Out of each of the furniture items, the chair could be of the most importance. While the majority of other items (apart from the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair should be looked upon here in the common sense, from stool to throne to developed kinds such as the 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 overtly labeled.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and/or an aesthetic artwork; it is historically a symbol of social place. In the past royal courts there were clear distinctions between sitting on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to make do with a stool. Since the recent century, a director’s or manager’s chair has been seen as a symbol of superior dignity, and in democratic governments the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
In its furniture creation, the chair ranges from a number of various forms. There are chairs designed to suit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the olden days there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); during 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 make chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has demanded new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair shapes has perfected to suit to growing human desires. For its close link with man, the chair appears to its full significance only when in employ. Although it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there are items inside or not, a chair is understood and regarded best with a person using it, for chair and sitter require the other. Thus the several areas of a chair have been given names according to the limbs of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first job of a chair is to support the body, its value is valued generally by how completely it does fulfill this practical use. In the build of a chair, the designer is restricted by the static rules and principal measurements. Through these boundaries, however, the chair builder has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair was an epoch of several thousand years. There existed cultures that had iconic chair forms, expressive of the topmost work in the industries of skill and art. Among these cultures, individual mention 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 items of careful design, are today known from discoveries made in tombs. The first one of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have four legs crafted as akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this design a solid triangular form was created. There was in our knowledge no marked change in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular peasantry. The general change was in the brand of ornamentation, in the selection of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was created to be an easily stored seat for officers. As a camp stool that form persevered during much later times. But the stool then also was created as the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical history as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can from evidence be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the shape of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats were worked from wood. The easy structure of the folding stool, made of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, reappeared but some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of those is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not as any ancient item still in form but seen in a large amount of pictorial material. The better known is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs could be displayed. These strange legs were considered to have been created of bent wood and were therefore put under extreme pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore super solid and were overtly denoted.
The Romans embued the Greek style; quite a few statues of seated Romans show evidence of a more heavyset and which appear to be a kind of crudely crafted klismos. Both types, the light and heavy, were revived during the Classicist period. The klismos style can be seen in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in special types of considerable iconicism in Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be traced as long as that of Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed series of sketches and works of art had been protected, detailing the interiors and exteriors of Chinese households and the designs of furniture. Kept also of the 16th century are a collection of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an interesting resemblance to styles of previous chairs.
As in Egypt, there were two iconic chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That chair was seen both with and without arms however never without a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one style, however, the stiles were slightly curved above the arms for the purpose of fit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a chairback). Together, the three parts were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. While the design of the Chinese back splat had an inspiration for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only to a restricted limit stabilise corner joints (as well as being loose to top that off) signify a feature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which finishes upon the rounded staves. All members are round in section or has rounded edges—referable maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and may have had a plaited texture. These chairs required of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs presumably were allowed only for older members of the family, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have taken to China from the West. It does not differ much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is delicately held to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is more often than not designed with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resulting effect of both of these furniture items is stylized. The construction and decorative parts are combined in a manner that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual members do not appear to have been fixed together by use of either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and fixed in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Paintings display 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 between, stitched to bring out a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same era, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is found in engravings of the interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this type of chair is also found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not believed that the innovation actually was instigated 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 produced in impressive numbers, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself with its shapely proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that was, to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat adheres to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of rather thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and more expensive examples might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used instead of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more variable in design than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and found favour 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 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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