From each of the furniture pieces, the chair may be of most importance. While most of the other objects (except the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is intended to be used here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to derivative pieces like a 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 evidently distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not only a physical support and/or an aesthetic craft; it is also an indicator of social placement. Within the old royal courts there were plain distinctions between having a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to utilise a stool. During the last century, the director’s and manager’s chair has become an identifier of superior dignity, and in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
As a furniture construction, the chair holds a number of different forms. There are chairs created to fit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). During historical times there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We design 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 up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has developed unique chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair types has been evolved to match to differing human uses. Due to its significant connection with man, the chair comes to its full purpose only when utilised. Whereas it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there are items inside or not, a chair is understood best and judged by a person utilising it, for chair and sitter suit each other. Thus the individual parts of the chair were labeled as the parts of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple work of a chair is to support our body, its value is judged principally for how completely it does measure up to this practical job. Within the build of a chair, the builder is restricted by the static laws and principal measurements. In these restrictions, however, the chair maker has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair was a period of several thousand years. There were cultures that have created individual chair types, as expressions of the leading work in the arenas of craft and aesthetics. Within such civilisations, 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of masterful make, are today a finding from findings made in tombs. One of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair has four legs shaped as akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this a durable triangular structure was created. There seems to be no significant difference from the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common peasantry. The simple difference lies in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the particulars of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was manufactured to be an easily carried seat for officers. As a camp stool the kind stayed around for much later periods of time. But the stool then was created as the character of a ceremonial seat, its original job as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can from evidence be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the shape of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats were worked from wood. The easy manufacture of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, appeared again somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of those is the folding stool, from ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not from any ancient fossil still extant but as seen in a large amount of pictorial items. The archetype is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs would be seen. These odd legs were considered to be created in bent wood and were therefore had a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore extremely solid and were overtly drawn.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; some statues of seated Romans display examples of a more heavyset and apparently somewhat crudely built klismos. Both designs, the light or the heavy, were brought back in the Classicist time. The klismos chair can be found in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some brands of marked iconicism around Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China isn’t able to be followed as well as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged series of sketches and works of art was preserved, detailing the inside and outer parts of Chinese buildings and their furniture. Another preservation of the 16th century are some chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an astonishing likeness to designs of older chairs.
As in Egypt, two iconic chair forms existed in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair is constructed both with or without arms although always with its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one form, it has been seen, the stiles were slightly curved above the arms to fit the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the back). All three sections are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the idea of a back splat had a foundation for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that would merely to a restricted capability stabilise corner joints (and then were loose in the result) are a feature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which stops around the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or has rounded edges—an acknowledgement maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and might have had a plaited seat. These chairs required of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to collapse. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs likely were reserved only for the senior family members, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have travelled to China from the West. It does not vary very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is usually seen with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of both these furniture designs is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic parts are combined in a way that is all at once naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual members do not seem to have been joined together by either glue or screws, but have been mortised onto one another and locked into position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Works of art show a style of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same era, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be found in engravings of the interior of affluent 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 may also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not believed that the style actually started in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in vast amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of 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 forms—that was, to say, as brought out in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting 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 achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike methodology despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of quite thick density; but all the members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and finer examples may be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carvings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in style than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which came from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles throughout 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 styles 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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