From all the furniture forms, the chair may be paramount. While most other objects (except the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is meant to be used here in the common sense, from stool to throne to developed types such as the 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 evidently distinguished.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and an aesthetic object; it is also an indicator of social rank. At the historical royal courts there were plain distinctions between being led to a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to squat on a stool. Since the 20th century, a director’s or manager’s chair has become an identifier of superior rank, and in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a higher platform.
As its furniture creation, the chair holds a range of different purposes. There are chairs created to attend to man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past times there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs 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 have chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has demanded new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair types have been changed to conform to different human needs. From its unique link with man, the chair lives to its full purpose only when being utilised. Though it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there might be things inside or not, a chair is understood best and regarded best with a person utilising it, for chair and sitter need one another. Thus the various areas of a chair have been given names as the names of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original function of a chair is to support a body, its credit is tested primarily from how fully it does fulfill this practical job. In the design of a chair, the builder is limited within certain static regulation and principal measurements. Within these restrictions, however, the chair designer has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair lasted dates of several thousand years. There existed peoples that made individual chair types, as expressions of the foremost craft in the spheres of technique and art. Among these societies, individual 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of careful scheme, are now seen from tombs. One of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have had four legs crafted not unlike those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. From this design a stable triangular design was crafted. There was from our knowledge no particular variation in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common citizens. The simple change was in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the evidence of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was created as an easily packed seat for officers. As a camp stool the kind persisted until much later points in time. But the stool also then was created for the character of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical history as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from evidence be found, 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 construction of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats were created of wood. The easy manufacture of the folding stool, being of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric held between them, is seen at some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of these is the folding stool, from ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is known not in any ancient item still extant but as found in a wealth of pictorial objects. The most recognisable is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which are seen. These odd legs were understood to be crafted of bent wood and were in that case bore a large amount of pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore extremely stable and were visibly drawn.
The Romans emulated the Greek style; existing models of seated Romans offer designs of a more heavyset and apparently kind of less intricately designed klismos. Both designs, the light and the heavy, were seen again during the Classicist period. The klismos chair is seen in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some special brands of considerable iconicism within Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China cannot be tracked as long as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken folio of drawings and artworks was preserved, with images of the inside and outer parts of Chinese buildings and their furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are a number of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that show an intriguing familiarity to images of previous chairs.
As were the designs in Egypt, two fundamental chair forms existed in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair can be seen both with and without arms but always having a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one form, it must be said, the stiles had been marginally curved above the arms to conform correctly to the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a chairback). The three parts are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Although the innovation of a back splat later had an introduction for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that would merely to a restricted capability support corner joints (and then are loose to top it off) signify a design exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which finishes about the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or has rounded edges—acknowledging as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and might have had a plaited form. These chairs demanded of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a habit of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs probably were allowed only for elderly people in the family, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have come to China from the West. It is not dissimilar so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is elegantly held to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resultant effect of both furniture styles is stylized. The construction and decoration issues are combined in a manner that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual parts do not look to have been constructed with either glue or screws, but were mortised with one another and fixed in its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Paintings display a style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same era, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is evidenced in engravings of interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this kind of chair is also made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not certain that the form actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in large numbers, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself by its harmonious proportions and expensive 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 developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The style owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike practices despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are constructed from wood of rather thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been sanded away, and more expensive designs may be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for all the 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 varied in style than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and was popular 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
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 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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