From each of the furniture objects, the chair could be of most importance. While most of the other pieces (save the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is intended to be used here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to derivative kinds for example a bench and sofa, which might be considered 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 an art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support or an aesthetic piece of art; it was historically a signifier of social standing. From the past royal courts there were important signifiers between being led to a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to make do with a stool. Since the past century, a director’s or manager’s chair has been seen as a symbol of superior status, like in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
In a furniture purpose, the chair ranges from a wealth of different forms. There are chairs created to fit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From historical times there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has designated particular chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair types have perfected to fit to changing human requirements. For its unique importance with man, the chair appears to its full purpose only when used. Although it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there are items inside or not, a chair is seen best and fairly regarded by a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter suit each other. Thus the different areas of a chair were named corresponding to the areas of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the clear purpose of the chair is to support our human body, its worth is evaluated primarily from how suitably it measures up to this practical job. Within the build of a chair, the carpenter is restricted within particular static laws and principal measurements. Under these rules, however, the chair creator has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair was dates of several thousand years. There existed cultures that made distinctive chair forms, expressions of the highest endeavour in the industries of craft and aesthetics. In such civilisations, special note 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 construct of expert craft, are now found from findings made in tombs. One of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have four legs designed not unlike those of a designated animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this way a stable triangular structure was created. There was to our knowledge no noteworthy difference in the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular citizens. The simple difference lied in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the choice of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was made for an easily portable seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool the kind existed for much later points. But the stool also was created as the use of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical function as a folding stool being forgotten. This can now be found, 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 were made in the shape of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats were formed with wood. The simplistic make of the folding stool, being of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, was then seen at some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this form is the folding stool, of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is found not from any ancient object still extant but as in a wealth of pictorial material. The best known is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs would be shown. These odd legs were presumably created from bent wood and were thus bore a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore very strong and were overtly denoted.
The Romans adopted the Greek designs; existing statues of seated Romans offer evidence of a heavier and which appear to be a somewhat more crudely constructed klismos. Both designs, the light or the heavy, were revived within the Classicist time. The klismos influence is found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some forms of profound iconicism within Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China can not be followed as far as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of sketches and paintings was kept safe, showing the interior and exterior of Chinese buildings and the kinds of furniture. Preserved also since the 16th century are some chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that show an astonishing resemblance to pictures of older chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there were two standard chair designs in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair has been found both with or without arms though always with its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to support the back. In one style, however, the stiles were lightly curved by the arms for the purpose of sit right with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a back). Together, the three areas are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Although the style of the Chinese back splat exercised an influence on English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden items that could merely to a particular capability support corner joints (as well as being loose to top it off) are a feature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops over the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or is given rounded edges—an acknowledgement maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and had on occasion a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs most likely were allowed only for elderly individuals, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have been brought to China from the West. It does not vary much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is intricately affixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the overall effect of both these furniture designs is stylized. The constructive and decoration issues are combined in a style that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual parts do not look to have been constructed by use of either glue or screws, but had been mortised with one another and held in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Paintings display a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, in the same era, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is found in engravings of the interior of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this design of chair might also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not believed that the design actually began in The Netherlands. Generally, 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 patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable amounts, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of such chairs lined up against a wall. The design asserts itself by its elegant proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that is, as progressed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied during 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 seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike principles even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are constructed from wood of fairly thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been cut away, and finer examples might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engraving. 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; canework is occasionally used in place of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and became the preference 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 popular 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 styles 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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