Out of all furniture forms, the chair may be the primary one. While the majority of other items (save for the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair was said here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to complex makes including a bench and sofa, which might be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly defined.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not only a physical support and/or an aesthetic piece of art; it was also a symbol of social rank. In the Medieval royal courts there were important connotations between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to use a stool. In the past century, the director’s and manager’s chair has become a symbol of superior status, and in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a higher level.
As a furniture purpose, the chair can be utilised for a range of different forms. There are chairs designed to match man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past times there were chairs for births (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (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 have chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has developed special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair kinds have perfected to fit to evolving human uses. Because of its significant connection with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when in employ. Whereas it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there might be items inside or not, a chair is best seen and evaluated by a person using it, for chair and sitter need one another. Thus the various elements of a chair were given names likened to the elements of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal work of your chair is to support your body, its value is valued generally from how suitably it fulfills this practical function. Within the manufacture of a chair, the chair maker is restricted within the static rules and principal measurements. Through these restrictions, however, the chair builder has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair extended over a period of several thousand years. There existed peoples that held distinctive chair forms, as seen of the leading task in the industries of technique and art. Among these such cultures, individual mention 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 structures of skilled make, are a finding from tomb findings. One of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs shaped akin to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this way a stable triangular design was made. There seemed to be no significant variation in the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular peasantry. The only change existed in the kind of ornamentation, in the choice of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was crafted to be an easily portable seat for officers. As a camp stool that kind continued for much later periods. But the stool also existed in the character of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical role as a folding stool fast 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 work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the shape of folding stools but are not able to be folded because the seats are made from wood. The simple construction of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric set between them, came up but somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of these is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient object still around but as seen from a variety of pictorial objects. The best known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location near Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those were seen. These curving legs were understood to be manufactured with bent wood and were thus bore great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super solid and were overtly denoted.
The Romans adopted the Greek style; designs of statues of seated Romans display chairs of a heavier and are a rather less delicately constructed klismos. Both features, the light and heavy, were popularised within the Classicist period. The klismos style can be seen in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in particular types of considerable individuality around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as well as chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full folio of sketches and paintings had been kept safe, showing the inside and outer parts of Chinese homes and their furniture. Also kept since the 16th century are some chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that show an intriguing similarity to images of previous chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This chair is seen both with or without arms but never without its square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to hold up the back. In one kind, it has been seen, the stiles could be marginally curved on top of the arms to sit correctly with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a back). Together, all three parts are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of this back splat had an inspiration for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only just to a limited capability stabilise corner joints (and then are loose in the bargain) are an element signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which stops around the rounded staves. Members are round in section or has rounded edges—acknowledging as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and might have had a plaited bottom. These chairs demanded of the sitter to be stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs presumably were kept for the senior persons in the family, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It is not dissimilar much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is delicately fixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is usually possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the ultimate effect of both these furniture styles is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic aspects are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the manner that the individual parts do not look to have been affixed by either glue or screws, but are mortised with one another and fixed in its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its name on the chair. Artworks display a style of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same period, held 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 interior of affluent 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 may also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not certain that the design actually started in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in considerable quantities, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of this kind of chairs lined up against a wall. The style asserts itself by its harmonious proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that was, to say, as brought out in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike principles in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof employ wood of quite thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and more upmarket examples might be further embellished with very delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and was popular 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 commonly known and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
In 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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