Out of all furniture needs, the chair might be primary. While the majority of other forms (apart from the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is meant to be said here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to further pieces such as a bench and sofa, which may be viewed 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 curious as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and aesthetic piece; it was historically an indicator of social status. From the past royal courts there were plain signifiers between possessing a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, and having to squat on a stool. From the recent century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has developed an identifier of superior position, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a higher platform.
As its furniture purpose, the chair can be used for a variety of different makes. There are chairs designed to match man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, 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 modern lifestyle has derived particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair shapes has been adapted to match to different human requirements. From its particular connection with man, the chair comes to its full importance only when in use. Although it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is seen best and evaluated by a person using it, because chair and sitter need the other. Thus the different parts of the chair have been given labels likened to the names of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the basic role of the chair is to support our body, its credit is judged primarily from how completely it does measure up to this practical role. Within the construction of the chair, the carpenter is restricted for certain static legislation and principal measurements. Under these limitations, however, the chair maker has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair lasted a period of several thousand years. There is evidence of peoples that have created individual chair shapes, expressive of the foremost endeavour in the arenas of craft and creativity. Among these such cultures, 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of expert craft, are found from findings made in tombs. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed like those of some 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 understanding no marked differentiation in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular populace. The main difference existed in the complex ornamentation, in the choice of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was developed as an easily stored seat for army. As a camp stool that stool persevered until much later times. But the stool also then took on the use of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical history as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from evidence be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the structure of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats were made with wood. The simple structure of the folding stool, being of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, was seen again at some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of these is the folding stool, of ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not with any ancient object still in form but found in a variety of pictorial material. The most recognisable is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place by Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those were displayed. These strange legs were most likely to have been created of bent wood and were as such needed to bear a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore extremely stable and were clearly pointed out.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek chair; designs of models of seated Romans are designs of a heavier and are a rather more crudely constructed klismos. Both types, the light and heavy, were revived during the Classicist time. The klismos influence is seen in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some kinds of profound individuality of Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China can not be tracked as long as that of Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full collection of drawings and artworks has been protected, detailing the interior and exterior of Chinese households and the kinds of furniture. Another preservation since the 16th century are a collection of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that show an interesting similarity to pictures of past chairs.
As in Egypt, there were two iconic chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That chair has been seen both with or without arms but never missing the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to firm the back. In one form, it has been found, the stiles could be slightly curved above the arms to conform correctly to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of its back). All three limbs were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Although the design of the back splat then had an inspiration for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden members that merely to a particular extent embolden corner joints (as well as being loose as a result) represent an element signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops around the rounded staves. Members are round in section or has rounded edges—references perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for if too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs probably were only for elderly individuals, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have taken to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is often seen with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the ultimate effect of both of these furniture designs is stylized. The construction and decorative elements are combined in a way that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the way that the individual members do not look to have been adjoined by use of either glue or screws, but are mortised on one another and held in position 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. Works of art show a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny 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 while 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 can be seen in engravings of interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this kind of chair may also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not certain that the innovation actually was born in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in vast quantities, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself by its shapely 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 form—that is, as created in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes this popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are constructed from wood of fairly thick dimensions; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and finer designs would be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and was popularised 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 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 products 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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