The History of the Chair
Out of all furniture objects, the chair could be the most imperative. While most other objects (save for the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is meant to be used here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to developed chairs for example the bench or sofa, which may be looked upon 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 curious as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support or an aesthetic creation; it was also a signifier of social rank. Within the historical royal courts there were clear connotations between being led to a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to utilise a stool. During the recent century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has developed an identifier of superior standing, as well as in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
In its furniture purpose, the chair can be employed for a wealth of different models. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). During historical times there were chairs used for birthing (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 and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has developed unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair types have been evolved to match to changing human uses. Due to its significant link with man, the chair comes to its full importance only when used. Whereas it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there is anything inside or not, a chair is seen best and clearly evaluated by a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the various elements of a chair were labeled according to the elements of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary role of the chair is to support our body, its value is valued basically from how suitably it measures up to this practical function. In the design of a chair, the builder is restricted by some static rules and principal measurements. Under these restrictions, however, the chair designer has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair lasted over an era of several thousand years. There existed cultures that had made unique chair forms, seen of the principal task in the industries of craft and aesthetics. Within these civilisations, a note 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 upshot of masterful scheme, are now a finding from discoveries made in tombs. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have had four legs shaped not unlike those of some animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this design a strong triangular construction was made. There was in our knowledge no significant change between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary populace. The main variation lies in the complex ornamentation, in the selection of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was crafted for an easily stored seat for officers. As a camp stool that type persevered until much later times. But the stool then took on the task of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical history as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can now be observed, 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 in the construction of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats were formed out of wood. The easy manufacture of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric held between them, came again but some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this form is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not from any ancient specimen still extant but seen in a trove of pictorial items. The iconic kind is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs can be shown. These unusual legs were presumably crafted out of bent wood and were as such needed to bear huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore extremely durable and were visibly indicated.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek designs; some models of seated Romans display chairs of a heavier and are a rather crudely crafted klismos. Both features, light or heavy, were brought back as part of the Classicist era. The klismos design is used in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in special brands of considerable uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be traced as far as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of drawings and works of art has been preserved, displaying the interiors and outer parts of Chinese households and the designs of furniture. Also preserved since the 16th century are some chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an amazing likeness to styles of older chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, two particular chair forms existed in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair has been designed both with and without arms although always having a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to give support to the back. In one image, it must be said, the stiles could be lightly curved on top of the arms to suit the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the back). Together, the three areas are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Though the style of a back splat exercised an introduction for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden items that would only to a restricted limit embolden corner joints (and furthermore are loose to top that off) signify a feature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which closes about the rounded staves. All members are round in section or is given rounded edges—a left over maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and occasionally had a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs most likely were reserved for elderly people in the family, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have taken to China from the West. It is akin that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is elegantly affixed to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is generally provided with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of both of these furniture forms is stylized. The constructive and decoration aspects are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual parts do not appear to have been joined together by either glue or screws, but have been mortised onto one another and fixed in position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Works of art display a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, at the same era, held the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be found in engravings of the interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this style of chair is also seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not believed that the form actually was born in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in considerable numbers, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of such chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that is to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The model owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike principles despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are made from wood of fairly thick density; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been taken away, and finer chairs can be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the premier 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 popularised 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 versions 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.
For a great deal on office storage in Sydney contact Fast Office Furniture today and check our specials.
Sphere: Related Content