Out of all furniture pieces, the chair may be primary. While many other objects (except the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair can be used here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to complex makes including a bench or sofa, which may be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as a creative art. The chair is not simply a physical support and an aesthetic craft; it was also a signifier of social ranking. In the past royal courts there were important differences between sitting on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to utilise a stool. Since the last century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen a symbol of superior dignity, and in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on an elevated level.
In a furniture creation, the chair is employed for a number of different makes. There are chairs structured to match man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the past there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has developed unique chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair types have been adapted to fit to differing human requirements. From its particular importance with man, the chair comes to its full purpose only when in employ. While it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there is anything inside or not, a chair is understood best and judged best by a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the several areas of a chair were named as the elements of the human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elemental work of a chair is to support a human body, its value is judged basically by how fully it measures up to this practical purpose. Within the build of a chair, the carpenter is limited by particular static legislation and principal measurements. Within these restrictions, however, the chair creator has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair lasted dates of several thousand years. There existed cultures that had made individual chair types, expressions of the principal craft in the arenas of handling and design. From such peoples, individual 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 objects of careful make, are found from tombs. The first of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have four legs structured like those of some animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this way a durable triangular construction was made. There was from our knowledge no noteworthy difference between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary citizens. The simple variation existed in the complexity of ornamentation, in the particulars of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was designed to be an easily stored seat for army. As a camp stool the form persevered until much later times. But the stool then was created for the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical task as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can now be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the form of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats were worked out of wood. The simplistic build of the folding stool, made of two frames that turn on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, then appeared at some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this type is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient fossil still extant but from a trove of pictorial evidence. The archetype is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of which could be seen. These unusual legs were presumed to be manufactured out of bent wood and were as such had to bear a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very stable and were plainly signified.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; quite a few statues of seated Romans display evidence of a more heavyset and which appear to be a kind of crudely built klismos. Both types, the light or heavy, were brought back as part of the Classicist time. The klismos style is used in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some particular brands of considerable uniqueness of Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be traced as far back as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed collection of sketches and works of art was preserved, displaying the inside and exteriors of Chinese households and the furniture. Another preservation of the 16th century are a trove of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an amazing familiarity to representations of ancient chairs.
Like in Egypt, two fundamental chair forms existed in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This chair has been found both with and without arms although never without its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one style, it has been found, the stiles had been slightly curved by the arms in order to sit correctly with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the chairback). Each of the three areas are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. While the style of the Chinese back splat had a foundation for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden items that could merely to a restricted ability embolden corner joints (and furthermore are loose as well) signify an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which ends upon the rounded staves. All members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—a left over perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and had on occasion a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; if too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of toppling. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs presumably were kept for senior persons, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have come to China from the West. It does not vary very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is elegantly joined to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is often seen with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resultant effect of both these furniture styles is stylized. The manufacture and decorative issues are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual parts do not look to have been held together by use of either glue or screws, but were mortised into one another and held in its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Paintings project a type of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a similar board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same era, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is evidenced in engravings of the interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this style of chair may also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not decided that the design actually began in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in impressive amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The design 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 of styles—that was, to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of quite thick density; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and more upmarket items can be further embellished with special delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and was popularised 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 popular 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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