From all the furniture forms, the chair may be primary. While many other objects (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair can be said here in the common sense, from stool to throne to further items including the bench or 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 clearly distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and aesthetic piece of art; it can also be a symbol of social place. Within the historical royal courts there were plain signifiers between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to make do with a stool. In the last century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been seen as iconic of superior position, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a raised level.
In a furniture construction, the chair ranges from a wealth of different makes. There are chairs created to fit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the past there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); from 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 contemporary lifestyle has developed special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair types have been perfected to match to evolving human requirements. For its unique connection with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when in employ. While it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there is anything inside or not, a chair is really understood and evaluated by a person using it, because chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the various parts of the chair have been labeled likened to the names of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the basic purpose of the chair is to support your body, its value is judged primarily by how completely it fulfills this practical function. Within the structure of a chair, the builder is restricted within the static law and principal measurements. Under these boundaries, however, the chair designer has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair extends over an epoch of several thousand years. There were peoples that held significant chair shapes, expressive of the topmost endeavour in the areas of skill and art. Among these such peoples, individual mention 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of careful make, are today found from tombs. One of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have four legs structured like those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular design was made. There appeared to be no significant change between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common citizens. The general variation existed in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the particulars of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was created for an easily carried seat for army officers. As a camp stool this kind stayed around til much later points. But the stool also then took on the task of a ceremonial seat, its technical job as a folding stool fast 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 ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the shape of folding stools but can not be folded as the seats are worked of wood. The simple structure of the folding stool, composed of two frames that spin on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, also appeared at some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this kind is the folding stool, made of ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not from any ancient item still around but found in a trove of pictorial objects. The better recognised is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place near Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs can be displayed. These strange legs were likely to be created in bent wood and were therefore had to bear great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore very solid and were plainly drawn.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; designs of casts of seated Romans display chairs of a more heavyset and in appearance kind of less delicately built klismos. Both types, light or heavy, were revived in the Classicist time. The klismos influence can be evidenced in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of considerable originality around Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be traced as long as in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed folio of images and works of art was preserved, detailing the inside and exteriors of Chinese houses and their furniture. Another preservation since the 16th century are some chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that show an interesting resemblance to pictures of previous chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That chair can be found both with and without arms however never missing a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to firm the back. In one image, it has been seen, the stiles are marginally curved by the arms for the purpose of conform correctly to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the chairback). The three parts are mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of this back splat had an influence on English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden items that merely to a particular limit reinforce corner joints (and then were loose into the bargain) are a signature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which closes over the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or possesses rounded edges—a left over maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited texture. These chairs demanded of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs most likely were allowed only for elderly persons in the family, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have been brought to China from the West. It does not differ so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is intricately held to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resulting effect of these furniture styles is stylized. The constructive and decorative aspects are combined in a manner that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual parts do not appear to have been constructed by use of either glue or screws, but had been mortised into one another and held in place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Artworks display a style 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 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 a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, in the same era, 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 interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this style of chair may also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not held that the design actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are in some cases 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 row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself by its elegant 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 forms—that was, to say, as brought out in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. 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 little upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike practices in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of quite thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been taken away, and more expensive items might be further embellished with special delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes used in place of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in style than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which came from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and was popular 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 well-known 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 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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