Out of each of the furniture items, the chair may be primary. While many other pieces (save for the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair was regarded here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to complex kinds including the bench and sofa, which can be seen 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 a creative art. The chair is not simply a physical support or an aesthetic craft; it is also a symbol of social ranking. In the old royal courts there were important connotations between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, and having to make do with a stool. Since the last century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has developed iconic of superior dignity, and in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
In its furniture form, the chair is employed for a range of various models. There are chairs created to attend to man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). In the olden days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, and 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 day living has derived special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair types has changed to suit to growing human needs. From its significant relationship with man, the chair appears to its full purpose only when utilised. While it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there are items inside or not, a chair is best seen and fairly judged with a person utilising it, for chair and sitter need the other. Thus the individual elements of a chair have been given labels corresponding to the elements of our human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious function of your chair is to support your body, its worth is valued primarily from how well it does measure up to this practical job. In the build of the chair, the designer is limited in particular static regulation and principal measurements. Under these limits, however, the chair designer has great freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over dates of several thousand years. There were peoples that had made distinctive chair types, expressions of the principal endeavour in the areas of craft and creativity. Within those peoples, particular 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of masterful make, are seen from discoveries made in tombs. The first one of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair has four legs designed not unlike those of some animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. From this design a strong triangular structure was crafted. There seems to be no significant change in the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common people. The general change exists in the level of ornamentation, in the particulars of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was crafted to be an easily stored seat for soldiers. As a camp stool the stool continued until much later points. But the stool also was made for the task of a ceremonial seat, its original task as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today be observed, from as early as 1366 57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the structure of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats were formed from wood. The plain build of the folding stool, composed of two frames that turn on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, came again somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this form is the folding stool, made of ashwood, which can now be found at Guldh j (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient item still around but as seen from a trove of pictorial evidence. The iconic kind is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs can be visible. These curving legs were most likely to be manufactured with bent wood and were thus put under a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore extremely strong and were plainly indicated.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; existing casts of seated Romans display evidence of a heavier and apparently slightly more crudely designed klismos. Both kinds, light or heavy, were revived within the Classicist epoch. The klismos influence is found in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of notable individuality around Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China cannot be tracked as well as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618 907) a full folio of drawings and works of art had been protected, detailing the insides and outside of Chinese homes and the designs of furniture. Also kept of the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that show an amazing likeness to images of past chairs.
Same as in Egypt, two chair designs persisted in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This chair can be seen both with and without arms however always having the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to firm the back. In one form, it has been seen, the stiles had been marginally curved on top of the arms for the purpose of conform to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a chairback). Together, the three limbs are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the design of this back splat later had an introduction for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that could only to a restricted ability support corner joints (as well as being loose to top that off) indicate a feature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or possesses rounded edges referable maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and had on occasion a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for if too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs presumably were allowed only for older people, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western point of view the overall effect of both furniture styles is stylized. The structure and decorative aspects are combined in a style that is all at once both na ve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual items do not seem to have been fixed by either glue or screws, but have been mortised with one another and locked into place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Artworks display 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 in the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same time, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is found in engravings of the interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this design of chair is also made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not certain that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in considerable quantities, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its shapely proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style that is to say, as developed in Paris around 1750 spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof have wood of quite thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and more expensive chairs may be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and was popular 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 reknowned 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 Eug ne Gaillard in France, Henry van de Velde in Belgium, Josef Hoffman in Austria, Antonio Gaud 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 M tro.
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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