From all the furniture needs, the chair may be the most important. While the majority of other pieces (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair must be regarded here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to derivative types including the bench and sofa, which might be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly definitive.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as a creative art. The chair is not just a physical support or an aesthetic piece of art; it was also a symbol of social place. Within the old royal courts there were important connotations between sitting on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to use a stool. From the past century, a director’s or manager’s chair has been seen as an indicator of superior dignity, like in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
As its furniture creation, the chair is employed for a wealth of various forms. There are chairs created to suit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has derived unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair shapes has been adapted to suit to differing human uses. Due to its close connection with man, the chair exists to its full importance only when being utilised. Though it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is understood best and regarded best with a person using it, because chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the different limbs of the chair are given names likened to the elements of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious job of a chair is to support a human body, its value is evaluated primarily by how completely it does measure up to this practical use. Within the creation of a chair, the carpenter is restricted in some static regulations and principal measurements. Inside these regulations, however, the chair designer has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over an epoch of several thousand years. There are societies that made iconic chair shapes, seen of the topmost craft in the spheres of craft and design. In these peoples, special note can 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 objects of careful make, are known from tombs. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have four legs structured as akin to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. From this design a strong triangular structure was obtained. There was in our understanding no noteworthy difference from the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common citizens. The general change was in the level of ornamentation, in the particulars of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was designed for an easily carried seat for soldiers. As a camp stool this form continued until much later times. But the stool then was designed for the use of a ceremonial seat, its original job as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can from today be found, 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 are constructed in the construction of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats are created of wood. The simple build of the folding stool, being of two frames that spin on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, can be seen somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of those is the folding stool, made of ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not as any ancient item still existing but found in a trove of pictorial items. The archetype is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location by Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs are shown. These strange legs were thought to have been manufactured with bent wood and were thus needed to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore very durable and were clearly denoted.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek design; some models of seated Romans are chairs of a thicker and apparently slightly less intricately designed klismos. Both kinds, light or heavy, were brought back in the Classicist epoch. The klismos chair is seen in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular kinds of considerable uniqueness within Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China isn’t able to be tracked as well as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken folio of images and paintings had been preserved, displaying the interiors and outer parts of Chinese houses and their furniture. Kept also of the 16th century are some chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that display an intriguing familiarity to styles of past chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, two chair forms dominated in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair can be found both with or without arms though always having a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to give support to the back. In one design, however, the stiles were delicately curved over the arms so as to fit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of its chairback). Each of the three areas were mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the style of the back splat had an influence on English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that would only to a particular ability support corner joints (and furthermore were loose into the bargain) indicate a signature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which finishes over the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or has rounded edges—referable perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and occasionally had a plaited form. These chairs demanded of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a way of toppling. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs presumably were reserved for older family members, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have come to China from the West. It is not dissimilar much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is elegantly affixed to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the overall effect of these furniture forms is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic parts are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual items do not appear to have been joined together by use of either glue or screws, but had been mortised into one another and held in position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Artworks project a style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to bring up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same era, held the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the inside 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 style of chair may also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not held that the form actually was born in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in large quantities, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself with its elegant proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that is, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The model owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of quite thick measurements; but all the members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and finer examples may be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. 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; cane is sometimes used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles through 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 well-known and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
Within 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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