The History of the Chair
Out of all furniture pieces, the chair could be the most imperative. While many other objects (except the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is intended to be viewed here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to derivative chairs like the bench or sofa, which should be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support or aesthetic craft; it was also a symbol of social placement. In the historical royal courts there were clear connotations between being seated on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to utilise a stool. From the 20th century, the director’s and manager’s chair has become iconic of superior rank, as well as in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a higher level.
As a furniture form, the chair can be utilised for a wealth of different purposes. There are chairs designed to fit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical days there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has derived new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair types have evolved to match to differing human uses. For its significant relationship with man, the chair appears to its full importance only when used. Though it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there might be things inside or not, a chair is really seen best and fairly evaluated with a person using it, for chair and sitter require each other. Thus the various elements of the chair were named corresponding to the names of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the fundamental function of a chair is to support the human body, its credit is tested basically by how completely it measures up to this practical job. In the creation of a chair, the maker is bound by certain static rules and principal measurements. Inside these restrictions, however, the chair maker has great freedom.
The history of the chair extends over a period of several thousand years. There were cultures that created significant chair forms, expressions of the premier object in the industries of handling and design. In those peoples, a 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of skilled make, are seen from tombs. The first one of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have four legs structured akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this a durable triangular structure was obtained. There was from our knowledge no significant change from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical peasantry. The real difference was in the kind of ornamentation, in the choice of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was created as an easily packed seat for army. As a camp stool that type continued during much later points in time. But the stool also then took on the character of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical role as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the shape of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats were worked with wood. The simplistic structure of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric set between them, came again at some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this form is the folding stool, of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient item still existing but in a trove of pictorial items. The best known is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them can be seen. These strange legs were most likely to be manufactured with bent wood and were therefore had to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore extremely strong and were particularly indicated.
The Romans emulated the Greek design; a number of casts of seated Romans offer chairs of a more heavyset and apparently rather less delicately crafted klismos. Both features, the light or the heavy, were brought back in the Classicist time. The klismos influence can be seen in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in special types of notable iconicism of Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be traced as long as chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken folio of drawings and artworks had been preserved, showing the interiors and outside of Chinese households and the kinds of furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are some chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that show an intriguing resemblance to pictures of ancient chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there were two major chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair can be found both with and without arms although never missing a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to hold up the back. In one type, it has been seen, the stiles had been slightly curved by the arms for the purpose of sit correctly with the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the back). Each of the three sections had been mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Although the style of the Chinese back splat later had a foundation for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that could merely to a restricted ability stabilise corner joints (as well as being loose in the result) indicate an element signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or has rounded edges—referable perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and might have had a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; if too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs likely were kept only for older persons in the family, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It does not differ much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is usually provided with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the overall effect of these furniture designs is stylized. The structure and decoration aspects are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual parts do not appear to have been adjoined with either glue or screws, but are mortised into one another and fixed in its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Artworks project a design of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between 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 loosening some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, in the same era, had the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is seen 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. While this type of chair can also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not held that the form actually was born in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in considerable amounts, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of such chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself with its elegant 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 of forms—that was, to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike methods in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are constructed from wood of relatively thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and more expensive designs can be further embellished with special delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and was popularised 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 popular 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 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 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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