The History of the Chair
Out of each of the furniture pieces, the chair might be paramount. While many other objects (save the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is meant to be regarded here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to further types like the bench and sofa, which might 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 exciting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not simply a physical support and/or an aesthetic piece of art; it is historically an indicator of social place. From the past royal courts there were significant distinctions between sitting on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to squat on a stool. Since the past century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been seen as an identifier of superior position, and even in democratic governments the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
As its furniture construction, the chair is utilised for a wealth of various forms. There are chairs structured to match man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). In the past there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has derived special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All these chair forms has evolved to match to growing human requirements. Due to its particular importance with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when in employ. Although it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there is anything inside or not, a chair is really seen and evaluated by a person using it, for chair and sitter complement one another. Thus the several elements of the chair have been labeled likened to the areas of a human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original function of a chair is to support a human body, its credit is judged primarily for how well it measures up to this practical purpose. Within the design of a chair, the chair maker is restricted in certain static law and principal measurements. In these regulations, however, the chair designer has great freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over a period of several thousand years. There were peoples that held iconic chair types, as expressions of the highest task in the areas of skill and design. In these cultures, special mention 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of skilled design, are today a finding from tombs. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair had four legs designed as akin to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this design a strong triangular structure was crafted. There was apparently no significant difference between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common people. The real difference existed in the type of ornamentation, in the evidence of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was designed for an easily portable seat for soldiers. As a camp stool this kind persevered during much later periods. But the stool then took on the use of a ceremonial seat, its technical history as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can today be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the construction of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats are formed out of wood. The simplistic manufacture of the folding stool, made of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric held between them, then came again but somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this type is the folding stool, of ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not in any ancient fossil still around but as found in a trove of pictorial evidence. The iconic kind is the klismos displayed 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, but only two of which were shown. These unusual legs were presumed to be executed with bent wood and were probably put under extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore extremely stable and were particularly indicated.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; evidence of casts of seated Romans display evidence of a denser and apparently kind of less intricately crafted klismos. Both features, light and heavy, were brought back within the Classicist time. The klismos influence is known in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular brands of notable uniqueness in Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China cannot be charted as far back as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of images and works of art has been kept safe, showing the interior and exteriors of Chinese buildings and the designs of furniture. Another preservation since the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an intriguing similarity to representations of ancient chairs.
As in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This chair is constructed both with and without arms however never missing its square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to hold up the back. In one style, however, the stiles had been marginally curved on top of the arms to fit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the back). Together, all three areas were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Although the innovation of a back splat had an inspiration for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that only just to a restricted ability embolden corner joints (and then are loose to top it off) represent an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops around the rounded staves. All members are round in section or have rounded edges—a left over as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and had on occasion a plaited seat. These chairs needed the sitter to stay stiff and upright; when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs probably were only for elderly persons in the family, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have been brought to China from the West. It is not dissimilar much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is usually possessing metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resulting effect of both furniture designs is stylized. The construction and decorative 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 members do not look to have been affixed with either glue or screws, but are mortised with one another and fixed in its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Artworks show 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 the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same period, possessed the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is evidenced in engravings of 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 type of chair can also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not held that the design actually was born in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in considerable quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up against a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious 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 to say, as created in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair 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 tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike practices in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are made from wood of rather thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and more upmarket designs can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engraving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and became the favourite 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 reknowned 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 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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