The History of the Chair
Out of each of the furniture pieces, the chair may be of most importance. While the majority of other objects (except the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair must be viewed here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to further makes like a bench or sofa, which can be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly labeled.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative art. The chair is not simply a physical support and/or an aesthetic creation; it was historically a signifier of social rank. At the past royal courts there were plain connotations between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to cope with a stool. Since the 20th century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been an indicator of superior standing, as well as in democratic governments the speaker sits on a higher floor.
In its furniture purpose, the chair can be employed for a range of various forms. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the past there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We have chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has designated special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair forms have perfected to match to changing human needs. For its particular relationship with man, the chair lives to its full importance only when being utilised. Although it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there are items inside or not, a chair is really understood and judged best with a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter require the other. Thus the several parts of a chair have been given names likened to the limbs of our human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary work of a chair is to support our human body, its worth is judged basically on how completely it does fulfill this practical use. Within the build of a chair, the builder is bound for some static rules and principal measurements. Inside these boundaries, however, the chair builder has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair was an epoch of several thousand years. There are cultures that made individual chair forms, as expressions of the leading endeavour in the arenas of handling and aesthetics. Among such civilisations, 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the objects of careful make, were a finding from findings made in tombs. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have four legs structured not unlike those of some animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this way a solid triangular structure was made. There was in our understanding no notable differentiation from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular populace. The only change exists in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the selection of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was manufactured to be an easily portable seat for army officers. As a camp stool the chair continued for much later periods. But the stool also then was created as the use of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can now be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the structure of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats are made with wood. The simple construction of the folding stool, being of two frames that spin on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, was seen again at some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this kind is the folding stool, from ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not in any ancient fossil still existing but from a large amount of pictorial evidence. The significant kind is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area by Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs could be seen. These strange legs were understood to be executed with bent wood and were thus needed to bear huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore super strong and were overtly pointed out.
The Romans embued the Greek style; evidence of casts of seated Romans offer chairs of a denser and which appear to be a slightly more crudely designed klismos. Both types, light and heavy, were revived within the Classicist period. The klismos influence can be evidenced in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in particular types of notable individuality within Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China can not be tracked as well as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken series of sketches and works of art has been kept safe, detailing the insides and outer parts of Chinese buildings and the designs of furniture. Another preservation since the 16th century are some chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that display an intriguing familiarity to pictures of previous chairs.
Like in Egypt, there existed two particular chair forms in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair can be designed both with and without arms but never missing its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to give support to the back. In one style, it has been seen, the stiles were slightly curved above the arms in order to sit correctly with the form of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the back). The three sections were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Although the style of this back splat had an introduction for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that would only to a particular limit support corner joints (and furthermore were loose as a result) indicate an element signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or has rounded edges—referable perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have a plaited form. These chairs needed the sitter to be stiff and upright; if too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs most likely were reserved for senior persons in the family, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have travelled to China from the West. It is akin much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is more often than not possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resulting effect of these furniture designs is stylized. The structure and aesthetic aspects are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual items do not look to have been adjoined by either glue or screws, but had been mortised on one another and locked into position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Works of art project a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same time, possessed the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is found 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 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 decided that the design actually began in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in large amounts, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of those chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that was, to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes its popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting 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 achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike principles even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are constructed from wood of quite thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and finer examples can be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engravings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more variable in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and became the favourite 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
During 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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