From each of the furniture objects, the chair may be of the most importance. While the majority of other pieces (apart from the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is used here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to complex forms for example the bench or sofa, which can be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously definitive.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not merely a physical support or aesthetic item; it was historically an indicator of social placement. From the Medieval royal courts there were social signifiers between having a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to sit on a stool. During the recent century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has become a symbol of superior rank, and even in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
As its furniture construction, the chair is employed for a range of different makes. There are chairs structured 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 past days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has derived particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair kinds has evolved to suit to evolving human uses. For its close relationship with man, the chair comes to its full importance only when used. Although it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there are items inside or not, a chair is best seen and fairly tested with a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter need one another. Thus the individual parts of a chair have been given labels as the elements of a human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the fundamental purpose of the chair is to support the body, its credit is valued basically from how suitably it measures up to this practical role. Within the manufacture of the chair, the chair maker is bound for certain static regulations and principal measurements. Within these limits, however, the chair creator has large freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over a period of several thousand years. There were peoples that had made iconic chair forms, seen of the topmost craft in the spheres of technique and aesthetics. Within such cultures, individual note 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of expert scheme, were a finding from tomb findings. One of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have had four legs designed not unlike those of some animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this way a stable triangular structure was made. There was from our knowledge no notable variation between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common peasantry. The simple variation existed in the complex ornamentation, in the particulars of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was crafted for an easily packed seat for officers. As a camp stool this stool continued til much later days. But the stool then also existed in the use of a ceremonial seat, its technical task as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from today be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the construction of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats were made from wood. The plain construction of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, then came again but some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of those is the folding stool, made of ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not as any ancient item still existing but as seen from a large amount of pictorial evidence. The best recognised is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location near 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 could be visible. These odd legs were presumed to have been created of bent wood and were as such had huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore extremely strong and were plainly indicated.
The Romans emulated the Greek designs; quite a few casts of seated Romans are designs of a heavier and apparently rather less delicately crafted klismos. Both styles, the light and the heavy, were revived in the Classicist time. The klismos design is evidenced in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in special brands of considerable uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China can not be charted as far as in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of sketches and paintings has been kept, showing the interior and outer parts of Chinese homes and the furniture. Kept also since the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that display an intriguing familiarity to designs of previous chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there were two particular chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair was seen both with or without arms however never missing a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to firm the back. In one image, it must be said, the stiles had been delicately curved over the arms to conform to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a chairback). Together, all three sections had been mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. While the style of this back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden items that could merely to a particular limit stabilise corner joints (and then were loose in the result) represent a feature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which closes about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or have rounded edges—references perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and had on occasion a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; if too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs presumably were kept only for the senior persons in the family, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have travelled to China from the West. It is not dissimilar very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is more often than not provided with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the ultimate effect of both of these furniture items is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic aspects are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual items do not seem to have been constructed by use of either glue or screws, but are mortised with one another and held in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Artworks project a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to show 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 readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same period, possessed the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is evidenced in engravings of interiors of rich 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 might also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not determined that the style actually started in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in impressive numbers, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself with its harmonious 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 of styles—that is, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The design owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually 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 strongly constructed on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof employ wood of rather thick measurements; but all the members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and finer designs might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for all 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 open in style than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which came from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and found 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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