The History of the Chair
Out of all furniture pieces, the chair might be the primary one. While the majority of other forms (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is intended to be said here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to derivative chairs like the bench and sofa, which should be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously defined.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and/or aesthetic craft; it is also an indicator of social hierarchy. Within the past royal courts there were important distinctions between sitting on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to sit on a stool. During the 20th century, the director’s and manager’s chair has become an identifier of superior status, and even in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated floor.
As its furniture creation, the chair encompasses a number of different makes. There are chairs designed to match man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past times there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (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 can make chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has demanded unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair kinds have changed to suit to growing human uses. Due to its significant importance with man, the chair comes to its full purpose only when utilised. Whereas it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is best seen and judged best by a person using it, for chair and sitter suit each other. Thus the individual elements of a chair have been named like the areas of our human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary function of your chair is to support a human body, its worth is tested basically from how suitably it does fulfill this practical role. Within the creation of a chair, the designer is restricted in some static legislation and principal measurements. Through these limits, however, the chair creator has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over dates of several thousand years. There are civilizations that created individual chair shapes, seen of the leading object in the spheres of handling and creativity. Among these such societies, a mention 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 items of skilled design, are today found from tombs. The first of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have had four legs structured not unlike those of an animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this design a stable triangular construction was obtained. There was in our view no significant change in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary populace. The simple difference existed in the type of ornamentation, in the choice of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was crafted as an easily stored seat for soldiers. As a camp stool this chair existed til much later periods. But the stool also was made as the task of a ceremonial seat, its technical history as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the construction of folding stools but are not able to be folded because the seats are created from wood. The plain make of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, then came up somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of these is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is known not from any ancient item still existing but as found in a wealth of pictorial items. The most recognisable is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place by Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which are seen. These creative legs were presumed to have been manufactured in bent wood and were probably put under a large amount of pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very strong and were overtly pointed out.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; designs of statues of seated Romans show examples of a more heavyset and apparently kind of crudely designed klismos. Both types, the light and heavy, were popularised as part of the Classicist epoch. The klismos influence is seen in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular brands of considerable originality of Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China can not be charted as long as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full collection of images and paintings had been protected, showing the interiors and exterior of Chinese buildings and the kinds of furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are some chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an intriguing similarity to images of past chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there existed two major chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This chair has been designed both with or without arms but never missing the square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one type, it has been seen, the stiles had been marginally curved on top of the arms in order to conform to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the chairback). Together, all three areas were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the idea of the Chinese back splat then had an introduction for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that could only to a limited capability stabilise corner joints (and then were loose as a result) represent an element particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which stops around the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or is given rounded edges—a left over as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; when too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs probably were allowed only for senior people, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have taken to China from the West. It is akin much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is prettily affixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is generally provided with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of these furniture styles is stylized. The construction and decorative aspects are combined in a style that is both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual items do not look to have been fixed by means of either glue or screws, but have been mortised on one another and held in 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. Works of art display a type of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, at the same period, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be found in engravings of interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this style of chair may also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not believed that the style actually was born in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in large quantities, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of those chairs lined up along a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of 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 of styles—that is to say, as brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of rather thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been cut away, and more expensive items might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engraving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used in place of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and became the preference in large 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 commonly known and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
In 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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