From all the furniture needs, the chair may be the most important. While the majority of other pieces (save for the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is meant to be used here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to complex pieces like a bench and sofa, which should be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly defined.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support or aesthetic piece of art; it is historically an indicator of social standing. From the old royal courts there were important connotations between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to use a stool. Since the recent century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been a signifier of superior rank, as well as in democratic governments the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
As its furniture creation, the chair is used for a wealth of variations. There are chairs created to fit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). During past times there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has demanded new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair shapes has been perfected to match to different human desires. For its particular connection with man, the chair exists to its full importance only when being utilised. Although it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there are items inside or not, a chair is really understood and fairly regarded with a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter need one another. Thus the individual limbs of a chair have been given labels likened to the parts of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple function of a chair is to support your body, its value is evaluated primarily by how well it fulfills this practical purpose. In the creation of a chair, the designer is restricted in particular static regulation and principal measurements. In these limits, however, the chair maker has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair covered a period of several thousand years. There are cultures that had individual chair types, expressive of the principal craft in the arenas of craft and creativity. Out of such civilisations, special 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 structures of skilled scheme, are now seen from findings made in tombs. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed not unlike those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this a strong triangular structure was crafted. There was to all appearances no significant variation between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular citizens. The only difference lied in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the selection of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was manufactured for an easily stored seat for army officers. As a camp stool that type existed for much later days. But the stool then played the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original job as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can from evidence be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the form of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats are worked with wood. The plain build of the folding stool, made of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, is seen at some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of those is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is known not as any ancient item still around but found in a variety of pictorial evidence. The archetype is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them can be displayed. These curving legs were presumed to be manufactured with bent wood and were therefore needed to bear huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very durable and were particularly indicated.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; a number of statues of seated Romans show examples of a thicker and are a slightly crudely crafted klismos. Both styles, the light and heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist period. The klismos influence can be seen in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some special forms of considerable uniqueness in Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as far back as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed serial of sketches and artworks has been kept, showing the insides and exteriors of Chinese buildings and their furniture. Also kept since the 16th century are a number of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that display an interesting resemblance to styles of older chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there existed two standard chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair is seen both with or without arms however always with its square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to firm the back. In one form, however, the stiles are marginally curved on top of the arms to conform to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a back). Each of the three areas are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Although the design of the Chinese back splat exercised an influence on English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden items that just to a limited limit stabilise corner joints (and then are loose as a result) are a signature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which finishes about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or have rounded edges—a left over perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs likely were reserved for the senior members of the family, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is delicately fixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the ultimate effect of both these furniture styles is stylized. The constructive and decorative aspects are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the fact that the individual members do not appear to have been put together by means of either glue or screws, but have been mortised into 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 mark on the chair. Works of art show a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined 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 small pads. The front board and a corresponding board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same time, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the inside of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this style of chair can also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not certain that the innovation actually originated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in considerable numbers, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself with its harmonious proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered 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—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat suits to the human body and allows 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 over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike principles even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of fairly thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and finer items may be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which came from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and became the preference 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
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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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