From all the furniture pieces, the chair may be primary. While most other pieces (save for the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is meant to be looked upon here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to further items such as the bench or sofa, which might be seen 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 exciting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not simply a physical support or an aesthetic item; it can also be a symbol of social hierarchy. From the past royal courts there were plain distinctions between being led to a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to use a stool. From the 20th century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has developed an indicator of superior status, like in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a raised floor.
As a furniture form, the chair ranges from a number of different forms. There are chairs designed to match man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since the olden days there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We make 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, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has derived particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair kinds has perfected to match to different human requirements. From its significant link with man, the chair appears to its full significance only when being utilised. Whereas it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there might be things inside or not, a chair is seen best and evaluated by a person using it, for chair and sitter need each other. Thus the different elements of the chair have been labeled likened to the limbs of the human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the clear role of a chair is to support the body, its worth is tested generally for how completely it does fulfill this practical purpose. Within the build of a chair, the chair maker is bound within some static regulations and principal measurements. In these limitations, however, the chair creator has large freedom.
The history of the chair was dates of several thousand years. There were societies that had iconic chair types, expressive of the highest object in the industries of skill and art. Among such societies, a mention 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of skilled design, were known from discoveries made in tombs. First of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair had four legs formed like those of an animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this way a solid triangular structure was obtained. There seems to be no significant difference from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common non-royals. The real change existed in the level of ornamentation, in the particulars of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was developed as an easily packed seat for army officers. As a camp stool the chair existed until much later periods of time. But the stool then also was created for the use of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical role 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 are made in the shape of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats were formed of wood. The simple build of the folding stool, being of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric set between them, appeared again but some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known 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 seen not from any ancient item still in form but as in a variety of pictorial items. The iconic kind is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location near Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs could be displayed. These unusual legs were presumed to be crafted of bent wood and were as such needed to bear huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore extremely durable and were overtly pointed out.
The Romans adopted the Greek designs; a number of models of seated Romans display evidence of a heavier and which appear to be a slightly more crudely constructed klismos. Both styles, the light and the heavy, were popularised during the Classicist epoch. The klismos design is evidenced in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some special brands of considerable iconicism around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China can not be tracked as well as in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged serial of images and works of art had been kept safe, showing the inside and exterior of Chinese buildings and the kinds of furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that hold an intriguing familiarity to styles of past chairs.
As in Egypt, there existed two iconic chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair has been designed both with and without arms although never missing its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to support the back. In one type, it has been found, the stiles are slightly curved over the arms to fit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of the back). Together, the three parts had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Though the design of the Chinese back splat then had a foundation for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only to a restricted capability support corner joints (and furthermore were loose additionally) signify a feature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes over the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or possesses rounded edges—acknowledging perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have a plaited form. These chairs required the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; when too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs presumably were reserved only for senior persons, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It is akin so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is delicately held to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is more often than not seen with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of both these furniture styles is stylized. The constructive and decorative aspects are combined in a manner that is at the same time naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual members do not look to have been held together with either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto 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 left its mark on the chair. Artworks project a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, in the same period, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is seen in engravings of the interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this design of chair can also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not decided that the style actually began in The Netherlands. Typically, 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 crafted in large amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The design 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 form—that was, to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and grants 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 on the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of fairly thick density; but every member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been sanded away, and finer examples can be further embellished with special delicate and decorative engravings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within 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 popularised 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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