From all the furniture items, the chair could be the primary one. While most of the other forms (save the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is intended to be looked upon here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to developed kinds such as a bench or sofa, which may be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly distinguished.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or an aesthetic artwork; it was historically semiotic of social place. From the past royal courts there were plain signifiers between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to utilise a stool. Since the recent century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been a symbol of superior rank, and in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a high-set level.
In a furniture creation, the chair is utilised for a number of different models. There are chairs designed to fit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past times there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We have chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has designated particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair forms have changed to suit to different human needs. Due to its significant importance with man, the chair appears to its full meaning only when being used. Though it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there might be anything inside or not, a chair is seen best and evaluated by a person using it, because chair and sitter need each other. Thus the various elements of the chair have been given names corresponding to the areas of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the basic work of a chair is to support a human body, its worth is judged principally by how suitably it does measure up to this practical use. Within the manufacture of the chair, the carpenter is limited in some static rules and principal measurements. In these regulations, however, the chair creator has large freedom.
The history of the chair covers dates of several thousand years. There are cultures that made unique chair shapes, as expressive of the foremost craft in the spheres of handling and aesthetics. From these such peoples, 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 items of careful make, were seen from tombs. The first one of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have four legs designed akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this a strong triangular design was created. There was from our knowledge no significant variation between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary peasantry. The only variation existed in the brand of ornamentation, in the selection of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was made to be an easily packed seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool the form continued til much later days. But the stool also then existed in the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its technical job as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from today be noted, 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 are constructed in the construction of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats were formed from wood. The plain make of the folding stool, composed of two frames that spin on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric set between them, appeared some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this kind is the folding stool, from ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not in any ancient item still extant but seen in a wealth of pictorial objects. The best known is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground near Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them can be visible. These unusual legs were presumed to be crafted from bent wood and were likely to have been subjected to huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore extremely strong and were overtly pointed out.
The Romans adopted the Greek designs; evidence of models of seated Romans show evidence of a more heavyset and in appearance somewhat less intricately built klismos. Both designs, the light or the heavy, were revived in the Classicist era. The klismos style is known in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some forms of profound uniqueness in Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China isn’t able to be followed as long as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed serial of drawings and artworks had been kept, with images of the inside and outer parts of Chinese households and the designs of furniture. Also preserved since the 16th century are a collection of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that hold an amazing similarity to pictures of older chairs.
Like in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair is designed both with and without arms although always with the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to hold up the back. In one type, it has been seen, the stiles were marginally curved on top of the arms for the purpose of sit correctly with the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its chairback). All three parts were mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Though the style of the Chinese back splat then had a foundation for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could merely to a particular extent support corner joints (as well as being loose in the result) indicate an element particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes around the rounded staves. All members are round in section or is given rounded edges—references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and may have had a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; if too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to collapse. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs presumably were kept for elderly individuals in the family, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have come to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is elegantly affixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is often designed with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the ultimate effect of these furniture designs is stylized. The construction and decoration parts are combined in a manner that is all at once naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual members do not look to have been fixed by use of either glue or screws, but were mortised with one another and held in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Paintings project a kind of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same era, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is seen in engravings of the interior of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this style of chair may also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not determined that the innovation actually began in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in considerable quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself with its elegant 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, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The style owes its popularity to a combination of leisure and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of relatively thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and finer designs would be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carvings. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used in place of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and won 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 well-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 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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