Out of each of the furniture objects, the chair may be the most imperative. While most other forms (save for the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair must be viewed here in the common sense, from stool to throne to complex kinds including a bench and sofa, which should be considered 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 art. The chair is not just a physical support and/or an aesthetic piece of art; it is historically an indicator of social hierarchy. In the past royal courts there were plain differences between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to use a stool. From the last century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been regarded as a signifier of superior dignity, like in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a raised level.
As a furniture construction, the chair holds a wealth of various forms. There are chairs created to fit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since the past there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has demanded unique chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair shapes has been perfected to conform to evolving human requirements. From its particular link with man, the chair lives to its full purpose only when in use. Though it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there might be things inside or not, a chair is seen best and fairly judged with a person using it, for chair and sitter suit each other. Thus the various elements of the chair are given labels as the limbs of our human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious job of a chair is to support a body, its worth is judged firstly by how well it does measure up to this practical role. Within the structure of a chair, the chair maker is bound for the static regulations and principal measurements. Within these limitations, however, the chair maker has large freedom.
The history of the chair extends over dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of peoples that made significant chair forms, as expressive of the highest object in the areas of skill and aesthetics. In these civilisations, 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 construct of masterful craft, are seen from discoveries made in tombs. The first one of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs shaped like those of a designated animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular form was crafted. There was from our knowledge no marked differentiation in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common people. The general change lies in the complex ornamentation, in the choice of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was developed to be an easily carried seat for army officers. As a camp stool this chair stayed around during much later periods. But the stool then was made for the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its technical task as a folding stool being forgotten. This can today be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the shape of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats were worked from wood. The plain make of the folding stool, made of two frames that spin on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, also appeared at some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of those is the folding stool, made from ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient specimen still extant but as found in a large amount of pictorial objects. The most recognisable is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs would be seen. These curved legs were most likely executed from bent wood and were therefore needed to bear great pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore extremely stable and were plainly signified.
The Romans adopted the Greek design; designs of casts of seated Romans display chairs of a heavier and which appear to be a kind of less delicately built klismos. Both features, the light and heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist time. The klismos influence is known in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in particular kinds of profound originality in Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China cannot be followed as long as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged series of drawings and works of art was protected, detailing the insides and outer parts of Chinese households and the kinds of furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are a number of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that hold an amazing familiarity to designs of ancient chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there existed two iconic chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That chair can be constructed both with and without arms although never without the square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to firm the back. In one type, it has been seen, the stiles were marginally curved by the arms for the purpose of fit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a back). Together, all three limbs had been mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the design of this back splat had a foundation for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only to a restricted limit support corner joints (and are loose to top it off) are a signature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which closes around the rounded staves. Members are round in section or is given rounded edges—an acknowledgement perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and might have had a plaited texture. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; when too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs presumably were reserved for older individuals, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have come to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is generally designed with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resulting effect of these two furniture items is stylized. The manufacture and decoration elements are combined in a manner that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the manner that the individual items do not look to have been joined together by either glue or screws, but are mortised onto one another and fixed in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Paintings project a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same era, held the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be displayed in engravings of interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this type of chair may also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not believed that the form actually began in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly 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 along a wall. The form asserts itself by its harmonious proportions and fine 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 is to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The model owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and permits 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 on the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof employ wood of rather thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been cut away, and more upmarket items would be further embellished with special delicate and decorative engravings. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles over 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 popularised and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
During 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 brands 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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