The History of the Chair
From each of the furniture items, the chair may be of the most importance. While most other objects (apart from the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is intended to be regarded here in the common sense, from stool to throne to complex forms for example the bench and sofa, which may be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously distinuishable.
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 or an aesthetic object; it can also be semiotic of social ranking. Within the past royal courts there were plain signifiers between being seated on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to cope with a stool. Since the recent century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen an indicator of superior standing, like in democratic governments the speaker sits on a raised floor.
As its furniture creation, the chair can be used for a range of different forms. There are chairs structured to match man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the past there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, 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.
Our modern lifestyle has demanded special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair forms have been evolved to fit to changing human requirements. For its close relationship with man, the chair lives to its full advantage only when being utilised. Though it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there might be items inside or not, a chair is really understood and tested with a person using it, because chair and sitter need the other. Thus the various areas of a chair are given labels like the areas of our human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious work of the chair is to support your body, its worth is judged primarily by how fully it measures up to this practical role. Within the construction of the chair, the maker is restricted within certain static law and principal measurements. Within these limitations, however, the chair maker has great freedom.
The history of the chair covers a period of several thousand years. There were societies that had unique chair forms, expressions of the foremost task in the areas of skill and creativity. From such cultures, individual note 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of skilled scheme, are now found from tombs. The first of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair had four legs structured akin to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. In this design a durable triangular design was obtained. There was from our understanding no notable difference from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary people. The real variation exists in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the evidence of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was crafted for an easily stored seat for army officers. As a camp stool this kind persisted during much later times. But the stool then was made for the use of a ceremonial seat, its technical job as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can today be found, 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 constructed in the structure of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats were worked from wood. The simple manufacture of the folding stool, made of two frames that spin on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, reappears some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this kind is the folding stool, of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is known not with any ancient item still extant but found in a large amount of pictorial objects. The archetype is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location near Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those would be visible. These curved legs were probably manufactured of bent wood and were probably needed to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super durable and were particularly denoted.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; designs of casts of seated Romans display designs of a denser and which appear to be a kind of crudely constructed klismos. Both designs, the light and heavy, were revived as part of the Classicist period. The klismos influence can be evidenced in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some types of considerable uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be followed as far back as in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed serial of sketches and artworks had been preserved, detailing the inside and outside of Chinese houses and the kinds of furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are a trove of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an amazing familiarity to images of previous chairs.
Same as in Egypt, there were two particular chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair is designed both with or without arms however never missing the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to firm the back. In one type, though, the stiles had been slightly curved over the arms so as to conform correctly to the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of a back). The three parts had been mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the design of this back splat exercised an influence on English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that merely to a limited capability reinforce corner joints (and then are loose in the result) represent a feature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends around the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or possesses rounded edges—referable maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and had on occasion a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs presumably were only for the senior family members, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have come to China from the West. It does not differ much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is elegantly affixed to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is often seen with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the overall effect of these two furniture forms is stylized. The construction and aesthetic parts are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the fact that the individual parts do not seem to have been held together by means of either glue or screws, but were mortised with one another and fixed in place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Works of art display a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same time, possessed the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the inside of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this type of chair is also seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not believed that the form actually started in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in considerable amounts, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that was, to say, as brought out in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those have wood of quite thick density; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and finer items may be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in style than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles through 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 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 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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