Of all furniture forms, the chair might be of the most importance. While the majority of other objects (save for the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is used here in the common sense, from stool to throne to developed chairs such as the bench and sofa, which can be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously labeled.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not just a physical support or aesthetic artwork; it was historically semiotic of social hierarchy. In the past royal courts there were significant signifiers between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, and having to squat on a stool. From the last century, the director’s or manager’s chair has become a signifier of superior rank, and in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a high-set level.
As its furniture form, the chair can be employed for a variety of various makes. There are chairs created to attend to man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); from 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 can make chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has demanded new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair forms has been evolved to match to differing human desires. Because of its significant link with man, the chair lives to its full significance only when used. Though it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is seen best and fairly judged with a person utilising it, because chair and sitter suit the other. Thus the various limbs of a chair were named like the names of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary job of your chair is to support a human body, its worth is valued principally by how completely it measures up to this practical role. In the structure of a chair, the designer is bound by certain static regulations and principal measurements. Within these boundaries, however, the chair builder has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair is an era of several thousand years. There were peoples that had made significant chair shapes, as expressions of the premier work in the arenas of handling and aesthetics. In these such cultures, special 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of careful craft, are today found from tomb findings. One of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair had four legs structured as akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. In this way a durable triangular structure was made. There was in our knowledge no particular variation between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary non-royals. The general change existed in the kind of ornamentation, in the choice of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was manufactured as an easily stored seat for army. As a camp stool that type continued for much later points in time. But the stool also then was created as the role of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can already be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the shape of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats are created with wood. The simple structure of the folding stool, composed of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, came up somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of those is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not from any ancient specimen still in form but in a large amount of pictorial evidence. The iconic kind is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them were displayed. These unusual legs were probably executed from bent wood and were thus had to bear a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore extremely strong and were particularly drawn.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek chair; some models of seated Romans are chairs of a denser and are a somewhat more crudely designed klismos. Both designs, the light and the heavy, were revived within the Classicist epoch. The klismos design is used in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in special brands of marked uniqueness of Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China cannot be charted as far as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged serial of images and paintings had been kept, displaying the interior and outside of Chinese buildings and their furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are a number of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that display an intriguing resemblance to designs of past chairs.
Just like in Egypt, two chair forms dominated in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This chair was seen both with or without arms but always with a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to firm the back. In one image, it has been found, the stiles could be marginally curved over the arms to suit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of its chairback). Together, the three limbs were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of this back splat had a foundation for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only to a limited ability embolden corner joints (and then are loose as well) represent a signature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes about the rounded staves. All members are round in section or has rounded edges—referable perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and had on occasion a plaited bottom. These chairs demanded of the sitter to be stiff and upright; if too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs presumably were reserved only for older people in the family, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have been brought to China from the West. It is akin that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is delicately affixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is usually provided with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of these furniture items is stylized. The structure and decoration elements 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 parts do not look to have been affixed by use of either glue or screws, but had been mortised on one another and held in 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. Works of art show a kind of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture for traveling which, at the same period, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is displayed in engravings of the interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this design of chair is also made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not decided that the design actually began in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in large quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself with its elegant 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 form—that was, as progressed in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes such 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 little upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike principles despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of quite thick dimensions; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been removed, and more upmarket examples might be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engraving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more differentiated in design than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles over 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 popularised 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 versions 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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