Of all furniture needs, the chair may be the paramount one. While most of the other objects (save for the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is said here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to complex makes like a 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 obviously labeled.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not merely a physical support or an aesthetic item; it was also symbolic of social ranking. In the past royal courts there were social differences between being led to a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, and having to make do with a stool. During the 20th century, the director’s and manager’s chair has become iconic of superior position, and in democratic governments the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
In a furniture purpose, the chair ranges from a number of various purposes. There are chairs manufactured to suit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We have 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, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has demanded unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair kinds have been perfected to conform to growing human requirements. Because of its particular relationship with man, the chair appears to its full significance only when in employ. Whereas it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there might be things inside or not, a chair is best seen and judged with a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter complement one another. Thus the several limbs of a chair are given names like the names of our human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple role of a chair is to support the body, its value is judged firstly on how suitably it does measure up to this practical purpose. Within the build of a chair, the chair maker is restricted within some static regulations and principal measurements. Under these regulations, however, the chair creator has great freedom.
The history of the chair extended over a period of several thousand years. There were civilizations that held unique chair forms, as expressions of the foremost craft in the areas of technique and creativity. Within such societies, special 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of careful scheme, are today a finding from findings made in tombs. The first of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair had four legs crafted as akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this a durable triangular structure was obtained. There appears to be no noteworthy difference from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common peasantry. The main change was in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the evidence of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was crafted as an easily carried seat for officers. As a camp stool the form existed for much later points. But the stool then also was made as the task of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical function as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from evidence be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay work 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 are worked with wood. The plain structure of the folding stool, made of two frames that turn on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, came again but some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of these is the folding stool, made from ashwood, which can now be found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not from any ancient specimen still in form but as in a large amount of pictorial material. The significant kind is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which could be displayed. These strange legs were thought to be manufactured of bent wood and were likely to have been subjected to huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore very solid and were visibly indicated.
The Romans adopted the Greek style; designs of statues of seated Romans offer examples of a denser and in appearance slightly crudely designed klismos. Both kinds, light or heavy, were revived within the Classicist period. The klismos influence is used in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some brands of marked originality of Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be traced as well as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged serial of images and paintings was kept, displaying the interiors and outer parts of Chinese buildings and their furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are a trove of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that display an interesting familiarity to representations of previous chairs.
As in Egypt, two chair forms dominated in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair has been found both with and without arms though never without its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one form, it must be said, the stiles had been delicately curved on top of the arms for the purpose of suit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a chairback). Together, all three sections were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. While the idea of a back splat later had an introduction for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden members that merely to a restricted extent stabilise corner joints (and then are loose as well) signify a feature particular 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—an acknowledgement perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and occasionally had a plaited texture. These chairs needed the sitter to stay stiff and upright; when too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs most likely were kept only for the senior people in the family, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have come to China from the West. It is akin much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is often designed with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of these furniture styles is stylized. The construction and decorative issues are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the manner that the individual members 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 its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Artworks display a type of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same period, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is found in engravings of the inside of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this design of chair is also made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not believed that the style actually originated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in large amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of such chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself with its elegant proportions and fine 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 created in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them have wood of fairly thick density; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and more upmarket chairs can be further embellished with very delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the premier 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 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 versions 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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