Out of each of the furniture forms, the chair might be the most imperative. While the majority of other items (except the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair can be said here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to developed kinds including the bench or sofa, which should be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly labeled.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and/or an aesthetic item; it was historically a symbol of social standing. From the Medieval royal courts there were significant differences between possessing a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to use a stool. From the past century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has become an identifier of superior status, and even in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a raised level.
In a furniture form, the chair is utilised for a range of various makes. There are chairs manufactured to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). In the olden days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs 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 can have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has derived new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair forms has been evolved to fit to growing human needs. Due to its unique link with man, the chair lives to its full advantage only when in use. Although it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is best seen and fairly evaluated by a person utilising it, because chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the different limbs of the chair have been given labels corresponding to the limbs of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the clear work of the chair is to support our human body, its worth is tested generally from how fully it does fulfill this practical function. Within the design of the chair, the carpenter is restricted by the static regulations and principal measurements. Under these limitations, however, the chair builder has great freedom.
The history of the chair is a period of several thousand years. There existed societies that created significant chair forms, as seen of the topmost craft in the arenas of skill and design. Out of these civilisations, a 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of skilled craft, are now found from tomb discoveries. One of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair has four legs designed not unlike those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this way a solid triangular design was obtained. There was to our knowledge no marked difference in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary citizens. The general variation lied in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the choice of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was developed as an easily carried seat for soldiers. As a camp stool this chair existed for much later periods. But the stool also then was created for the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical task as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the construction of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats are created out of wood. The easy structure of the folding stool, composed of two frames that turn on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, can be seen somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this form is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not in any ancient item still around but in a large amount of pictorial material. The significant kind is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them would be seen. These creative legs were thought to have been executed of bent wood and were therefore put under huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very stable and were overtly denoted.
The Romans embued the Greek design; existing statues of seated Romans offer designs of a more heavyset and which appear to be a kind of less intricately built klismos. Both kinds, the light or the heavy, were brought back as part of the Classicist era. The klismos influence can be seen in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some forms of notable uniqueness in Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be charted as well as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full collection of images and artworks was kept, with images of the inside and outside of Chinese buildings and the kinds of furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are some chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an astonishing likeness to pictures of ancient chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there was two major chair designs in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair was seen both with and without arms but never without the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to give support to the back. In one style, it has been seen, the stiles are delicately curved over the arms to suit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its chairback). Together, the three limbs were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. While the innovation of a back splat later had an inspiration for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden members that would merely to a limited capability embolden corner joints (and then were loose into the bargain) signify a feature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which ends around the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or is given rounded edges—an acknowledgement maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and may have had a plaited texture. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs most likely were kept only for elderly people in the family, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is prettily joined to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the ultimate effect of both these furniture styles is stylized. The manufacture and decoration elements are combined in a style that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual members do not appear to have been held together by means of either glue or screws, but were mortised into one another and locked into position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Works of art show a style of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same period, held the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be displayed in engravings of the inside of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this kind of chair is also made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not certain that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in considerable amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself with its shapely 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 forms—that is, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes such popularity to a combination of leisure 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 small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike principles even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them have wood of relatively thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been removed, and finer items may be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and was popular 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 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 products 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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