Out of each of the furniture pieces, the chair may be the most imperative. While most other pieces (save for the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair can be said here in the common sense, from stool to throne to further chairs such as a bench and sofa, which might be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently definitive.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and/or an aesthetic craft; it historically is a symbol of social rank. Within the Medieval royal courts there were significant differences between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to squat on a stool. From the 20th century, the director’s and manager’s chair has become iconic of superior standing, like in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
In a furniture form, the chair can be used for a range of various models. There are chairs designed to match man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From historical days there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has developed special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair types have been changed to conform to growing human desires. Due to its particular importance with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when being utilised. Whereas it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there are items inside or not, a chair is really seen best and fairly evaluated with a person utilising it, because chair and sitter need one another. Thus the various parts of the chair were named corresponding to the limbs of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal job of a chair is to support our body, its worth is tested basically by how fully it fulfills this practical job. In the creation of the chair, the designer is restricted for particular static rules and principal measurements. Within these rules, however, the chair designer has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair covers a period of several thousand years. There existed civilizations that have created iconic chair shapes, expressions of the highest work in the industries of craft and creativity. In those civilisations, a note 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the objects of skilled design, were known from findings made in tombs. One of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair has four legs formed similar to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this way a durable triangular form was obtained. There was from our view no noteworthy difference from the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common non-royals. The simple variation existed in the complexity of ornamentation, in the choice of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was created as an easily packed seat for officers. As a camp stool this form persevered until much later points. But the stool then also was made as the task of a ceremonial seat, its technical function as a folding stool being forgotten. This can already be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay work 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 made with wood. The easy manufacture of the folding stool, made of two frames that turn on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric set between them, also appeared somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of this form is the folding stool, made from ashwood, which can now be found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not as any ancient object still in form but as seen from a wealth of pictorial objects. The better known is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which were shown. These creative legs were likely to be executed in bent wood and were probably put under great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore extremely durable and were overtly indicated.
The Romans embued the Greek designs; quite a few models of seated Romans show chairs of a denser and which appear to be a kind of less intricately constructed klismos. Both features, the light and heavy, were revived in the Classicist era. The klismos style is known in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in special types of marked originality in Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China can not be tracked as well as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken folio of images and paintings had been preserved, displaying the interior and exteriors of Chinese homes and the furniture. Another preservation from the 16th century are a collection of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that show an amazing likeness to styles of ancient chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there existed two particular chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair can be found both with or without arms but always having its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to firm the back. In one style, though, the stiles are slightly curved by the arms so as to sit correctly with the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of its back). The three areas were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. While the design of the back splat had an influence on English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could only to a particular ability reinforce corner joints (as well as being loose in the bargain) indicate a design exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which closes about the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or is given rounded edges—a left over as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and occasionally had a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs probably were allowed only for elderly persons, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have travelled 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 delicately held to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is more often than not provided with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the ultimate effect of both these furniture designs is stylized. The structure and decorative issues are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual parts do not appear to have been held together by means of either glue or screws, but were mortised on one another and held in its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Paintings show a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same period, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be seen in engravings of the inside of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this design of chair is also seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not decided that the style actually originated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in impressive numbers, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of 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—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat suits to the human body and permits 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 on the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike methodology in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof employ wood of rather thick density; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and finer items can be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engraving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and became the preference 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 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 versions 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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