The History of the Chair
From each of the furniture pieces, the chair might be of most importance. While most other forms (except the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair was said here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to further pieces like the bench and sofa, which can be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously distinguished.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not simply a physical support or an aesthetic piece; it historically was an indicator of social placement. At the Medieval royal courts there were plain differences between possessing a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to squat on a stool. In the last century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been seen as an identifier of superior rank, like in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a higher floor.
In a furniture purpose, the chair can be used for a range of various models. There are chairs manufactured to suit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past days there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and/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.
Modern day living has developed special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair kinds has been changed to match to different human requirements. Due to its significant importance with man, the chair comes to its full importance only when being used. Although it does not make a 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 with a person using it, for chair and sitter complement the other. Thus the individual elements of a chair are given names according to the parts of our human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary job of your chair is to support a body, its credit is tested principally from how completely it does fulfill this practical job. Within the design of a chair, the designer is bound in the static regulations and principal measurements. Within these rules, however, the chair builder has great freedom.
The history of the chair was dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of peoples that held individual chair forms, as expressions of the topmost object in the industries of skill and creativity. Within these such peoples, particular 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of expert make, were seen from findings made in tombs. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair has four legs structured akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this way a solid triangular form was created. There was in our understanding no marked differentiation between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical people. The main change lies in the level of ornamentation, in the particulars of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was crafted to be an easily carried seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool this form stayed during much later periods of time. But the stool also was designed for the role of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can now be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the form of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats were created of wood. The simplistic manufacture of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric held between them, was seen again somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this kind is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is found not from any ancient object still extant but found in a trove of pictorial objects. The significant kind is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place near Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs could be seen. These strange legs were likely to have been manufactured in bent wood and were as such subjected to a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore extremely stable and were plainly pointed out.
The Romans embued the Greek style; existing statues of seated Romans are evidence of a thicker and are a somewhat less intricately crafted klismos. Both styles, the light or the heavy, were brought back during the Classicist period. The klismos style is evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular brands of marked uniqueness of Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China can not be tracked as long as the progression of the chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of sketches and works of art was kept, showing the interiors and exteriors of Chinese houses and the designs of furniture. Also preserved from the 16th century are a collection of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an amazing familiarity to pictures of past chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there existed two major chair designs in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair is constructed both with and without arms however never missing a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to hold up the back. In one form, it must be said, the stiles were slightly curved over the arms to fit the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a back). Together, all three parts are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the innovation of the back splat exercised an introduction for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could merely to a restricted capability support corner joints (and furthermore are loose additionally) indicate a signature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or has rounded edges—referable perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs likely were reserved for elderly people, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It does not vary that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is more often than not possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resultant effect of both of these furniture designs is stylized. The structure and decorative elements are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the way that the individual parts do not look to have been constructed by use of either glue or screws, but are mortised onto one another and locked into place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Paintings display a type 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 produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same era, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be found in engravings of the interior 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 type of chair might also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not decided that the design actually was born in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in considerable amounts, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of its elegant proportions and fine 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 styles—that was, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The model owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat suits 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 little upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike practices in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are constructed from wood of relatively thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and more expensive examples can be further embellished with very delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which came from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and was popularised in several 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 popular 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 products 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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