings of the interior of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this design of chair may also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not certain that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in impressive amounts, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that was, to say, as brought out in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike principles despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are constructed from wood of relatively thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been removed, and more expensive chairs may be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carvings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and found 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
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 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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