Out of all furniture objects, the chair might be of the most importance. While many other objects (save for the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair must be used here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to derivative items including a bench or sofa, which should be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support or an aesthetic artwork; it is also a signifier of social rank. From the historical royal courts there were important differences between being seated on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to use a stool. From the last century, a director’s and manager’s chair has developed a symbol of superior position, as well as in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
As a furniture form, the chair ranges from a variety of different makes. There are chairs manufactured to suit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In the olden days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); during 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, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has derived special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All these chair types has been changed to conform to different human requirements. Because of its significant connection with man, the chair appears to its full purpose only when being utilised. Though it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is understood best and regarded best with a person utilising it, for chair and sitter require each other. Thus the different limbs of the chair have been named according to the names of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary work of the chair is to support a body, its value is tested basically on how well it measures up to this practical role. In the design of the chair, the designer is restricted in particular static legislation and principal measurements. In these boundaries, however, the chair creator has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair lasted over a period of several thousand years. There existed cultures that created significant chair shapes, expressions of the highest endeavour in the areas of skill and art. In those cultures, individual 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the objects of expert scheme, are today a finding from tomb findings. The first of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have four legs structured not unlike those of some animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this design a durable triangular design was created. There seemed to be no significant variation in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common non-royals. The simple difference was in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the choice of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was crafted for an easily packed seat for army. As a camp stool the stool stayed until much later points. But the stool also played the character of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool being forgotten. This can already be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the form of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats were made out of wood. The plain build of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, appeared at some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this type is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not with any ancient fossil still existing but from a trove of pictorial material. The better recognised is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs are displayed. These curving legs were presumed to have been executed in bent wood and were as such bore huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore very strong and were particularly denoted.
The Romans embued the Greek designs; existing statues of seated Romans are examples of a heavier and which appear to be a kind of less delicately constructed klismos. Both types, light or heavy, were revived during the Classicist period. The klismos influence is evidenced in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some special forms of profound individuality within Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China cannot be followed as long as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged series of sketches and artworks has been preserved, showing the interiors and outside of Chinese households and their furniture. Also kept of the 16th century are some chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an amazing likeness to representations of ancient chairs.
Same as in Egypt, there were two iconic chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That chair was found both with and without arms but never without its square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to hold up the back. In one type, it has been found, the stiles are slightly curved by the arms to sit correctly with the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its back). Together, all three areas are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the innovation of the Chinese back splat later had an influence on English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that would only to a particular limit reinforce corner joints (and were loose into the bargain) signify a design signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops upon the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or has rounded edges—an acknowledgement as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and may have had a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs most likely were allowed only for older members of the family, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have taken to China from the West. It is akin so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is delicately held to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is often designed with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resulting effect of these two furniture forms is stylized. The structure and decoration elements are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the manner that the individual parts do not appear to have been adjoined by means of either glue or screws, but have been mortised into one another and fixed in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Works of art project a type of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of 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 in the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same period, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is displayed in engravings of the inside of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this kind of chair is also seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not held that the form actually originated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in considerable quantities, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself with its elegant proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged 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—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat suits 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 made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike practices in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are constructed from wood of quite thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and more expensive chairs can be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carvings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used in place of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more open in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and became the favourite 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 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 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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