From all the furniture needs, the chair could be of most importance. While most of the other forms (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair must be used here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to developed forms such as a bench and sofa, which can be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and an aesthetic craft; it was historically an indicator of social ranking. In the historical royal courts there were plain differences between sitting on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to sit on a stool. In the past century, a director’s or manager’s chair has been an indicator of superior status, as well as in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a higher level.
As its furniture purpose, the chair encompasses a range of different forms. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical times there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has derived special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair types has been changed to conform to changing human desires. For its significant relationship with man, the chair comes to its full significance only when being used. While it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there might be anything inside or not, a chair is understood best and fairly judged by a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter require the other. Thus the different parts of the chair are given labels likened to the elements of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary job of a chair is to support our human body, its worth is judged firstly for how suitably it does fulfill this practical use. In the manufacture of a chair, the chair maker is bound with some static regulations and principal measurements. Through these limits, however, the chair creator has large freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over dates of several thousand years. There are cultures that had made significant chair types, as seen of the premier craft in the industries of technique and aesthetics. Within such civilisations, particular mention needs to 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 construct of expert make, are a finding from tomb discoveries. The first one of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair has four legs crafted like those of an animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. From this a strong triangular structure was created. There was from our understanding no marked variation between the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary non-royals. The only difference lies in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the selection of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was made for an easily stored seat for army officers. As a camp stool that form stayed around til much later periods. But the stool also was created for the use of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can now be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the structure of folding stools but are not able to be folded because the seats were made from wood. The plain construction of the folding stool, being of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, appeared again but some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this type is the folding stool, made from ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is known not as any ancient fossil still around but as seen in a trove of pictorial objects. The archetype is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those were displayed. These odd legs were most likely to have been created with bent wood and were probably put under huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very solid and were overtly indicated.
The Romans emulated the Greek designs; a number of casts of seated Romans show designs of a heavier and in appearance rather less delicately built klismos. Both styles, the light and heavy, were popularised within the Classicist epoch. The klismos design is known in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in particular forms of marked originality within Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be followed as well as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full folio of drawings and paintings was kept safe, with images of the insides and exteriors of Chinese homes and the kinds of furniture. Another preservation since the 16th century are a collection of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that show an astonishing likeness to representations of previous chairs.
As were the designs in Egypt, two major chair forms existed in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair was designed both with or without arms although never missing the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to support the back. In one style, however, the stiles could be lightly curved over the arms for the purpose of conform correctly to the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its back). All three areas had been mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Although the design of a back splat had an influence on English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that merely to a particular ability support corner joints (and then are loose as a result) signify a feature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. Members are round in section or is given rounded edges—referable perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have had a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to stay 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 probably were only for elderly family members, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have travelled to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is delicately joined to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is often designed with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the overall effect of both these furniture items is stylized. The structure and aesthetic issues are combined in a style that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual items do not seem to have been fixed by either glue or screws, but had been mortised on one another and held in position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Artworks project a style 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 small pads. The front board and a corresponding board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, at the same time, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be displayed 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. Though this type of chair can also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not determined that the style actually began in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in large numbers, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of these chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its elegant proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that was, to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over 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 charm. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof have wood of quite thick dimensions; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and more upmarket chairs may be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engravings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and was popular in many 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 popularised 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 styles 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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