Of all furniture items, the chair might be of most importance. While most other items (save the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair should be used here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to derivative types like the bench or sofa, which may be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently definitive.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support or an aesthetic artwork; it was historically an indicator of social placement. In the past royal courts there were social differences between being led to a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to make do with a stool. In the last century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen a signifier of superior dignity, and in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a raised level.
In a furniture purpose, the chair encompasses a wealth of variations. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From historical times there were chairs for births (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has derived special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair kinds has been adapted to suit to changing human uses. For its significant importance with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when used. Though it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there are items inside or not, a chair is really understood and regarded best with a person utilising it, for chair and sitter need the other. Thus the several parts of the chair were named like the names of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elemental job of the chair is to support our body, its credit is judged primarily by how suitably it measures up to this practical role. Within the structure of the chair, the chair maker is bound with some static rules and principal measurements. Inside these restrictions, however, the chair creator has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair extended over dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of peoples that held unique chair forms, as seen of the highest task in the areas of technique and art. In such peoples, individual mention must 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of skilled design, are today found from tomb discoveries. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have had four legs crafted akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this way a durable triangular design was made. There was to all appearances no noteworthy difference from the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common non-royals. The main difference existed in the type of ornamentation, in the particulars of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was manufactured to be an easily carried seat for soldiers. As a camp stool that type stayed around during much later points. But the stool then existed in the task of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today’s 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 made in the structure of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats were worked from wood. The easy construction of the folding stool, composed of two frames that spin on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric held between them, appeared but somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of those is the folding stool, made of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is found not from any ancient fossil still around but as seen in a variety of pictorial material. The best recognised is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them are shown. These strange legs were presumed to have been crafted from bent wood and were likely to have been put under a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super solid and were visibly denoted.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek design; evidence of casts of seated Romans offer examples of a more heavyset and which appear to be a slightly crudely crafted klismos. Both features, the light and heavy, were brought back in the Classicist era. The klismos influence is known in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in special types of marked individuality within Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China isn’t able to be charted as far as the progression of the chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of sketches and paintings had been preserved, displaying the interior and outside of Chinese homes and their furniture. Another preservation from the 16th century are a trove of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an amazing similarity to styles of previous chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there existed two iconic chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair was designed both with or without arms although never missing the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to firm the back. In one kind, it must be said, the stiles had been slightly curved by the arms to suit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the back). Each of the three limbs were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the design of a back splat exercised an influence on English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden items that merely to a restricted ability support corner joints (and furthermore were loose as well) are an element exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends upon the rounded staves. Members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have had a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to be stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a way of toppling. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs likely were allowed only for older individuals in the family, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have travelled to China from the West. It does not vary very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is elegantly fixed to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is usually designed with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the overall effect of these two furniture designs is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic elements are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the fact that the individual members do not look to have been fixed together by either glue or screws, but have been mortised onto one another and locked into its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Paintings show a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board from the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture in traveling which, in the same time, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be seen in engravings of the inside of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this style of chair might also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not certain that the innovation actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in impressive numbers, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of these chairs lined up against a wall. The design asserts itself with its elegant proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that was, as created in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The model owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat conforms 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 made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike principles in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof have wood of fairly thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been taken away, and more expensive chairs can be further embellished with very delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles throughout 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
During 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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