From each of the furniture objects, the chair may be the paramount one. While the majority of other objects (save the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair should be looked upon here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to derivative makes such as the bench and sofa, which can be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly definitive.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or aesthetic piece; it was historically a symbol of social status. In the past royal courts there were significant connotations between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to cope with a stool. In the past century, a director’s or manager’s chair has developed iconic of superior rank, as well as in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
In its furniture construction, the chair can be used for a variety of various models. There are chairs created to suit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past times there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used 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. There are chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has demanded unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair types has been adapted to conform to growing human requirements. From its unique importance with man, the chair lives to its full importance only when being utilised. Although it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there are items inside or not, a chair is seen best and fairly regarded by a person using it, for chair and sitter need the other. Thus the several elements of a chair are labeled according to the limbs of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious purpose of your chair is to support the human body, its value is evaluated principally by how completely it fulfills this practical job. In the design of a chair, the maker is bound in some static regulations and principal measurements. Through these rules, however, the chair designer has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair covers an era of several thousand years. There were societies that created distinctive chair types, as seen of the highest task in the arenas of skill and creativity. Within such societies, special 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 items of skilled make, were seen from discoveries made in tombs. The first of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair had four legs structured like those of an animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this design a solid triangular structure was obtained. There was from our view no notable differentiation in the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common people. The general change lied in the decorative ornamentation, in the particulars of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was crafted to be an easily packed seat for army officers. As a camp stool the stool existed for much later points in time. But the stool then also was designed for the character of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical role as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from evidence be found, 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 were in the construction of folding stools but can not be folded as the seats are created out of wood. The plain build of the folding stool, being of two frames that spin on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric held between them, appeared again somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this kind is the folding stool, from ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is known not in any ancient specimen still in form but as seen from a variety of pictorial items. The significant kind is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground by Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them could be seen. These strange legs were presumably created with bent wood and were as such put under a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very strong and were visibly denoted.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; a number of statues of seated Romans are evidence of a denser and apparently slightly more crudely built klismos. Both types, the light and the heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist era. The klismos chair is evidenced in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some kinds of notable individuality around Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be traced as far as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed serial of sketches and works of art had been protected, detailing the interior and exterior of Chinese buildings and the designs of furniture. Another preservation of the 16th century are a number of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that display an astonishing familiarity to pictures of ancient chairs.
Same as in Egypt, two particular chair forms existed in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair was found both with or without arms although always with a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one type, it has been found, the stiles could be delicately curved over the arms to sit right with the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the chairback). All three areas are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. While the idea of the Chinese back splat later had a foundation for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that would merely to a limited ability embolden corner joints (as well as being loose into the bargain) represent a design exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which closes upon the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or has rounded edges—referable perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and might have had a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a way of toppling. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs probably were only for the senior persons, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have come to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is delicately joined to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is generally provided with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of these two furniture designs is stylized. The structure and aesthetic elements are combined in a manner that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual items do not look to have been held together by use of either glue or screws, but had been mortised into one another and fixed in 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. Works of art project a style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to bring out a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, in the same period, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be found in engravings of the inside of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this design 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 was instigated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable numbers, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself with its elegant proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that is, as developed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat adheres to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike principles despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are constructed from wood of relatively thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and more expensive items would be further embellished with special delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French touch 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
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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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