Out of all furniture pieces, the chair might be primary. While many other pieces (save for the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair must be viewed here in the general sense, from stool to throne to further pieces like the bench or sofa, which can 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 intriguing as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or aesthetic craft; it is also symbolic of social place. At the old royal courts there were significant differences between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to sit on a stool. From the past century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been iconic of superior rank, like in democratic governments the speaker sits on a higher platform.
As its furniture construction, the chair can be used for a number of various forms. There are chairs designed to match man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the past there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); in 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 have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has derived unique chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair types have been changed to match to differing human needs. Due to its close relationship with man, the chair lives to its full importance only when utilised. Whereas it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there are items inside or not, a chair is understood best and fairly tested by a person utilising it, because chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the individual elements of a chair were named like the parts of the human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first role of a chair is to support the body, its credit is tested principally from how suitably it does fulfill this practical function. In the build of a chair, the maker is bound in certain static regulations and principal measurements. Inside these limits, however, the chair creator has large freedom.
The history of the chair extended over a period of several thousand years. There are civilizations that created significant chair shapes, expressions of the principal endeavour in the areas of craft and design. In those civilisations, a mention can 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 construct of careful scheme, are today found from tomb discoveries. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed not unlike those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this way a stable triangular design was crafted. There was in our understanding no marked differentiation between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical peasantry. The only difference was in the kind of ornamentation, in the particulars of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was designed for an easily portable seat for army. As a camp stool the form continued until much later periods of time. But the stool also then was created as the role of a ceremonial seat, its technical role as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can already be observed, 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 construction of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats were worked with wood. The easy make of the folding stool, made of two frames that spin on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, also appeared somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of these is the folding stool, made of ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not in any ancient fossil still in form but as seen from a trove of pictorial objects. The significant kind is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs were visible. These creative legs were understood to have been created out of bent wood and were therefore subjected to great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore extremely strong and were overtly drawn.
The Romans adopted the Greek style; designs of models of seated Romans offer designs of a heavier and in appearance slightly crudely built klismos. Both styles, light or heavy, were revived within the Classicist era. The klismos design is known in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of profound uniqueness of Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China is not able to be followed as long as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full folio of sketches and works of art had been kept, displaying the interiors and outer parts of Chinese homes and the furniture. Kept also of the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an interesting resemblance to images of older chairs.
As in Egypt, there were two iconic chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair was designed both with and without arms however always with the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to support the back. In one kind, it has been found, the stiles could be lightly curved by the arms to sit correctly with the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the chairback). Together, the three areas were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Although the style of the back splat later had an introduction for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden items that would merely to a limited ability embolden corner joints (and furthermore were loose additionally) are a signature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends upon the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or have rounded edges—references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have a plaited texture. These chairs required the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for if too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs probably were kept only for senior individuals in the family, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have come to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is elegantly held to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is usually seen with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resulting effect of both these furniture designs is stylized. The construction and decorative aspects are combined in a style that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the fact that the individual items do not look to have been held together by either glue or screws, but have been mortised on one another and held in place 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. Paintings display a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same time, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be displayed in engravings of the inside of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this type of chair is also seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not held that the style actually was born in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in vast numbers, 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 design asserts itself by 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 to say, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are found 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 them employ wood of quite thick dimensions; but each member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been sanded away, and finer chairs would be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carvings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and became the preference 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 reknowned 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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