From all the furniture items, the chair could be of the most importance. While most of the other forms (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair should be said here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to complex items for example the bench and sofa, which may be considered 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 stimulating as its history as a creative art. The chair is not only a physical support or an aesthetic piece of art; it was also a symbol of social ranking. In the old royal courts there were clear signifiers between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, and having to squat on a stool. During the last century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been regarded as iconic of superior position, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
In its furniture creation, the chair can be used for a wealth of different makes. There are chairs created to suit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past times there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); from 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 make chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has developed unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair kinds have changed to fit to different human requirements. From its particular importance with man, the chair exists to its full importance only when in employ. Although it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there are things inside or not, a chair is really understood and judged with a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the different elements of a chair were named corresponding to the parts of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious function of your chair is to support the human body, its worth is evaluated generally on how fully it fulfills this practical use. Within the construction of a chair, the carpenter is bound for the static regulations and principal measurements. Through these rules, however, the chair creator has great freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over an era of several thousand years. There is evidence of societies that made unique chair shapes, as seen of the principal endeavour in the industries of technique and art. Out of these peoples, a note 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of masterful scheme, are today seen from tomb discoveries. The first of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have had four legs designed as akin to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. From this a strong triangular construction was made. There was to our knowledge no particular differentiation between the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common citizens. The simple variation was in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the selection of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was crafted as an easily packed seat for officers. As a camp stool the stool stayed for much later periods of time. But the stool then was made as the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical job as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can today be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the structure of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats are made out of wood. The simplistic structure of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric held 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 of ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is known not as any ancient specimen still existing but as in a wealth of pictorial items. The better known is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs were seen. These creative legs were likely to have been crafted with bent wood and were as such had huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super durable and were plainly denoted.
The Romans embued the Greek style; a number of statues of seated Romans offer evidence of a more heavyset and are a kind of less delicately constructed klismos. Both features, light and heavy, were seen again within the Classicist time. The klismos design can be evidenced in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in special kinds of considerable originality within Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China cannot be followed as far back as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full folio of drawings and artworks had been kept safe, displaying the interior and outer parts of Chinese households and their furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are some chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an amazing likeness to pictures of older chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, two chair designs persisted in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair is found both with and without arms but always having the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one form, though, the stiles had been delicately curved over the arms to conform correctly to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the chairback). All three areas were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the idea of this back splat exercised an introduction for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could merely to a restricted extent support corner joints (as well as being loose as well) are an element exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which stops around the rounded staves. All members are round in section or have rounded edges—acknowledging perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and may have a plaited form. These chairs demanded of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; when too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs probably were kept for older individuals, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have taken to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is delicately fixed to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is more often than not provided with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resultant effect of both of these furniture items is stylized. The constructive and decoration parts are combined in a way that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual items do not appear to have been affixed with either glue or screws, but had been mortised with one another and locked into place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Paintings show a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture while traveling which, in the same era, had the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is evidenced in engravings of the interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this type of chair might also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not believed that the form actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Normally, 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 patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in vast quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The design asserts itself by its elegant 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 created in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike principles despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of quite thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and finer designs would be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes used in place of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and won favour in several 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
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 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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