Out of each of the furniture objects, the chair might be primary. While many other objects (save for the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair was used here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to derivative kinds for example a bench and sofa, which may be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or aesthetic object; it is also an indicator of social rank. In the past royal courts there were important differences between being seated on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to utilise a stool. From the 20th century, the director’s and manager’s chair has become an identifier of superior rank, like in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
As a furniture purpose, the chair can be employed for a variety of variations. There are chairs created to suit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In the olden days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs 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 and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has developed new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair kinds have been evolved to fit to different human uses. From its unique link with man, the chair exists to its full advantage only when in employ. Whereas it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there might be things inside or not, a chair is understood and fairly evaluated by a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the different parts of a chair were given labels according to the parts of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the clear purpose of the chair is to support the body, its credit is evaluated generally on how fully it measures up to this practical use. Within the build of a chair, the chair maker is bound for certain static law and principal measurements. In these boundaries, however, the chair creator has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair was a period of several thousand years. There are civilizations that created significant chair types, as expressions of the highest object in the arenas of handling and creativity. Out of 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of careful scheme, are known from discoveries made in tombs. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have four legs shaped akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this design a durable triangular construction was created. There was in our knowledge no notable variation in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary people. The general change exists in the level of ornamentation, in the evidence of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was designed for an easily portable seat for army officers. As a camp stool this chair existed til much later points in time. But the stool also then took on the character of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical history as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the shape of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats were created from wood. The simplistic construction of the folding stool, composed of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric held between them, is seen but somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this form is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is known not as any ancient object still around but seen in a trove of pictorial items. The better known is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs can be seen. These creative legs were considered to have been created of bent wood and were in that case subjected to huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore very strong and were particularly drawn.
The Romans embued the Greek design; existing statues of seated Romans offer examples of a heavier and are a rather more crudely designed klismos. Both kinds, light and heavy, were popularised during the Classicist period. The klismos style is evidenced in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some particular kinds of considerable iconicism around Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be charted as far as chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of images and paintings was preserved, with images of the interior and exteriors of Chinese buildings and the kinds of furniture. Also kept of the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an interesting resemblance to pictures of past chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there existed two particular chair forms in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair has been designed both with or without arms however always having a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to give support to the back. In one kind, it must be said, the stiles had been marginally curved over the arms for the purpose of conform correctly to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a back). Together, the three parts had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. While the style of the back splat had a foundation for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that only just to a limited extent embolden corner joints (and furthermore are loose additionally) signify an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes around the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or is given rounded edges—referable as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and occasionally had a plaited seat. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; when too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs probably were reserved for senior individuals in the family, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have taken to China from the West. It does not vary very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is delicately held to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resultant effect of both of these furniture designs is stylized. The structure and decorative aspects are combined in a way that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual items do not seem to have been joined together by either glue or screws, but had been mortised into one another and held in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Works of art show a type 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 the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same period, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is seen in engravings of interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this type of chair may also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not believed that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in considerable quantities, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of those chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself by its harmonious proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of styles—that is, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them use wood of fairly thick dimensions; but each member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been cut away, and more expensive chairs can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carvings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and won favour 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 reknowned 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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