The History of the Chair
Out of each of the furniture forms, the chair could be of the most importance. While many other items (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair must be said here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to derivative items 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 definitive.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not just a physical support and an aesthetic craft; it is also an indicator of social hierarchy. In the historical royal courts there were social connotations between sitting on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to cope with a stool. During the 20th century, the director’s and manager’s chair has been an identifier of superior status, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
As its furniture creation, the chair holds a variety of various models. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since historical days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs 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. We can make chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has developed particular chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair types has perfected to match to different human requirements. Due to its particular relationship with man, the chair comes to its full significance only when utilised. While it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there is anything inside or not, a chair is best seen and clearly evaluated with a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter need the other. Thus the different areas of the chair have been given names according to the parts of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original work of the chair is to support our body, its value is valued basically from how well it fulfills this practical function. In the build of a chair, the designer is bound by certain static rules and principal measurements. In these limits, however, the chair builder has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair covered dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of societies that have created unique chair types, expressive of the premier task in the spheres of craft and creativity. Within such civilisations, a note needs to 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 result of masterful design, are today found from tomb discoveries. The first of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have four legs shaped akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. In this way a stable triangular structure was obtained. There seemed to be no significant differentiation from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular populace. The real difference was in the brand of ornamentation, in the particulars of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was created to be an easily stored seat for army officers. As a camp stool that kind continued til much later times. But the stool also then existed in the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical function 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 work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the form of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats were worked out of wood. The plain structure of the folding stool, composed of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, was then seen but somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of those is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, which can now be found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient object still in form but in a variety of pictorial objects. The iconic kind is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area by Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs could be seen. These unusual legs were presumed to have been manufactured with bent wood and were probably needed to bear a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super strong and were overtly denoted.
The Romans emulated the Greek design; quite a few models of seated Romans are examples of a more heavyset and which appear to be a somewhat crudely crafted klismos. Both styles, light or heavy, were popularised within the Classicist epoch. The klismos style is known in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of notable individuality within Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China cannot be followed as long as that of Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged serial of images and works of art had been kept, with images of the interior and outer parts of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Also preserved from the 16th century are a trove of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that display an amazing likeness to styles of previous chairs.
As were the designs in Egypt, there existed two major chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair was seen both with and without arms although never without the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to give support to the back. In one image, however, the stiles had been slightly curved by the arms to conform correctly to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its chairback). The three areas were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Though the style of this back splat had an introduction for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that merely to a restricted capability support corner joints (as well as being loose as well) indicate a feature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops upon the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—a left over perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and occasionally had a plaited form. These chairs demanded of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs most likely were only for elderly individuals in the family, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have travelled to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is elegantly joined to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is usually seen with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the overall effect of both these furniture styles is stylized. The structure and aesthetic issues are combined in a manner that is at the same time naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual parts do not appear to have been affixed with either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and locked into 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. Artworks display a kind of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, in the same period, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is evidenced in engravings of the interior of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this style of chair may also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not determined that the form actually began in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in impressive quantities, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of its shapely proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that is, as brought out in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike principles despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them have wood of rather thick density; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been sanded away, and more upmarket chairs might be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more variable in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles through 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
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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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