The History of the Chair
Out of each of the furniture needs, the chair might be the most important. While the majority of other pieces (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is meant to be looked upon here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to complex forms like the bench or sofa, which should be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly definitive.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and aesthetic object; it is historically a signifier of social rank. In the historical royal courts there were plain signifiers between having a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to sit on a stool. From the last century, a director’s or manager’s chair has been seen as a symbol of superior standing, and even in democratic governments the speaker sits on an elevated level.
In its furniture creation, the chair is utilised for a range of different makes. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since historical times there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, or 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 modern lifestyle has designated unique chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair forms have perfected to suit to changing human requirements. From its unique connection with man, the chair appears to its full advantage only when in use. Although it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there are things inside or not, a chair is seen best and fairly evaluated with a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the various parts of the chair have been labeled likened to the limbs of our human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the basic job of a chair is to support the body, its worth is valued principally by how suitably it does fulfill this practical use. In the manufacture of a chair, the carpenter is limited for certain static legislation and principal measurements. Within these limitations, however, the chair builder has great freedom.
The history of the chair covered a period of several thousand years. There are peoples that have created individual chair shapes, as expressions of the topmost craft in the arenas of craft and aesthetics. From those civilisations, special note can 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 skilled craft, are found from tomb findings. The first of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have had four legs crafted similar to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. From this a strong triangular form was created. There seems to be no noteworthy variation between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical citizens. The main variation lies in the decorative ornamentation, in the choice of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was manufactured to be an easily portable seat for army. As a camp stool this type existed for much later periods of time. But the stool also was created as the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical job as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can already 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 form of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats are created of wood. The plain construction of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that spin on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, appeared 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, made of ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is known not in any ancient fossil still extant but as in a wealth of pictorial items. The archetype is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground by Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs were seen. These unique legs were considered to have been executed out of bent wood and were probably put under extreme pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very stable and were visibly signified.
The Romans embued the Greek design; evidence of models of seated Romans are designs of a thicker and apparently somewhat less intricately crafted klismos. Both styles, light and heavy, were brought back during the Classicist epoch. The klismos style is found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some special types of notable individuality in Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China can not be tracked as long as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken collection of images and works of art had been kept safe, displaying the interiors and outside of Chinese houses and the designs of furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that show an intriguing resemblance to representations of ancient chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there were two major chair forms in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair can be seen both with and without arms though never missing a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to firm the back. In one style, however, the stiles were lightly curved on top of the arms for the purpose of conform correctly to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its back). Together, the three sections had been mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of a back splat had an influence on English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only just to a particular ability stabilise corner joints (as well as being loose as well) represent a signature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. All members are round in section or has rounded edges—a left over maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to be stiff and upright; when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a way of toppling. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs presumably were reserved for the senior individuals in the family, for they were respected greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have come to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is elegantly affixed to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is more often than not provided with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of these two furniture styles is stylized. The constructive and decorative parts are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the fact that the individual items do not look to have been fixed by use of either glue or screws, but had been mortised into one another and locked into its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Works of art project a style of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture while traveling which, in the same time, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is displayed in engravings of the 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. Although this design of chair can also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not certain that the design actually was born in The Netherlands. Normally, 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 patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in impressive numbers, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The design asserts itself by 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 form—that was, as progressed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The style owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them use wood of fairly thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and finer chairs may be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carvings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in style than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and became the preference 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
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 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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