Out of each of the furniture pieces, the chair could be of most importance. While the majority of other pieces (save for the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is regarded here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to complex kinds such as the bench or sofa, which should be viewed 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 art. The chair is not simply a physical support and/or an aesthetic item; it historically is semiotic of social standing. From the Medieval royal courts there were plain distinctions between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to squat on a stool. Since the past century, a director’s or manager’s chair has risen an identifier of superior standing, as well as in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated level.
As a furniture creation, the chair can be employed for a number of various makes. There are chairs structured to match man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since the past there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has demanded particular chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair shapes have been changed to fit to changing human desires. From its close relationship with man, the chair comes to its full importance only when used. While it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there are items inside or not, a chair is really understood and clearly evaluated by a person utilising it, for chair and sitter need each other. Thus the several areas of a chair were labeled corresponding to the areas of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original role of the chair is to support your body, its worth is valued basically by how well it fulfills this practical use. Within the construction of a chair, the designer is bound in particular static regulations and principal measurements. Within these restrictions, however, the chair designer has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair is a period of several thousand years. There were civilizations that held unique chair forms, expressions of the highest endeavour in the spheres of skill and art. In these such civilisations, special mention needs to 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 construct of expert design, are today found from findings made in tombs. First of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have had four legs crafted akin to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this design a durable triangular structure was obtained. There seems to be no particular variation in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical non-royals. The general difference was in the brand of ornamentation, in the choice of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was crafted as an easily packed seat for army. As a camp stool this stool continued until much later days. But the stool then also was made as the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical 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 work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the construction of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats are formed from wood. The easy build of the folding stool, made of two frames that turn on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, came again somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this type is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient fossil still extant but as seen in a trove of pictorial objects. The better known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which were visible. These creative legs were considered to be created out of bent wood and were in that case had to bear huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore very stable and were overtly pointed out.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek design; designs of statues of seated Romans show evidence of a heavier and which appear to be a kind of less delicately built klismos. Both types, the light and the heavy, were popularised in the Classicist period. The klismos design is used in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some special forms of profound individuality within Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be traced as well as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed collection of images and artworks was preserved, with images of the inside and exteriors of Chinese buildings and the kinds of furniture. Another preservation since the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that show an astonishing similarity to pictures of older chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair is found both with and without arms but always having its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to hold up the back. In one image, it must be said, the stiles are lightly curved over the arms so as to sit correctly with the form of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of the chairback). The three parts were mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Though the innovation of a back splat had an introduction for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that only just to a limited extent embolden corner joints (and then are loose into the bargain) represent a design signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which finishes about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or has rounded edges—a left over maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have a plaited form. These chairs demanded of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs presumably were reserved for the senior persons, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It is akin so 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 by use of a curved member, which is more often than not provided with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the ultimate effect of these furniture items is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic parts are combined in a manner that is all at once naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual members do not seem to have been adjoined by means of either glue or screws, but had been mortised on one another and held in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Paintings project a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related 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, during the same era, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be displayed in engravings of the interior of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this design of chair might also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not held that the innovation actually was born in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in large amounts, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of such chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and delicate 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—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. 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 are made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are constructed from wood of rather thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been removed, and finer items may be further embellished with special delicate and decorative engraving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles through 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 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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