From all the furniture pieces, the chair may be the most important. While many other forms (except the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair can be said here in the common sense, from stool to throne to further forms like a bench and sofa, which might be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly defined.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support and an aesthetic piece of art; it is also an indicator of social hierarchy. Within the old royal courts there were clear distinctions between sitting on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to sit on a stool. In the last century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen iconic of superior rank, and in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a higher floor.
In its furniture creation, the chair is employed for a range of variations. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical times there were chairs used for birthing (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 can have chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has demanded special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair forms have been perfected to fit to changing human needs. For its close relationship with man, the chair exists to its full purpose only when utilised. While it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there might be things inside or not, a chair is understood best and evaluated with a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter suit each other. Thus the several areas of a chair have been given labels like the areas of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary job of your chair is to support the human body, its value is valued generally on how fully it does measure up to this practical purpose. Within the build of a chair, the maker is limited with particular static rules and principal measurements. Through these restrictions, however, the chair creator has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair was dates of several thousand years. There are civilizations that created distinctive chair shapes, as seen of the topmost task in the arenas of skill and creativity. Within these peoples, particular mention 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 result of masterful scheme, were known from tombs. One of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have four legs formed not unlike those of an animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. From this design a solid triangular structure was obtained. There was from our knowledge no marked change from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical non-royals. The only difference exists in the kind of ornamentation, in the particulars of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was made as an easily carried seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool the type persevered til much later days. But the stool also then was made for the use of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical history as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from evidence be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the shape of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats were made out of wood. The easy make of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, reappears at some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of this type is the folding stool, from ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not in any ancient object still around but as in a variety of pictorial items. The best known is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place near Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of which would be visible. These curving legs were presumed to have been executed out of bent wood and were probably needed to bear huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore very stable and were particularly pointed out.
The Romans emulated the Greek designs; quite a few statues of seated Romans show designs of a denser and which appear to be a kind of more crudely crafted klismos. Both designs, light or heavy, were seen again during the Classicist epoch. The klismos chair can be evidenced in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of marked originality within Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China can not be tracked as far as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of sketches and paintings has been kept, with images of the insides and exterior of Chinese households and the designs of furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are a number of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an interesting resemblance to designs of older chairs.
Same as in Egypt, there were two particular chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That chair can be found both with and without arms though always with a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to support the back. In one style, it has been found, the stiles are lightly curved by the arms so as to suit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a chairback). Together, all three limbs are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the innovation of a back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only to a restricted limit embolden corner joints (and furthermore are loose in the bargain) signify a signature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which stops about the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or have rounded edges—a left over perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and had on occasion a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for when too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a way of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs most likely were kept only for senior persons in the family, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have come to China from the West. It is not dissimilar that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is elegantly held to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is usually designed with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resulting effect of these two furniture items is stylized. The manufacture and decoration parts are combined in a manner that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the way that the individual members do not seem to have been constructed by use of either glue or screws, but were mortised onto one another and held in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its name on the chair. Works of art display a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, in the same time, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be displayed in engravings of interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this design of chair is also made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not determined that the form actually was born in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in impressive amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of those chairs lined up along 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 style—that is, as brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The style owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them have wood of relatively thick dimensions; but all the members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and more upmarket designs may be further embellished with very delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more variable in design than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and became the preference 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 well-known 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 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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