The History of the Chair
From all the furniture pieces, the chair could be the imperative one. While the majority of other items (save for the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is regarded here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to complex chairs like a bench and 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 overtly distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support or aesthetic item; it can also be a signifier of social place. Within the past royal courts there were social connotations between sitting on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to cope with a stool. In the last century, the director’s and manager’s chair has been regarded as an indicator of superior standing, like in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a high-set level.
In a furniture form, the chair can be employed for a variety of different makes. There are chairs designed to suit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since past times there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); in 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. We have chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has developed new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair kinds has been adapted to suit to growing human needs. Due to its particular association with man, the chair lives to its full significance only when being used. Although it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there are items inside or not, a chair is best seen and regarded best by a person using it, because chair and sitter suit the other. Thus the several elements of a chair are labeled according to the areas of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious job of the chair is to support a body, its worth is tested primarily from how completely it fulfills this practical role. Within the manufacture of a chair, the carpenter is restricted under some static regulation and principal measurements. Under these rules, however, the chair designer has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair extends over a period of several thousand years. There are peoples that have created significant chair forms, expressive of the topmost object in the industries of skill and art. Within those societies, individual note 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the objects of skilled scheme, are a finding from tomb discoveries. The first one of these two 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 some animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this design a stable triangular construction was made. There was from our knowledge no marked differentiation from the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular people. The only variation lies in the complex ornamentation, in the selection of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was created for an easily packed seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool this chair continued until much later periods of time. But the stool then also was created for the role of a ceremonial seat, its original job as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today be noted, 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 made in the structure of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats were formed with wood. The plain make of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, reappeared but somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this type is the folding stool, made from ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is known not as any ancient specimen still in form but as seen from a large amount of pictorial objects. The best known is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location just out of 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 would be displayed. These curved legs were thought to be executed with bent wood and were as such needed to bear great pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super durable and were visibly denoted.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; a number of models of seated Romans are examples of a denser and in appearance somewhat less intricately built klismos. Both features, the light or heavy, were popularised as part of the Classicist time. The klismos style can be found in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of considerable individuality in Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China isn’t able to be tracked as long as chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of drawings and works of art was protected, with images of the interior and outside of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Another preservation from the 16th century are a trove of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an intriguing similarity to images of past chairs.
As were the designs in Egypt, two particular chair forms existed in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair is designed both with and without arms however never without the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one style, however, the stiles had been marginally curved above the arms so as to conform to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its chairback). Together, the three areas had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Although the style of the back splat had an influence on English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only to a particular capability stabilise corner joints (and then are loose in the bargain) are a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or is given rounded edges—a left over as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; when too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs most likely were reserved only for older family members, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have come to China from the West. It is akin that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is prettily affixed to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is often seen with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resulting effect of both of these furniture designs is stylized. The manufacture and decorative parts are combined in a way that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual items do not seem to have been fixed by use of either glue or screws, but have been mortised with one another and fixed in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Paintings display a kind of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same period, possessed the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is seen in engravings of the inside 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 type of chair is also seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not believed that the design actually started in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in vast quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The style 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 style—that is, as developed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike principles even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof have wood of quite thick density; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and more upmarket examples can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carvings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used instead of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more open in design than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and won favour 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 well-known 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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