Out of each of the furniture pieces, the chair may be the imperative one. While many other forms (except the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair must be used here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to developed kinds including a bench and sofa, which should be viewed 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 exciting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and an aesthetic item; it historically is a signifier of social ranking. In the Medieval royal courts there were important differences between possessing a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to utilise a stool. During the last century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been regarded as iconic of superior standing, like in democratic governments the speaker sits on a raised level.
As its furniture form, the chair holds a variety of variations. There are chairs designed to suit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has developed new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair types has changed to match to differing human uses. For its particular relationship with man, the chair lives to its full meaning only when used. Though it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there are things inside or not, a chair is really understood and fairly evaluated with a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter suit each other. Thus the different areas of the chair were labeled likened to the names of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary function of a chair is to support the body, its worth is judged basically on how fully it does fulfill this practical use. In the manufacture of a chair, the builder is restricted by some static law and principal measurements. Through these rules, however, the chair designer has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair covers an era of several thousand years. There is evidence of civilizations that have created unique chair types, expressions of the principal craft in the spheres of technique and creativity. Within those peoples, special 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the objects of skilled scheme, are today seen from discoveries made in tombs. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed like those of an animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this design a durable triangular design was obtained. There was from our knowledge no noteworthy variation in the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common peasantry. The simple variation exists in the brand of ornamentation, in the choice of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was manufactured to be an easily carried seat for army. As a camp stool this chair stayed around during much later days. But the stool also then was created as the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original job as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be noted, 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 were in the shape of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats are made of wood. The simplistic structure of the folding stool, made of two frames that turn on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, reappears at some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this kind is the folding stool, made of ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not from any ancient item still existing but as seen in a wealth of pictorial material. The best known is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location near Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them are shown. These creative legs were most likely to be created in bent wood and were as such had to bear huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore super durable and were plainly denoted.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; a number of casts of seated Romans are evidence of a denser and which appear to be a somewhat more crudely built klismos. Both designs, light or heavy, were revived during the Classicist era. The klismos design can be evidenced in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in special forms of marked uniqueness of Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China isn’t able to be charted as far as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken serial of images and paintings had been protected, showing the interiors and outer parts of Chinese buildings and their furniture. Also preserved from the 16th century are a trove of chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that show an intriguing resemblance to pictures of older chairs.
Same as in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This chair has been designed both with or without arms though always having the square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to hold up the back. In one image, though, the stiles are slightly curved above the arms for the purpose of fit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its back). Together, the three limbs were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Although the innovation of a back splat later had an influence on English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden members that would merely to a restricted capability stabilise corner joints (and are loose as well) indicate a design signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which finishes over the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or have rounded edges—acknowledging perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and occasionally had a plaited seat. These chairs needed the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs likely were reserved for the senior members of the family, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It is akin much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is delicately fixed to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is often seen with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resultant effect of both of these furniture items is stylized. The construction and decoration parts are combined in a way that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the fact that the individual items do not seem to have been fixed together by means of either glue or screws, but were mortised with one another and fixed in its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its name on the chair. Artworks project 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 between, stitched to show up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same era, possessed the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the interiors of affluent 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 may also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not certain that the form actually was born in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in impressive amounts, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of these chairs lined up against a wall. The style asserts itself with its harmonious proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that is to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike methodology despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of rather thick dimensions; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been taken away, and more expensive examples can be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and became the preference in large 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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