Out of all furniture objects, the chair could be paramount. While many other objects (save the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair was used here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to further forms including a bench and sofa, which can be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly defined.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support or aesthetic piece of art; it historically is symbolic of social placement. From the past royal courts there were plain distinctions between sitting on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to utilise a stool. In the recent century, the director’s and manager’s chair has developed a symbol of superior standing, and in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on an elevated level.
In a furniture construction, the chair ranges from a number of various forms. There are chairs structured to suit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical days there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used 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 have chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has developed special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair kinds have perfected to conform to different human desires. Due to its particular relationship with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when used. Although it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is seen best and judged by a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter require the other. Thus the various limbs of the chair were named like the names of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original purpose of a chair is to support a human body, its worth is valued generally by how completely it fulfills this practical purpose. In the design of the chair, the carpenter is limited with particular static legislation and principal measurements. Inside these regulations, however, the chair creator has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over dates of several thousand years. There are societies that created individual chair forms, seen of the foremost task in the arenas of skill and aesthetics. Within these societies, special note should 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 objects of expert craft, are now a finding from tomb discoveries. The first of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have four legs shaped not unlike those of a particular animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this way a strong triangular form was crafted. There was from our knowledge no particular change in the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular populace. The main change was in the type of ornamentation, in the choice of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was crafted as an easily carried seat for army officers. As a camp stool this kind persevered til much later periods of time. But the stool also then existed in the use of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from evidence be observed, 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 were made in the form of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats are worked with wood. The easy build of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, is seen but somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this type is the folding stool, from ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is known not as any ancient fossil still extant but found in a large amount of pictorial evidence. The iconic kind is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area by Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those can be seen. These creative legs were likely to have been created out of bent wood and were likely to have been bore extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore extremely durable and were particularly drawn.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek chair; a number of models of seated Romans offer evidence of a thicker and which appear to be a kind of less intricately designed klismos. Both kinds, light or heavy, were popularised during the Classicist time. The klismos influence is evidenced in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in special kinds of notable originality in Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China isn’t able to be traced as far as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken folio of images and paintings was protected, displaying the inside and exteriors of Chinese homes and their furniture. Also preserved since the 16th century are a collection of chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that hold an astonishing likeness to representations of previous chairs.
As in Egypt, there existed two standard chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This chair can be found both with and without arms although never missing its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to give support to the back. In one kind, though, the stiles were lightly curved by the arms for the purpose of conform correctly to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its back). The three sections were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Though the style of a back splat exercised an influence on English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden items that would merely to a particular extent reinforce corner joints (as well as being loose in the bargain) signify a feature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops around the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or has rounded edges—references perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and might have had a plaited form. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a way of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs presumably were only for senior people, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have taken to China from the West. It does not differ so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is delicately fixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is more often than not possessing metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the overall effect of both of these furniture designs is stylized. The constructive and decoration parts are combined in a style that is at the same time naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the way that the individual parts do not seem to have been fixed together by use of 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 in the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Artworks display 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 the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same period, had 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 inside of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this style of chair can also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not certain that the style actually originated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in vast amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of those chairs lined up along a wall. The design asserts itself with its shapely proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that is, as brought out in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The model owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike principles despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of rather thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been taken away, and more expensive items can be further embellished with very delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in style than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles over 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 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 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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