From all the furniture forms, the chair could be the most important. While most of the other items (apart from the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair can be regarded here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to complex forms such as 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 overtly distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not just a physical support and an aesthetic piece of art; it historically was semiotic of social hierarchy. At the old royal courts there were significant signifiers between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, and having to sit on a stool. In the 20th century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen an identifier of superior status, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
In a furniture purpose, the chair encompasses a variety of various makes. There are chairs designed to suit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past days there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has designated unique chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair shapes have adapted to suit to evolving human needs. Because of its significant relationship with man, the chair exists to its full importance only when being used. Although it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there might be things inside or not, a chair is understood best and judged by a person using it, because chair and sitter complement one another. Thus the various areas of a chair have been given labels as the limbs of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary function of the chair is to support the human body, its credit is tested basically by how well it does measure up to this practical role. Within the creation of the chair, the maker is restricted under some static regulation and principal measurements. Within these regulations, however, the chair creator has large freedom.
The history of the chair extended over a period of several thousand years. There are peoples that had made individual chair shapes, as expressions of the leading endeavour in the areas of craft and creativity. Out of such civilisations, particular note 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 objects of masterful make, are a finding from tomb discoveries. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed like those of some animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. From this a solid triangular structure was crafted. There was in our view no notable variation between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular non-royals. The simple variation lies in the level of ornamentation, in the choice of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was designed as an easily portable seat for army. As a camp stool that chair stayed til much later points in time. But the stool then also was created for the character of a ceremonial seat, its original function as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the shape of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats were formed of wood. The plain build of the folding stool, made of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric set between them, can be seen somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this type 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 object still around but found in a trove of pictorial evidence. The most well known is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place near Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which were seen. These curving legs were most likely to be created of bent wood and were probably subjected to a large amount of pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore very solid and were clearly drawn.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek designs; existing casts of seated Romans are chairs of a thicker and which appear to be a rather less intricately designed klismos. Both designs, light and heavy, were brought back within the Classicist period. The klismos influence is evidenced in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some particular brands of profound individuality around Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be charted as far back as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged serial of sketches and artworks had been kept safe, displaying the insides and exterior of Chinese buildings and their furniture. Kept also since the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that hold an intriguing resemblance to pictures of ancient chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there were two iconic chair designs in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair was designed both with and without arms though never missing a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one image, it has been seen, the stiles were slightly curved over the arms in order to fit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the chairback). Each of the three parts had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. While the innovation of this back splat later had a foundation for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden members that would only to a particular capability stabilise corner joints (and were loose to top that off) signify a signature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which ends about the rounded staves. All members are round in section or has rounded edges—an acknowledgement perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and might have had a plaited form. These chairs needed the sitter to be stiff and upright; when too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs most likely were allowed only for older members of the family, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have taken to China from the West. It is not dissimilar much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is usually provided with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of both furniture forms is stylized. The manufacture and decoration issues are combined in a style that is both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual items do not look to have been affixed by either glue or screws, but have been mortised onto one another and locked into position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Paintings display a type of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same time, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be displayed in engravings of the interior of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this type of chair might also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not decided that the design actually started in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in large numbers, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its elegant proportions and delicate 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 was, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes its popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat adheres to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of rather thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and finer examples can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carvings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more open in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which came from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and became the preference in large 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 commonly known 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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