Out of each of the furniture pieces, the chair could be the imperative one. While most of the other forms (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is meant to be used here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to complex pieces including the bench and sofa, which can be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support or an aesthetic craft; it is historically an indicator of social ranking. Within the old royal courts there were significant distinctions between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or having to utilise a stool. In the past century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been a symbol of superior rank, and in democratic governments the speaker sits on a raised floor.
As its furniture construction, the chair can be employed for a number of variations. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past times there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has developed unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair forms has evolved to match to growing human requirements. Because of its close link with man, the chair exists to its full advantage only when utilised. Although it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there might be items inside or not, a chair is best seen and judged with a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter suit the other. Thus the different limbs of a chair have been named likened to the parts of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary purpose of the chair is to support the body, its credit is valued primarily from how suitably it fulfills this practical job. In the structure of the chair, the designer is bound under some static laws and principal measurements. Through these limits, however, the chair creator has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair lasted dates of several thousand years. There were peoples that made iconic chair forms, as expressions of the topmost craft in the spheres of technique and creativity. From these peoples, special mention needs to 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 upshot of careful craft, are now known from tomb discoveries. The first one of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair has four legs designed not unlike those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this design a durable triangular structure was made. There was in our understanding no noteworthy difference in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular peasantry. The real variation lies in the complexity of ornamentation, in the particulars of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was designed for an easily stored seat for soldiers. As a camp stool the type stayed until much later periods. But the stool then also was created as the character of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical job as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can today be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the structure of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats are made of wood. The plain build of the folding stool, composed of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric set between them, then came again some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of those is the folding stool, from ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not from any ancient item still existing but as in a wealth of pictorial evidence. The better known is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those would be visible. These curving legs were presumably manufactured in bent wood and were thus subjected to great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore extremely strong and were clearly denoted.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek design; evidence of models of seated Romans display chairs of a more heavyset and apparently slightly less delicately designed klismos. Both designs, the light and heavy, were revived during the Classicist era. The klismos chair is used in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some kinds of marked iconicism within Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China cannot be followed as long as that of Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full folio of images and artworks was kept safe, detailing the interior and outer parts of Chinese households and the designs of furniture. Also kept of the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that show an interesting similarity to images of previous chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair has been constructed both with and without arms but always having a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one kind, it has been seen, the stiles were slightly curved by the arms for the purpose of conform correctly to the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the back). The three areas were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Though the innovation of the Chinese back splat then had an inspiration for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that just to a restricted limit reinforce corner joints (and are loose in the result) are an element particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. All members are round in section or has rounded edges—references as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and might have had a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to be stiff and upright; when too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs presumably were kept for older people, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have taken to China from the West. It is akin that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is usually provided with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the overall effect of both of these furniture styles is stylized. The manufacture and decoration parts are combined in a style that is at the same time naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual items do not seem to have been affixed with either glue or screws, but were mortised with one another and locked into place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Artworks show a style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, during the same era, held the status 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 wealthy 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 might also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not certain that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in considerable amounts, as evidenced 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 harmonious 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 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 chair owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally 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 conceal all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike principles despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are made from wood of fairly thick density; but all the members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been removed, and more expensive examples might be further embellished with very delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and became the preference 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 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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