Out of each of the furniture pieces, the chair could be the paramount one. While the majority of other items (save for the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair should be regarded here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to complex kinds including a bench and sofa, which may be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently labeled.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support and/or aesthetic piece of art; it is historically a symbol of social ranking. At the historical royal courts there were clear signifiers between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or having to utilise a stool. During the 20th century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been regarded as an identifier of superior standing, and even in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a raised platform.
As a furniture construction, the chair can be employed for a variety of various models. There are chairs created to match man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the olden days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, 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.
Modern living has designated unique chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair kinds have been evolved to suit to different human needs. From its close association with man, the chair exists to its full importance only when in use. While it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there are items inside or not, a chair is really seen best and fairly regarded with a person using it, because chair and sitter require one another. Thus the various limbs of a chair are named like the elements of a human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple role of a chair is to support our body, its value is valued principally by how suitably it fulfills this practical job. In the structure of a chair, the builder is restricted by some static legislation and principal measurements. Through these restrictions, however, the chair creator has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair lasted over a period of several thousand years. There are cultures that have created significant chair forms, seen of the topmost object in the areas of craft and aesthetics. Out of these such civilisations, a 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 items of masterful make, were a finding from tomb findings. First of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed as akin to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this design a durable triangular structure was created. There appeared to be no significant change from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary peasantry. The main variation lies in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the choice of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was made for an easily stored seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool that form persisted during much later points in time. But the stool also then played the character of a ceremonial seat, its original job as a folding stool being forgotten. This can already be observed, 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 constructed in the structure of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats are worked out of wood. The simple manufacture of the folding stool, made of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric set between them, appeared at some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of those is the folding stool, made of ashwood, which can now be found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is known not in any ancient object still existing but found in a wealth of pictorial material. The best known is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place by Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them could be shown. These odd legs were likely to be executed of bent wood and were therefore had to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore super solid and were overtly denoted.
The Romans adopted the Greek designs; designs of statues of seated Romans display evidence of a denser and which appear to be a kind of crudely constructed klismos. Both types, the light and heavy, were revived as part of the Classicist era. The klismos style can be found in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some special brands of considerable iconicism in Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as far as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged collection of sketches and works of art had been preserved, with images of the interiors and outside of Chinese homes and their furniture. Another preservation of the 16th century are a collection of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an intriguing similarity to images of ancient chairs.
As were the designs in Egypt, there existed two iconic chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This chair can be constructed both with and without arms however always having a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one style, it has been found, the stiles had been marginally curved over the arms for the purpose of conform correctly to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the chairback). All three areas were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of the Chinese back splat later had a foundation for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden items that would only to a limited limit stabilise corner joints (and are loose additionally) indicate a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes over the rounded staves. Members are round in section or has rounded edges—references perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and occasionally had a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs likely were kept only for elderly persons, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have been brought to China from the West. It is not dissimilar that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is generally designed with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resulting effect of both furniture forms is stylized. The manufacture and decoration aspects are combined in a manner that is at the same time naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the fact that the individual items do not appear to have been affixed by either glue or screws, but were mortised into one another and locked into its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Artworks display 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, stitched to produce a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same period, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be seen in engravings of the interior of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this style of chair can also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not held that the form actually was born in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in considerable amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself with its shapely proportions and fine 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 was, to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The design owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof use wood of fairly thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and more upmarket designs might be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carvings. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and won favour 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 popular and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
During 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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