The History of the Chair
Out of each of the furniture objects, the chair may be the primary one. While the majority of other items (save for the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair should be regarded here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to derivative types like the bench or sofa, which should 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 interesting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and aesthetic piece of art; it is also symbolic of social placement. Within the old royal courts there were plain differences between sitting on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to cope with a stool. In the 20th century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been regarded as a symbol of superior rank, and in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
As a furniture form, the chair ranges from a variety of various models. There are chairs created to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). During historical days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has derived special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair shapes have been perfected to suit to changing human desires. Because of its unique importance with man, the chair exists to its full purpose only when in employ. Though it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there might be things inside or not, a chair is understood and fairly tested with a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the different elements of a chair were labeled corresponding to the elements of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary role of your chair is to support our human body, its value is valued generally on how suitably it does fulfill this practical role. In the build of a chair, the maker is limited in certain static regulation and principal measurements. In these restrictions, however, the chair designer has large freedom.
The history of the chair covers an era of several thousand years. There existed peoples that held individual chair shapes, as expressions of the highest object in the spheres of handling and art. From these cultures, 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of expert craft, are seen from discoveries made in tombs. The first one of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair had four legs formed akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular structure was obtained. There was apparently no notable differentiation from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical populace. The general difference lies in the decorative ornamentation, in the choice of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was developed for an easily portable seat for officers. As a camp stool this form persevered til much later points in time. But the stool then was made as the role of a ceremonial seat, its original job as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can today be noted, 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 in the shape of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats are worked with wood. The simple manufacture of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, reappeared but some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this form is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is known not from any ancient specimen still around but in a variety of pictorial items. The most well known is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those are visible. These odd legs were presumed to be crafted in bent wood and were in that case put under great pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore super solid and were clearly signified.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; a number of statues of seated Romans offer chairs of a heavier and which appear to be a somewhat less intricately designed klismos. Both kinds, the light and the heavy, were revived as part of the Classicist era. The klismos chair is known in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in special types of marked uniqueness of Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be traced as well as that of Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed collection of images and paintings was preserved, displaying the interior and exterior of Chinese households and the designs of furniture. Also preserved since the 16th century are a trove of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an amazing likeness to images of previous chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there existed two iconic chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That chair is seen both with or without arms though always with its square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one type, it has been seen, the stiles could be delicately curved above the arms in order to conform correctly to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of a back). Each of the three sections are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of the back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only just to a particular extent support corner joints (as well as being loose to top that off) signify an element signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes about the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or has rounded edges—references as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and had on occasion a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for if too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs probably were only for senior members of the family, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have been brought to China from the West. It does not differ much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is delicately fixed to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is generally seen with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the overall effect of both furniture forms is stylized. The construction and aesthetic aspects are combined in a manner that is all at once naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual items do not appear to have been put together by means of either glue or screws, but have been mortised with one another and fixed in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Paintings show a style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same era, had the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is displayed in engravings of the interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this type of chair can also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not decided that the innovation actually originated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in impressive amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself with its elegant 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 was, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes its popularity to a combination of comfort 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 small upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike principles even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof employ wood of quite thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and finer items can be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and was popularised 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 well-known 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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