Of all furniture items, the chair may be the imperative one. While most other objects (save the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is regarded here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to complex makes for example the bench or sofa, which should be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently defined.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support or an aesthetic piece of art; it historically is an indicator of social ranking. In the past royal courts there were plain differences between sitting on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to sit on a stool. Since the past century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been regarded as an identifier of superior rank, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a raised level.
In its furniture construction, the chair is used for a variety of various makes. There are chairs created to fit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). In the olden days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are 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. All these chair shapes has been changed to fit to evolving human requirements. Due to its particular connection with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when utilised. While it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there is anything inside or not, a chair is really seen best and regarded best by a person using it, for chair and sitter require the other. Thus the various limbs of a chair have been given labels likened to the names of a human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first role of a chair is to support a human body, its credit is judged generally on how well it measures up to this practical role. In the manufacture of the chair, the builder is limited by certain static legislation and principal measurements. Inside these restrictions, however, the chair maker has large freedom.
The history of the chair covered a period of several thousand years. There existed civilizations that had distinctive chair shapes, as expressive of the foremost endeavour in the arenas of skill and art. From those peoples, particular 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 design, are today seen from findings made in tombs. The first of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair had four legs formed similar to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this design a solid triangular structure was created. There seems to be no noteworthy differentiation between the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular people. The simple change lied in the decorative ornamentation, in the particulars of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was made as an easily portable seat for officers. As a camp stool that kind persisted during much later times. But the stool also then was created as the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical role as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the form of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats were made with wood. The simple build of the folding stool, made of two frames that turn on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric set between them, appeared again somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this type is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient object still around but from a large amount of pictorial evidence. The iconic kind is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs could be visible. These odd legs were most likely to be manufactured in bent wood and were likely to have been had to bear a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very stable and were plainly denoted.
The Romans embued the Greek designs; evidence of models of seated Romans offer chairs of a more heavyset and in appearance rather less intricately built klismos. Both kinds, light or heavy, were popularised in the Classicist time. The klismos style is evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular types of marked originality around Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China cannot be tracked as well as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken series of sketches and paintings has been kept, with images of the inside and outside of Chinese households and the kinds of furniture. Also preserved since the 16th century are a collection of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that display an astonishing resemblance to representations of past chairs.
As in Egypt, two chair forms persisted in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair was designed both with or without arms although always having a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to give support to the back. In one design, it has been seen, the stiles were marginally curved on top of the arms to conform correctly to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its chairback). Together, all three limbs are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. While the design of the Chinese back splat then had an introduction for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could merely to a particular extent support corner joints (and then were loose in the result) indicate a feature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes around the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or have rounded edges—references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and occasionally had a plaited texture. These chairs needed the sitter to be stiff and upright; when too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs likely were kept for the senior people, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have been brought to China from the West. It is not dissimilar much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is elegantly affixed to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is more often than not provided with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resulting effect of both these furniture designs is stylized. The structure and decoration issues are combined in a style that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is a result of the way that the individual parts do not look to have been fixed by either glue or screws, but are mortised onto one another and fixed in position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Artworks display a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same period, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be displayed in engravings of the interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this design of chair might also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not believed that the innovation actually began in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in vast numbers, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself with its harmonious proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that was, to say, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and allows 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 made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of fairly thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been cut away, and more upmarket designs might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engraving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which came from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and was popularised 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 popular 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 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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