From each of the furniture needs, the chair may be the most imperative. While most other items (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is meant to be used here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to developed types including a bench and sofa, which might be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly distinguished.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support and an aesthetic craft; it can also be an indicator of social standing. Within the past royal courts there were important signifiers between being seated on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to cope with a stool. During the past century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been regarded as iconic of superior dignity, like in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
In a furniture form, the chair holds a wealth of variations. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In 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 have chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has demanded new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair forms has been evolved to conform to differing human desires. From its unique link with man, the chair comes to its full purpose only when utilised. Whereas it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there might be things inside or not, a chair is really understood and fairly evaluated by a person using it, because chair and sitter need one another. Thus the different elements of the chair are named like the areas of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple role of the chair is to support a human body, its value is tested generally by how well it measures up to this practical use. Within the design of a chair, the maker is limited in the static legislation and principal measurements. In these regulations, however, the chair maker has large freedom.
The history of the chair was dates of several thousand years. There are cultures that have created distinctive chair forms, expressive of the principal task in the spheres of handling and creativity. Among those civilisations, particular note 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 objects of masterful craft, are now a finding from discoveries made in tombs. The first one of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have had four legs shaped akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this a durable triangular design was created. There was to all appearances no noteworthy difference in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common citizens. The only variation was in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the evidence of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was created to be an easily packed seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool the chair persisted during much later points in time. But the stool then was made as the role of a ceremonial seat, its original job as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can from evidence be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the form of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats are created out of wood. The easy construction of the folding stool, made of two frames that turn on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric set between them, then came up some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this form is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is known not with any ancient fossil still in form but as seen in a trove of pictorial evidence. The better known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs are displayed. These unique legs were most likely to have been created out of bent wood and were likely to have been needed to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very strong and were particularly pointed out.
The Romans embued the Greek style; some models of seated Romans display examples of a thicker and apparently somewhat less delicately crafted klismos. Both types, light and heavy, were seen again in the Classicist era. The klismos design can be seen in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some forms of notable originality within Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China isn’t able to be tracked as well as chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full collection of sketches and paintings had been protected, displaying the interior and outer parts of Chinese homes and the furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are a number of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that display an astonishing similarity to images of ancient chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, two particular chair forms existed in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair can be constructed both with and without arms although always having a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to support the back. In one form, it must be said, the stiles had been lightly curved above the arms in order to sit correctly with the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its back). Together, all three parts were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Though the style of the Chinese back splat later had an influence on English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that only to a limited capability stabilise corner joints (and were loose to top it off) represent a feature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes over the rounded staves. Members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—references as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and occasionally had a plaited seat. These chairs required of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs presumably were kept for older persons in the family, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It is not dissimilar much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is delicately held to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is generally provided with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of both these furniture styles is stylized. The constructive and decoration aspects are combined in a style that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual members do not seem to have been adjoined by means of either glue or screws, but are mortised into one another and held in its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Artworks display a style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same time, held the status 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 rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this type of chair can also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not held that the style actually began in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in large quantities, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of those chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself with its elegant 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 form—that is to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes its popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are made from wood of relatively thick density; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been removed, and more upmarket chairs can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more open in design than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and was popularised in several 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 popularised 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 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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