From each of the furniture objects, the chair may be primary. While many other forms (save the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair should be looked upon here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to complex forms for example the bench and sofa, which can be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly definitive.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as a creative art. The chair is not simply a physical support or an aesthetic creation; it historically is a symbol of social hierarchy. In the historical royal courts there were significant differences between sitting on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to sit on a stool. In the recent century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen a symbol of superior status, and even in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a raised platform.
In a furniture creation, the chair is employed for a variety of different purposes. There are chairs structured 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 historical days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); from 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.
Modern living has demanded particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair forms have been adapted to conform to changing human needs. For its unique relationship with man, the chair lives to its full purpose only when used. Although it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there are items inside or not, a chair is really seen and regarded best by a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the several elements of a chair were labeled corresponding to the parts of our human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first function of a chair is to support your body, its credit is judged primarily by how well it does measure up to this practical use. In the manufacture of the chair, the carpenter is restricted with the static rules and principal measurements. Inside these restrictions, however, the chair designer has great freedom.
The history of the chair extended over an epoch of several thousand years. There were civilizations that made significant chair types, as expressive of the highest endeavour in the spheres of craft and art. Within these societies, a mention 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of skilled make, were known from tombs. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair had four legs crafted like those of an animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this way a stable triangular construction was made. There was from our understanding no notable differentiation from the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular people. The general difference exists in the complex ornamentation, in the particulars of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was created to be an easily portable seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool this kind stayed during much later periods. But the stool also then was made as the use of a ceremonial seat, its original 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, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the construction of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats are formed from wood. The plain structure of the folding stool, composed of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric held between them, appeared some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of these 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 found not with any ancient object still around but as seen from a variety of pictorial items. The most well known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs could be visible. These curving legs were understood to have been manufactured of bent wood and were therefore needed to bear a large amount of 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 plainly drawn.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; some statues of seated Romans show chairs of a denser and in appearance somewhat crudely designed klismos. Both kinds, the light and the heavy, were revived in the Classicist period. The klismos influence can be seen in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some special brands of marked uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China isn’t able to be tracked as well as chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged series of drawings and artworks has been kept, with images of the insides and outside of Chinese households and their furniture. Kept also of the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that display an interesting resemblance to designs of ancient chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there were two iconic chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair was found both with or without arms however always with a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to give support to the back. In one image, however, the stiles are slightly curved over the arms to conform correctly to the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its chairback). Together, all three limbs had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Though the design of the Chinese back splat exercised a foundation for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden items that just to a particular limit embolden corner joints (and furthermore were loose to top that off) indicate a feature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which stops around the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or have rounded edges—acknowledging maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and might have had a plaited form. These chairs demanded of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs most likely were only for older individuals in the family, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have come to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is intricately affixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is generally seen with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of these two furniture styles is stylized. The manufacture and aesthetic elements are combined in a style that is both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the way that the individual parts do not appear to have been constructed with either glue or screws, but were mortised into one another and fixed in position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Paintings display a design 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 show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same period, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be found in engravings of the inside of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this type of chair can also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not certain that the innovation actually originated in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable numbers, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its shapely 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 styles—that is to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The model owes its popularity to a combination of leisure and charm. The seat conforms to the human body and allows 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 over the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them have wood of fairly thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been taken away, and finer designs can be further embellished with special delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and was popularised 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
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 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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