From each of the furniture items, the chair could be of most importance. While the majority of other items (save the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair can be viewed here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to further forms like the bench or sofa, which may be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly defined.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and/or an aesthetic craft; it is also an indicator of social status. At the historical royal courts there were clear signifiers between possessing a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to squat on a stool. From the 20th century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been seen as an identifier of superior standing, and even in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
As a furniture purpose, the chair can be utilised for a variety of various makes. There are chairs designed to fit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past times there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We have chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has derived new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair types has adapted to suit to changing human uses. Because of its close importance with man, the chair appears to its full advantage only when utilised. Though it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is understood and tested by a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter suit each other. Thus the various limbs of the chair are labeled corresponding to the limbs of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary job of a chair is to support our body, its credit is evaluated generally on how suitably it measures up to this practical function. Within the construction of a chair, the builder is bound by the static laws and principal measurements. Through these regulations, however, the chair creator has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair covered an era of several thousand years. There are societies that held distinctive chair types, expressions of the foremost object in the areas of craft and art. Among these peoples, a note 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of careful craft, were found from discoveries 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 would have four legs formed akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this design a solid triangular design was made. There appeared to be no notable variation in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical peasantry. The main difference existed in the complexity of ornamentation, in the selection of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was created for an easily portable seat for soldiers. As a camp stool that chair persisted during much later times. But the stool also then was designed as the role of a ceremonial seat, its original job as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can now be observed, 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 constructed in the structure of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats were created of wood. The easy construction of the folding stool, composed of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, then came up somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of those is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is found not as any ancient item still existing but in a trove of pictorial items. The most recognisable is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those were displayed. These creative legs were considered to be executed in bent wood and were probably put under huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore extremely strong and were overtly denoted.
The Romans adopted the Greek design; quite a few models of seated Romans show evidence of a denser and apparently somewhat more crudely designed klismos. Both styles, the light or heavy, were popularised during the Classicist epoch. The klismos design is evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular types of notable uniqueness in Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China cannot be followed as far as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed serial of sketches and artworks had been protected, detailing the inside and exteriors of Chinese buildings and their furniture. Preserved also since the 16th century are some chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that show an amazing likeness to pictures of past chairs.
As in Egypt, two chair designs persisted in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That chair has been seen both with and without arms but never without its square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to hold up the back. In one design, it has been found, the stiles had been lightly curved by the arms so as to conform to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a back). All three areas had been mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Although the style of a back splat exercised an introduction for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only just to a limited ability reinforce corner joints (and are loose as a result) represent a signature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes around the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or is given rounded edges—acknowledging perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and had on occasion a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs likely were reserved only for the senior people, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is elegantly affixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resultant effect of these furniture items is stylized. The structure and decorative issues are combined in a style that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the fact that the individual items do not seem to have been put together by use of either glue or screws, but have been mortised on one another and fixed in position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Works of art show a style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same time, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is evidenced in engravings of interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this design of chair may also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not decided that the innovation actually was born in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in impressive amounts, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The style asserts itself by its shapely proportions and fine 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 was, to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methods in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them have wood of rather thick measurements; but all the members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been sanded away, and finer designs can be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carvings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more differentiated in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and won 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
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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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