From all the furniture objects, the chair may be primary. While many other pieces (save the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is regarded here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to derivative chairs for example the bench or sofa, which should be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously defined.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support or aesthetic object; it historically is symbolic of social rank. In the old royal courts there were significant connotations between possessing a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to utilise a stool. In the recent century, the director’s and manager’s chair has developed a symbol of superior position, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a higher level.
As its furniture purpose, the chair can be employed for a variety of various models. There are chairs manufactured to fit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, or 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 derived particular chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair shapes has perfected to fit to different human desires. Because of its unique association with man, the chair appears to its full importance only when utilised. Though it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there might be items inside or not, a chair is understood and evaluated with a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter need one another. Thus the various limbs of a chair have been named likened to the limbs of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the basic role of the chair is to support a body, its credit is valued firstly by how fully it does measure up to this practical role. Within the creation of the chair, the builder is restricted for particular static regulation and principal measurements. Within these limitations, however, the chair creator has great freedom.
The history of the chair covered dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of civilizations that had distinctive chair shapes, seen of the principal object in the arenas of craft and aesthetics. Within these such peoples, special 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 upshot of expert design, were a finding from tomb findings. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs structured not unlike those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this way a strong triangular construction was obtained. There appeared to be no particular differentiation from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common peasantry. The simple difference exists in the brand of ornamentation, in the choice of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was created to be an easily stored seat for soldiers. As a camp stool the stool stayed around til much later periods. But the stool then was designed for the character of a ceremonial seat, its original function as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can from today be seen, 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 made in the shape of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats are made from wood. The plain make of the folding stool, being of two frames that spin on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, was seen again at some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of these is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not with any ancient fossil still extant but from a trove of pictorial items. The iconic kind is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area by Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs could be visible. These unusual legs were presumed to be executed with bent wood and were probably had huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore super stable and were clearly signified.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek chair; evidence of models of seated Romans offer designs of a more heavyset and which appear to be a slightly crudely crafted klismos. Both features, the light and heavy, were seen again within the Classicist period. The klismos design can be found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in particular kinds of profound iconicism of Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China cannot be followed as far back as that of Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full folio of drawings and works of art has been protected, detailing the inside and outside of Chinese homes and the kinds of furniture. Also kept since the 16th century are a number of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an intriguing resemblance to designs of past chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, two chair designs persisted in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair can be seen both with and without arms although always with a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to firm the back. In one image, it has been seen, the stiles are marginally curved above the arms so as to sit right with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of its back). Together, the three sections were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the design of the back splat exercised an introduction for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only just to a limited capability embolden corner joints (and then were loose additionally) signify an element signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which closes upon the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or is given rounded edges—a left over perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs presumably were kept for older members of the family, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It is not dissimilar so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the overall effect of these two furniture styles is stylized. The construction and aesthetic parts are combined in a way that is all at once naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the fact that the individual items do not look to have been held together by either glue or screws, but had been mortised on one another and locked into place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Artworks project a design of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to show up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in 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 found in engravings of the interior of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this kind of chair can also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not decided that the form actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in vast numbers, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of such chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself by 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 style—that is, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat adheres 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 little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof employ wood of fairly thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been sanded away, and finer designs would be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and became the preference 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 popular 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 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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