Out of each of the furniture needs, the chair may be the most important. While most other objects (save for the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is intended to be viewed here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to developed chairs including a bench or sofa, which might be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently definitive.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support or aesthetic piece of art; it historically was an indicator of social place. Within the Medieval royal courts there were clear signifiers 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 last century, the director’s and manager’s chair has risen an identifier of superior status, as well as in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a raised platform.
As its furniture construction, the chair is utilised for a variety of various forms. There are chairs structured to fit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the olden days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has demanded special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair kinds has changed to fit to changing human desires. Because of its close relationship with man, the chair comes to its full importance only when in use. Whereas it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there is anything inside or not, a chair is understood and regarded best by a person using it, for chair and sitter need the other. Thus the various parts of the chair have been named as the areas of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal role of a chair is to support our human body, its value is valued firstly on how fully it fulfills this practical role. In the design of a chair, the maker is limited under some static law and principal measurements. Within these limits, however, the chair maker has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair covers dates of several thousand years. There existed cultures that had made unique chair types, as expressive of the principal craft in the spheres of skill and design. In such cultures, 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of masterful scheme, are seen from findings made in tombs. The first one of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair had four legs crafted not unlike those of some animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular design was obtained. There was in our knowledge no noteworthy change in the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular populace. The simple change exists in the kind of ornamentation, in the evidence of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was created to be an easily stored seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool that chair continued til much later periods of time. But the stool then was created as the task of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical task as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be noted, 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 were in the shape of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats were made out of wood. The easy construction of the folding stool, composed of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, came again at some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of these is the folding stool, of ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not as any ancient fossil still existing but as seen from a variety of pictorial evidence. The best recognised is the klismos depicted 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, only two of those legs would be displayed. These unique legs were understood to be manufactured with bent wood and were thus bore huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore extremely durable and were visibly pointed out.
The Romans adopted the Greek design; some statues of seated Romans are examples of a more heavyset and in appearance slightly crudely crafted klismos. Both kinds, the light or the heavy, were brought back as part of the Classicist epoch. The klismos chair is known in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some types of considerable uniqueness within Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China can not be traced as far back as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed series of images and works of art has been kept, showing the inside and exteriors of Chinese households and the furniture. Preserved also since the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that hold an astonishing similarity to designs of older chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, two chair forms persisted in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair was seen both with and without arms however never missing a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one image, however, the stiles had been marginally curved by the arms so as to suit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a chairback). All three sections are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. While the idea of the Chinese back splat exercised an influence on English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that only just to a limited extent stabilise corner joints (as well as being loose to top it off) indicate a feature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which finishes over the rounded staves. All members are round in section or have rounded edges—acknowledging perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and occasionally had a plaited texture. These chairs required the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs likely were kept for senior persons, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have been brought to China from the West. It is akin that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is intricately joined to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is usually provided with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resulting effect of both furniture styles is stylized. The construction and decoration parts are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual parts do not appear to have been affixed by means of either glue or screws, but are mortised into one another and held in its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Paintings show a style of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to bring up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture for traveling which, during the same time, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the interior of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this kind of chair might also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not held that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in vast quantities, 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 form asserts itself by its harmonious proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—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 chair owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat suits to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methodology despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of quite thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and finer examples may be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engraving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used in place of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more differentiated in design than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and was popularised 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 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 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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