Of all furniture forms, the chair might be of most importance. While the majority of other objects (save for the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is viewed here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to developed types such as the bench or sofa, which can be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously definitive.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and an aesthetic creation; it is also symbolic of social status. Within the past royal courts there were plain connotations between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to sit on a stool. During the past century, the director’s or manager’s chair has risen a signifier of superior position, and in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
In a furniture form, the chair is utilised for a range of various forms. There are chairs manufactured to fit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From historical times there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has demanded new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair kinds has adapted to match to evolving human uses. For its close association with man, the chair comes to its full importance only when utilised. While it is not relevant 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 clearly evaluated by a person utilising it, because chair and sitter need each other. Thus the different parts of a chair are named as the areas of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original purpose of the chair is to support our body, its worth is valued generally from how suitably it fulfills this practical job. In the structure of the chair, the designer is limited in certain static law and principal measurements. Through these boundaries, however, the chair maker has great freedom.
The history of the chair covered dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of cultures that made individual chair types, expressive of the principal craft in the spheres of technique and art. Out of such peoples, individual mention should 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 items of masterful scheme, are today a finding from discoveries made in tombs. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have had four legs shaped like those of some animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this way a strong triangular structure was crafted. There appears to be no significant variation between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary non-royals. The general difference lies in the decorative ornamentation, in the selection of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was made to be an easily carried seat for soldiers. As a camp stool this type persisted during much later periods of time. But the stool then was designed as the task of a ceremonial seat, its technical 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 were constructed in the shape of folding stools but are not able to be folded because the seats were made from wood. The simplistic build of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that turn on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric held between them, then came again but somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this type is the folding stool, made of ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not from any ancient fossil still existing but as found in a variety of pictorial items. The better known is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of which are displayed. These curving legs were presumably created from bent wood and were in that case subjected to great pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore extremely stable and were clearly pointed out.
The Romans adopted the Greek designs; quite a few models of seated Romans display examples of a denser and are a rather more crudely constructed klismos. Both styles, the light or the heavy, were seen again in the Classicist epoch. The klismos design is found in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some kinds of considerable originality within Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China can not be tracked as far back as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of images and artworks had been kept safe, showing the interiors and outside of Chinese houses and the designs of furniture. Also preserved from the 16th century are a number of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an astonishing likeness to representations of previous chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, two chair forms dominated in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair is constructed both with and without arms though never without the square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to hold up the back. In one image, however, the stiles had been marginally curved over the arms for the purpose of sit right with the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the back). Each of the three parts are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of the Chinese back splat later had an inspiration for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only to a restricted ability reinforce corner joints (as well as being loose in the result) represent a design solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes about the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or possesses rounded edges—a left over perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and may have had a plaited seat. These chairs needed the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; if too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to collapse. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs probably were kept only for older members of the family, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have taken to China from the West. It is not dissimilar that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is delicately affixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is more often than not possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the ultimate effect of both furniture items is stylized. The manufacture and aesthetic elements are combined in a style that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual items do not seem to have been held together by means of either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and fixed in position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Paintings show a kind of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture for traveling which, at the same period, possessed the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be found in engravings of interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this design of chair can also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not determined that the style actually began in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in large amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by its shapely proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that is, as created in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike principles even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are made from wood of relatively thick density; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and more upmarket examples would be further embellished with special delicate and decorative engraving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more open in design than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and found favour 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 popularised 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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