Of all furniture items, the chair could be the most important. While most of the other pieces (apart from the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is meant to be said here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to derivative pieces like 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 evidently defined.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and aesthetic artwork; it can also be semiotic of social placement. In the Medieval royal courts there were clear connotations between sitting on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to squat on a stool. In the recent century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been a signifier of superior status, like in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a raised level.
As a furniture form, the chair ranges from a range of different forms. There are chairs manufactured to suit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the olden days there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has designated new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair types has been perfected to match to different human needs. From its unique link with man, the chair exists to its full meaning only when being used. Although it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there are items inside or not, a chair is best seen and regarded best by a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter need one another. Thus the individual parts of the chair have been named corresponding to the areas of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the clear work of your chair is to support your body, its worth is valued basically from how well it does measure up to this practical function. Within the build of a chair, the chair maker is restricted with the static law and principal measurements. Within these regulations, however, the chair creator has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair extended over dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of cultures that had individual chair forms, as seen of the leading endeavour in the arenas of handling and aesthetics. Out of these such civilisations, particular 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of skilled scheme, are today found from tomb findings. The first one of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have four legs crafted akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this way a durable triangular construction was created. There was in our understanding no significant differentiation between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical peasantry. The simple change existed in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the choice of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was manufactured for an easily portable seat for army. As a camp stool this type stayed around during much later points. But the stool then was created as the character of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical function as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can today be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the form of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats were formed of wood. The simplistic manufacture of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that turn on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric set between them, can be seen but somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this type is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not as any ancient specimen still extant but seen in a variety of pictorial objects. The better recognised is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of which were seen. These curving legs were probably manufactured in bent wood and were thus put under huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super durable and were overtly drawn.
The Romans embued the Greek chair; some models of seated Romans offer designs of a thicker and are a slightly more crudely constructed klismos. Both styles, the light or heavy, were seen again within the Classicist epoch. The klismos style is used in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in particular kinds of marked individuality in Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China can not be traced as long as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged collection of sketches and paintings was preserved, with images of the inside and outer parts of Chinese households and their furniture. Preserved also of the 16th century are a trove of chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that show an interesting likeness to styles of ancient chairs.
Same as in Egypt, two chair designs dominated in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair is designed both with or without arms although always with the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to support the back. In one form, however, the stiles had been slightly curved above the arms so as to sit right with the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its back). Each of the three sections had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Although the innovation of the Chinese back splat then had an influence on English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that would merely to a limited ability support corner joints (and are loose in the bargain) represent a feature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which stops over the rounded staves. Members are round in section or is given rounded edges—a left over perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and had on occasion a plaited seat. These chairs required of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a habit of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs presumably were reserved only for the senior individuals, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It does not vary very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is elegantly joined to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is usually possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the ultimate effect of both these furniture styles is stylized. The structure and aesthetic parts are combined in a way that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual members do not appear to have been held together by either glue or screws, but had been mortised on one another and locked into place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Artworks show a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same period, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be evidenced in engravings of interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this kind of chair is also made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not held that the design actually was born in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in impressive amounts, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of such chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself with its elegant 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 form—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 style owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike practices despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of fairly thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been taken away, and more expensive designs might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more varied in style than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and became the preference 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 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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