From each of the furniture needs, the chair might be of the most importance. While the majority of other forms (apart from the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair must be said here in the common sense, from stool to throne to further items like the bench or 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 overtly distinguished.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and an aesthetic piece of art; it is historically an indicator of social standing. From the past royal courts there were significant differences between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to squat on a stool. During the last century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen iconic of superior status, and in democratic governments the speaker sits on a high-set level.
As its furniture purpose, the chair encompasses a variety of different forms. There are chairs designed to match man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the olden days there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs 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 make chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has developed special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair types have changed to fit to growing human uses. Due to its close link with man, the chair exists to its full significance only when utilised. Although it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there is anything inside or not, a chair is best seen and tested by a person using it, because chair and sitter complement one another. Thus the different areas of the chair were labeled likened to the limbs of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the clear job of the chair is to support a body, its worth is judged firstly from how completely it does measure up to this practical job. Within the construction of the chair, the builder is limited by some static laws and principal measurements. In these rules, however, the chair builder has large freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over an era of several thousand years. There were societies that held distinctive chair forms, as expressions of the principal task in the arenas of technique and design. In these societies, particular mention needs to 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 known from findings made in tombs. The first one of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair has four legs crafted similar to those of some animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this design a durable triangular structure was made. There was to all appearances no noteworthy differentiation from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common populace. The real variation exists in the level of ornamentation, in the particulars of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was developed to be an easily packed seat for army officers. As a camp stool the type persisted for much later points in time. But the stool then also took on the character of a ceremonial seat, its original function as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can already be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the form of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats were worked with wood. The plain construction of the folding stool, composed of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, came up at some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this form is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient fossil still in form but as found in a wealth of pictorial material. The best known is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place near Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs are seen. These unusual legs were thought to have been created of bent wood and were probably had extreme pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very stable and were visibly indicated.
The Romans embued the Greek design; a number of statues of seated Romans offer chairs of a heavier and are a kind of less delicately designed klismos. Both features, the light and heavy, were popularised in the Classicist era. The klismos design is known in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in particular types of profound iconicism in Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be followed as well as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed collection of sketches and paintings was kept, detailing the inside and exterior of Chinese buildings and the designs of furniture. Another preservation of the 16th century are some chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an astonishing similarity to images of ancient chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This chair can be constructed both with and without arms however never missing a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to firm the back. In one kind, it has been found, the stiles had been slightly curved by the arms for the purpose of suit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a chairback). All three areas had been mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Although the style of the back splat exercised a foundation for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that would merely to a limited extent embolden corner joints (and then are loose as well) signify an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which stops over the rounded staves. All members are round in section or is given rounded edges—acknowledging perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have a plaited bottom. These chairs needed the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs probably were kept only for older individuals, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is believed 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 elegantly joined to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of both furniture designs is stylized. The manufacture and decorative elements are combined in a way that is at the same time naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual members do not look to have been adjoined by either glue or screws, but have been mortised with one another and locked into position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Works of art project a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same time, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be displayed in engravings of the inside of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this kind of chair may also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not determined that the design actually began in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in impressive quantities, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of its shapely proportions and expensive 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 is, as created in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are constructed from wood of fairly thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and finer examples can be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engraving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more open in style than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles within 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 commonly known 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 products 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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