The History of the Chair
Of all furniture pieces, the chair might be paramount. While most of the other pieces (save the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair can be looked upon here in the common sense, from stool to throne to developed types such as a bench or sofa, which should be regarded 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 exciting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not just a physical support and aesthetic artwork; it is historically a signifier of social ranking. From the old royal courts there were clear signifiers between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to make do with a stool. From the last century, the director’s or manager’s chair has risen a symbol of superior status, and in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a higher level.
In a furniture construction, the chair ranges from a number of different models. There are chairs created to suit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past days there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We have chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has demanded special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair kinds have changed to match to growing human desires. Because of its close relationship with man, the chair appears to its full advantage only when in use. Although it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there are things inside or not, a chair is seen best and judged best by a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the several areas of the chair are named like the parts of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the fundamental role of the chair is to support our human body, its credit is valued primarily for how suitably it does measure up to this practical job. Within the manufacture of the chair, the chair maker is bound for some static legislation and principal measurements. Under these rules, however, the chair builder has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair covered dates of several thousand years. There were societies that made individual chair types, expressions of the topmost object in the industries of craft and creativity. From these civilisations, special mention 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of careful craft, are now a finding from tomb discoveries. One of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have four legs crafted similar to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this way a durable triangular design was created. There seemed to be no noteworthy variation in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common populace. The only change lies in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the evidence of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was designed as an easily portable seat for army officers. As a camp stool this kind persevered during much later days. But the stool then also was designed as the use of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical task as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the form of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats are formed with wood. The easy construction of the folding stool, made of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, appeared somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this kind is the folding stool, of ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not in any ancient specimen still existing but as in a trove of pictorial evidence. The significant kind is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place near 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 can be displayed. These strange legs were thought to have been executed out of bent wood and were thus subjected to great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore extremely strong and were clearly indicated.
The Romans adopted the Greek designs; quite a few casts of seated Romans offer evidence of a denser and in appearance rather less delicately designed klismos. Both kinds, the light or heavy, were popularised during the Classicist time. The klismos style is seen in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of profound individuality within Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China isn’t able to be tracked as far as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of sketches and works of art has been kept, displaying the inside and outer parts of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Also preserved since the 16th century are a trove of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an astonishing likeness to pictures of ancient chairs.
As in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This chair was designed both with or without arms although always with the square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to firm the back. In one kind, it must be said, the stiles were lightly curved above the arms to sit right with the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the chairback). Together, the three areas are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the idea of the back splat had a foundation for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only to a particular extent reinforce corner joints (and are loose additionally) are a feature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends around the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or has rounded edges—references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and had on occasion a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; when too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs presumably were reserved for senior persons, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have come to China from the West. It does not vary that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is elegantly joined to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resulting effect of these furniture items is stylized. The construction and decoration aspects are combined in a way that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual parts do not seem to have been joined together by use of either glue or screws, but had been mortised on one another and fixed in position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Paintings show a style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same period, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is displayed in engravings of interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this type of chair may also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not determined that the innovation actually started in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in large numbers, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its shapely 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 form—that was, to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The design owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike practices in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are made from wood of quite thick density; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been taken away, and more expensive examples may be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and was popularised 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
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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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