From each of the furniture needs, the chair could be the primary one. While the majority of other items (save the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair must be regarded here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to derivative chairs for example the bench or sofa, which may be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently labeled.
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 an indicator of social hierarchy. At the old royal courts there were social differences between sitting on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or having to squat on a stool. During the last century, a director’s or manager’s chair has been regarded as a signifier of superior status, and even in democratic governments the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
In its furniture creation, the chair can be utilised for a wealth of various purposes. There are chairs structured to match man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since the olden days there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used 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 demanded particular chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair kinds has adapted to suit to evolving human requirements. From its close importance with man, the chair exists to its full advantage only when utilised. While it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there is anything inside or not, a chair is really understood and fairly tested by a person using it, because chair and sitter require one another. Thus the various limbs of a chair were given labels as the elements of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious job of your chair is to support the human body, its credit is tested basically for how completely it does fulfill this practical purpose. Within the creation of the chair, the builder is limited in some static laws and principal measurements. Within these rules, however, the chair maker has large freedom.
The history of the chair extended over an era of several thousand years. There are civilizations that had made individual chair types, expressions of the leading object in the industries of skill and design. Within those peoples, individual note can 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 structures of careful scheme, are today found from discoveries made in tombs. The first of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have had four legs crafted akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this design a solid triangular structure was obtained. There was to our knowledge no marked variation between the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary non-royals. The main variation was in the complex ornamentation, in the evidence of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was designed as an easily stored seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool that stool stayed around for much later points in time. But the stool also played the use of a ceremonial seat, its technical task as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can today be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the construction of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats are created of wood. The easy manufacture of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that turn on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, then came up but somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of those is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, which can now be found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not from any ancient fossil still around but as in a variety of pictorial objects. The most well known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them were shown. These unique legs were thought to have been crafted of bent wood and were in that case had to bear great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore extremely stable and were plainly indicated.
The Romans adopted the Greek design; a number of casts of seated Romans offer examples of a thicker and apparently rather less intricately built klismos. Both kinds, the light or the heavy, were popularised during the Classicist epoch. The klismos influence is used in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some particular kinds of marked individuality within Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China cannot be tracked as far as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged collection of sketches and paintings had been kept safe, with images of the insides and exteriors of Chinese buildings and their furniture. Preserved also since the 16th century are some chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an astonishing similarity to pictures of previous chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there existed two standard chair designs in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair is found both with or without arms however always having a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one kind, it has been found, the stiles had been lightly curved over the arms so as to sit right with the form of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a chairback). Together, all three areas had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the innovation of the back splat later had a foundation for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only just to a limited extent support corner joints (as well as being loose as well) signify an element signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which stops around the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or has rounded edges—referable perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and occasionally had a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs presumably were kept for senior family members, for they were respected greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have come to China from the West. It does not vary very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is usually possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resulting effect of both furniture designs is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic aspects are combined in a manner that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the fact that the individual parts do not seem to have been joined together by means of either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and fixed in place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Artworks project a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same period, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is evidenced in engravings of the interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this kind of chair might also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not decided that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in impressive amounts, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of such chairs lined up against a wall. The style asserts itself with its shapely proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that is, as brought out in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes this 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. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof employ wood of quite thick density; but all the members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and finer examples might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engraving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the most distinguished 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 reknowned 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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