The History of the Chair
Out of each of the furniture pieces, the chair may be primary. While many other objects (except the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is meant to be viewed here in the general sense, from stool to throne to further makes like the bench or sofa, which may be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as a creative art. The chair is not just a physical support or an aesthetic artwork; it can also be an indicator of social rank. At the past royal courts there were social distinctions between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or having to cope with a stool. During the past century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been regarded as a signifier of superior standing, as well as in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a higher floor.
As a furniture form, the chair ranges from a number of variations. There are chairs manufactured to fit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). From historical days there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has derived new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair forms has adapted to suit to growing human uses. Because of its unique association with man, the chair exists to its full importance only when being used. Though it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there are items inside or not, a chair is really seen best and judged with a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter require the other. Thus the several limbs of a chair are given labels as the parts of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple job of the chair is to support your body, its value is valued principally by how fully it fulfills this practical job. Within the structure of the chair, the chair maker is restricted for the static legislation and principal measurements. Inside these boundaries, however, the chair designer has large freedom.
The history of the chair extends over an era of several thousand years. There is evidence of peoples that created iconic chair types, seen of the foremost object in the spheres of technique and aesthetics. Among these such societies, special 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of expert design, are now known from discoveries made in tombs. The first of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs shaped as akin to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. From this a durable triangular form was obtained. There was in our understanding no marked variation in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary non-royals. The main variation exists in the complex ornamentation, in the evidence of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was designed for an easily carried seat for army. As a camp stool this stool continued til much later periods. But the stool then also was designed for the character of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical function as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today be seen, 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 were constructed in the form of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats are created of wood. The simplistic structure of the folding stool, made of two frames that spin on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric held between them, then came up but some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of those is the folding stool, from ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is known not with any ancient specimen still extant but as seen in a variety of pictorial objects. The iconic kind is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place 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 them can be displayed. These strange legs were considered to be manufactured from bent wood and were thus had extreme pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very solid and were visibly denoted.
The Romans embued the Greek designs; existing statues of seated Romans are examples of a heavier and which appear to be a slightly crudely constructed klismos. Both kinds, the light and the heavy, were revived in the Classicist era. The klismos chair is found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some kinds of notable originality of Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be charted as well as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed folio of images and artworks has been kept safe, detailing the interior and exteriors of Chinese households and their furniture. Also kept since the 16th century are a number of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that show an intriguing resemblance to styles of past chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there existed two particular chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That chair can be constructed both with or without arms however never without a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one image, it has been found, the stiles were lightly curved on top of the arms in order to fit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the back). The three areas are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. While the innovation of this back splat then had an influence on English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that just to a limited capability reinforce corner joints (and then were loose as a result) are a feature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which stops upon the rounded staves. All members are round in section or has rounded edges—acknowledging maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and might have had a plaited texture. These chairs required of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for when too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs presumably were reserved for older individuals, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have been brought to China from the West. It does not differ very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is often provided with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resultant effect of both of these furniture forms is stylized. The manufacture and aesthetic issues are combined in a way that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the manner that the individual items do not appear to have been adjoined by either glue or screws, but are mortised into one another and locked into 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. Paintings project a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, at the same time, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is displayed 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. While this type of chair is also made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not certain that the design actually started in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in considerable amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of those chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself with its elegant 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 form—that is to say, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The chair owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat adheres 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 on the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back cover 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 those use wood of fairly thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and finer examples may be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engraving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in design than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which came from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and was popular 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
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 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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