Out of all furniture items, the chair might be the imperative one. While the majority of other pieces (save the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is intended to be used here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to derivative items such as a bench and sofa, which might be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently defined.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and aesthetic creation; it can also be symbolic of social hierarchy. At the Medieval royal courts there were important signifiers between having a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to squat on a stool. From the past century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been regarded as an indicator of superior dignity, and in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a higher platform.
In a furniture purpose, the chair is utilised for a range of variations. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past times there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has demanded unique chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair forms has evolved to match to differing human needs. From its significant relationship with man, the chair exists to its full purpose only when utilised. Though it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there is anything inside or not, a chair is best seen and fairly tested by a person utilising it, because chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the different parts of a chair are labeled likened to the elements of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary job of a chair is to support our body, its value is valued generally for how completely it does measure up to this practical job. In the construction of a chair, the chair maker is restricted within some static legislation and principal measurements. Through these rules, however, the chair maker has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair covered a period of several thousand years. There are societies that held significant chair shapes, seen of the highest object in the arenas of handling and aesthetics. Among these such societies, 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of skilled scheme, are now known from findings made in tombs. The first one of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have had four legs designed like those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular structure was crafted. There was from our view no notable variation from the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular populace. The real difference exists in the complexity of ornamentation, in the particulars of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was designed as an easily packed seat for army. As a camp stool that kind continued til much later times. But the stool also then was made for the character of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical job as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be noted, 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 in the shape of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats were worked of wood. The simplistic make of the folding stool, composed of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, was then seen at some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this form is the folding stool, of ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is found not from any ancient object still in form but seen in a variety of pictorial evidence. The iconic kind is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those would be shown. These unusual legs were understood to have been executed with bent wood and were as such bore extreme pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore super stable and were plainly pointed out.
The Romans embued the Greek designs; a number of casts of seated Romans offer examples of a denser and are a somewhat crudely built klismos. Both designs, the light and the heavy, were brought back within the Classicist period. The klismos style can be seen in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some particular types of considerable iconicism of Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be followed as well as chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of sketches and works of art had been kept safe, displaying the interiors and outer parts of Chinese houses and the designs of furniture. Another preservation since the 16th century are a collection of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that hold an amazing familiarity to representations of ancient chairs.
Like in Egypt, two major chair forms existed in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair has been found both with and without arms although always with its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one image, it has been found, the stiles had been lightly curved over the arms in order to conform to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of its chairback). Together, all three limbs are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of the back splat exercised an introduction for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only just to a restricted ability embolden corner joints (and then are loose to top that off) represent a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes about the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or has rounded edges—a left over maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and might have had a plaited bottom. These chairs needed the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for if too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs most likely were only for the senior individuals, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have come to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is intricately affixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is more often than not designed with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the ultimate effect of both of these furniture styles is stylized. The construction and decorative issues are combined in a way that is all at once naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the way that the individual parts do not look to have been fixed by means of either glue or screws, but were mortised into one another and fixed in position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Artworks project 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 between, stitched to bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, at the same time, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be displayed in engravings of the interior of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this style of chair may also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not determined that the form actually began in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in considerable numbers, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself with its shapely proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of styles—that was, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes this popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. 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 tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike practices in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are made from wood of fairly thick dimensions; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and more upmarket items would be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in style than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles over 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 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 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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