Out of all furniture pieces, the chair could be the primary one. While the majority of other forms (save for the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair can be regarded here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to complex forms including a bench or sofa, which might be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly definitive.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support or aesthetic creation; it was also symbolic of social ranking. Within the historical royal courts there were social distinctions between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, and having to use a stool. During the 20th century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been an indicator of superior rank, and even in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
In its furniture form, the chair can be utilised for a variety of various purposes. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). During past times there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (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. We make chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has developed unique chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair kinds have been changed to conform to different human uses. From its particular link with man, the chair appears to its full importance only when used. While it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there are items inside or not, a chair is really understood and judged by a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter require each other. Thus the individual parts of a chair are named likened to the areas of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elemental purpose of your chair is to support the body, its worth is tested basically for how suitably it fulfills this practical purpose. Within the build of the chair, the chair maker is bound within the static laws and principal measurements. Under these restrictions, however, the chair maker has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair covers an era of several thousand years. There is evidence of cultures that held unique chair forms, as expressive of the topmost task in the arenas of technique and design. Out of those civilisations, individual 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of skilled craft, are known from findings made in tombs. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair had four legs designed akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this design a durable triangular structure was obtained. There was from our view no marked change between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical people. The main difference lied in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the choice of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was created as an easily stored seat for army. As a camp stool that type existed until much later periods. But the stool then was designed for the task of a ceremonial seat, its technical history as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can today be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the construction of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats are formed from wood. The easy make of the folding stool, composed of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, is seen but some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of those is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not in any ancient item still around but as found in a trove of pictorial objects. The best known is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs were visible. These strange legs were considered to be created out of bent wood and were probably had to bear huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super solid and were visibly signified.
The Romans emulated the Greek design; some models of seated Romans are designs of a heavier and in appearance slightly less delicately crafted klismos. Both types, light or heavy, were revived in the Classicist era. The klismos design is known in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some types of considerable iconicism around Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China cannot be charted as far back as in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken folio of images and paintings had been kept, showing the insides and outer parts of Chinese homes and their furniture. Preserved also of the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that show an interesting likeness to pictures of older chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair is found both with and without arms although never without a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one kind, it has been seen, the stiles are slightly curved on top of the arms for the purpose of fit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its back). All three limbs had been mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. While the innovation of the back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden members that just to a particular ability stabilise corner joints (and furthermore are loose into the bargain) represent a signature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends around the rounded staves. All members are round in section or is given rounded edges—an acknowledgement perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have had a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; if too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs probably were kept for elderly people, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have come to China from the West. It is not dissimilar very 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 in a curved member, which is often seen with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the ultimate effect of these furniture styles is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic issues are combined in a style that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the fact that the individual items do not look to have been joined together by either glue or screws, but were mortised with one another and locked into its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Artworks display a kind of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same era, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be seen in engravings of the inside of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this type of chair might also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not decided that the form actually was born in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in large quantities, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself with its shapely 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 style—that was, as created in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The model owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. 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 covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of rather thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been sanded away, and more upmarket items might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in design than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated 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 well-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 styles 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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