Out of each of the furniture items, the chair may be the imperative one. While most other items (apart from the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair can be regarded here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to complex forms including the bench and sofa, which should be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly defined.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or an aesthetic creation; it historically is semiotic of social ranking. From the past royal courts there were important signifiers between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to cope with a stool. From the 20th century, the director’s and manager’s chair has been regarded as iconic of superior standing, and even in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a raised level.
In a furniture purpose, the chair can be employed for a wealth of various models. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since historical days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has developed particular chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair kinds has been changed to suit to growing human needs. For its significant importance with man, the chair comes to its full significance only when utilised. Though it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is really seen best and fairly regarded by a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter require each other. Thus the several limbs of the chair have been labeled according to the names of our human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious function of your chair is to support your body, its credit is valued principally on how fully it does fulfill this practical role. Within the design of the chair, the builder is bound under particular static regulations and principal measurements. Under these limitations, however, the chair designer has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair covers an era of several thousand years. There were cultures that had made iconic chair forms, expressive of the premier craft in the arenas of craft and aesthetics. Within these peoples, individual note needs to 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 skilled design, are seen from tomb discoveries. One of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have four legs crafted like those of some animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular design was created. There was apparently no significant difference from the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common populace. The real difference lies in the decorative ornamentation, in the particulars of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was crafted as an easily portable seat for officers. As a camp stool the type continued during much later periods of time. But the stool then also was created as the task of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the shape of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats are formed from wood. The simple build of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric set between them, reappeared but somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of this type is the folding stool, made from ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not as any ancient specimen still around but in a large amount of pictorial objects. The most recognisable is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs can be displayed. These unusual legs were thought to have been crafted in bent wood and were probably bore a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super stable and were particularly drawn.
The Romans adopted the Greek designs; designs of models of seated Romans display examples of a more heavyset and are a somewhat less intricately constructed klismos. Both features, the light or heavy, were brought back during the Classicist era. The klismos chair can be evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in special brands of considerable iconicism within Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be traced as long as that of Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full collection of images and paintings had been protected, displaying the insides and exterior of Chinese households and the furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are some chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an intriguing resemblance to pictures of previous chairs.
Same as in Egypt, two chair designs persisted in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This chair can be seen both with or without arms but always with a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one kind, it has been seen, the stiles could be lightly curved over the arms to suit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of its chairback). The three sections had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the idea of the Chinese back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that only to a particular extent reinforce corner joints (as well as being loose in the bargain) represent a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes over the rounded staves. All members are round in section or is given rounded edges—acknowledging perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and occasionally had a plaited texture. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; if too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to collapse. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs most likely were kept only for senior family members, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have come to China from the West. It is akin so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is prettily joined to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is often provided with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the ultimate effect of these furniture styles is stylized. The manufacture and decoration parts are combined in a way that is at the same time naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual parts do not appear to have been fixed together with either glue or screws, but are mortised on one another and fixed in place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Works of art show a design 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 small pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, at the same period, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is evidenced in engravings of the interior of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this design of chair may also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not held that the design actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast numbers, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up against a wall. The style asserts itself by its elegant proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of styles—that is to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and charm. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are constructed from wood of quite thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and more upmarket chairs can be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carvings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and won 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 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 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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