From all the furniture forms, the chair may be paramount. While the majority of other forms (apart from the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair was regarded here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to developed chairs such as a bench or sofa, which might be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and/or an aesthetic object; it was also a signifier of social place. At the historical royal courts there were important connotations between being seated on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to squat on a stool. Since the last century, the director’s and manager’s chair has been seen as an indicator of superior status, and even in democratic governments the speaker sits on an elevated floor.
In a furniture purpose, the chair is employed for a range of various purposes. There are chairs created to match man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the past there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has designated special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair forms have changed to fit to growing human uses. From its unique relationship with man, the chair exists to its full advantage 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 things inside or not, a chair is understood and clearly evaluated with a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter suit each other. Thus the various limbs of the chair are labeled corresponding to the areas of our human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the clear work of a chair is to support our body, its credit is evaluated basically from how suitably it measures up to this practical function. Within the build of a chair, the chair maker is bound by the static regulations and principal measurements. In these limits, however, the chair creator has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair was dates of several thousand years. There were cultures that had iconic chair forms, as seen of the principal work in the areas of technique and design. Among such societies, a 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of careful design, are now a finding from tomb discoveries. The first of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair had four legs designed as akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular form was obtained. There seems to be no particular difference from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common non-royals. The only change lied in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the evidence of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was created to be an easily packed seat for soldiers. As a camp stool this stool persisted until much later periods of time. But the stool then was designed for the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original function as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can today be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the form of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats are created out of wood. The plain structure of the folding stool, made of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, then appeared somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this form is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is known not from any ancient fossil still extant but as in a large amount of pictorial material. The better known is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs were shown. These strange legs were most likely to have been crafted with bent wood and were as such put under extreme pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very solid and were visibly denoted.
The Romans embued the Greek chair; some casts of seated Romans are examples of a thicker and apparently somewhat more crudely built klismos. Both kinds, the light or the heavy, were popularised in the Classicist epoch. The klismos chair is known in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in special types of considerable individuality around Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China cannot be followed as long as in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged series of sketches and works of art has been kept, with images of the insides and outer parts of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Also preserved of the 16th century are a number of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an amazing likeness to representations of previous chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there existed two major chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This chair can be designed both with and without arms however never missing the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to give support to the back. In one style, however, the stiles are marginally curved by the arms so as to sit right with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of a back). Each of the three areas had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the innovation of this back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that just to a limited ability embolden corner joints (as well as being loose to top that off) represent an element exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes upon the rounded staves. All members are round in section or has rounded edges—references maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and occasionally had a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; if too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs likely were allowed only for the senior individuals, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have travelled to China from the West. It is not dissimilar much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is elegantly fixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the ultimate effect of both furniture forms is stylized. The manufacture and decoration aspects are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual items do not seem to have been put together by means of either glue or screws, but had been mortised on one another and fixed in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Paintings project a style of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board from the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same era, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is evidenced in engravings of the interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this type of chair might also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not believed that the innovation actually was born in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in considerable quantities, as surmisable 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 by virtue of its harmonious proportions and expensive 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 created in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The design owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike practices in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those have wood of fairly thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been cut away, and more upmarket items would be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and became the favourite in many 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 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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