From all the furniture forms, the chair might be paramount. While most of the other forms (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is meant to be viewed here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to developed chairs like a bench or sofa, which should be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently distinguished.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support and aesthetic artwork; it is historically an indicator of social placement. Within the Medieval royal courts there were important connotations between possessing a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to use a stool. Since the last century, a director’s or manager’s chair has been seen as iconic of superior position, and in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
In a furniture construction, the chair ranges from a range of different models. There are chairs created to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past times there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (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 make chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has demanded new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair types has evolved to suit to evolving human requirements. Due to its unique importance with man, the chair appears to its full importance only when being used. Although it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is understood best and tested with a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter complement the other. Thus the various parts of a chair are given names according to the elements of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the fundamental job of a chair is to support your body, its worth is evaluated generally from how fully it does fulfill this practical function. In the creation of the chair, the builder is restricted within some static rules and principal measurements. Through these restrictions, however, the chair maker has great freedom.
The history of the chair is an era of several thousand years. There were peoples that held distinctive chair forms, expressive of the topmost work in the industries of technique and creativity. Among these cultures, particular mention should 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 structures of masterful make, are now known from tomb findings. The first one of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair had four legs formed as akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this way a durable triangular structure was made. There was to our understanding no marked variation from the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular people. The general variation exists in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the selection of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was crafted as an easily stored seat for army officers. As a camp stool this chair stayed during much later periods. But the stool then was made as the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical function as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can already be noted, from as early as 1366 57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the form of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats are formed with wood. The plain structure of the folding stool, being of two frames that spin on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, was seen again but somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of those is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, now seen at Guldh j (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient specimen still around but as seen in a large amount of pictorial objects. The better known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location near Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs could be displayed. These strange legs were considered to have been crafted out of bent wood and were therefore subjected to huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore very durable and were clearly indicated.
The Romans embued the Greek design; evidence of models of seated Romans offer designs of a denser and are a kind of crudely crafted klismos. Both types, the light or the heavy, were popularised as part of the Classicist time. The klismos chair can be seen in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some particular forms of marked individuality of Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China cannot be charted as far as the progression of the chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618 907) an undamaged folio of sketches and works of art has been kept safe, showing the interior and outside of Chinese houses and the furniture. Kept also of the 16th century are a number of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an interesting likeness to representations of previous chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there were two particular chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This chair was designed both with or without arms though never missing the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to firm the back. In one type, it must be said, the stiles are marginally curved on top of the arms in order to fit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its chairback). All three areas are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the innovation of the back splat later had an inspiration for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that would merely to a restricted capability reinforce corner joints (and furthermore were loose as well) indicate a feature solely 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 possesses rounded edges a left over as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and had on occasion a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for if too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a habit of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs most likely were kept for senior persons, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have taken to China from the West. It does not vary that 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 with a curved member, which is usually possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resulting effect of these furniture styles is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic elements are combined in a way that is all at once both na ve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual items do not look to have been joined together by means 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 had its name on the chair. Artworks display 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 show up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same era, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be seen in engravings of the inside of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this design of chair is also made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not determined that the innovation actually was born in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in vast quantities, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself by its harmonious proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style that is, as created in Paris around 1750 conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The design owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat suits 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 tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of quite thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and more expensive chairs can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more open in style than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles throughout 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 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 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 Eug ne Gaillard in France, Henry van de Velde in Belgium, Josef Hoffman in Austria, Antonio Gaud 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 M tro.
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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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