Of all furniture objects, the chair might be of the most importance. While most other forms (apart from the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair should be said here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to complex items such as the bench and sofa, which can be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and aesthetic item; it is also a symbol of social place. At the historical royal courts there were clear connotations between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, and having to squat on a stool. Since the last century, the director’s and manager’s chair has been an identifier of superior status, and even in democratic governments the speaker sits on a raised platform.
As its furniture purpose, the chair encompasses a range of variations. There are chairs manufactured to attend to man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past times there were chairs for births (birth chairs); since 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 have chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has demanded particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair kinds have been evolved to fit to differing human uses. Due to its significant relationship with man, the chair exists to its full advantage only when used. Though it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there is anything inside or not, a chair is best seen and regarded best with a person using it, for chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the several areas of the chair are labeled according to the areas of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first work of the chair is to support the body, its worth is evaluated primarily on how completely it does measure up to this practical role. In the structure of the chair, the maker is limited for certain static rules and principal measurements. Inside these restrictions, however, the chair designer has large freedom.
The history of the chair lasted over dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of civilizations that created individual chair types, seen of the premier craft in the areas of skill and creativity. Out of such civilisations, special 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of careful make, are now seen from tomb findings. One of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have four legs structured as akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this way a solid triangular design was obtained. There seemed to be no noteworthy change between the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular people. The only change lies in the kind of ornamentation, in the evidence of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was created to be an easily carried seat for army. As a camp stool this chair stayed around for much later days. But the stool then was made for the task of a ceremonial seat, its original task as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can today be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the form of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats are made from wood. The simple manufacture of the folding stool, composed of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric held between them, appeared but some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of those is the folding stool, from ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is known not in any ancient object still existing but from a large amount of pictorial evidence. The most well known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location by Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them are visible. These odd legs were understood to be executed of bent wood and were therefore had a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very solid and were overtly signified.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; existing statues of seated Romans offer examples of a more heavyset and apparently kind of more crudely constructed klismos. Both designs, the light or heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist epoch. The klismos style is evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular kinds of considerable uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China cannot be followed as far as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged series of sketches and paintings had been preserved, with images of the insides and outer parts of Chinese homes and their furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that show an astonishing similarity to designs of past chairs.
As in Egypt, two chair designs persisted in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That chair is designed both with or without arms however always having a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one type, however, the stiles had been marginally curved over the arms in order to conform to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a back). Together, all three areas are mortised on the yoke-like top rail. While the style of a back splat later had a foundation for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that could only to a particular ability support corner joints (and then were loose as well) are an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or has rounded edges—referable as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; when too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs probably were reserved only for the senior individuals in the family, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have taken to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is delicately affixed to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is usually possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resultant effect of both furniture designs is stylized. The constructive and decoration elements are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual parts do not look to have been joined together by means of either glue or screws, but are mortised on one another and fixed in position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Works of art display a style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same time, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is displayed in engravings of the inside of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this type of chair is also found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not held that the style actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of such chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself by its shapely proportions and delicate 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 styles—that was, to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The model owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methodology in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of quite thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been sanded away, and more expensive designs can be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes 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 throughout most of France and found favour in many 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 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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