The History of the Chair
Out of each of the furniture forms, the chair could be the paramount one. While many other items (apart from the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair must be regarded here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to further forms like the bench and sofa, which can be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently distinguished.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support or an aesthetic item; it historically is an indicator of social ranking. Within the old royal courts there were important signifiers between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to cope with a stool. Since the past century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been a signifier of superior status, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated floor.
As its furniture purpose, the chair is utilised for a variety of variations. There are chairs created to suit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In the past there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has derived special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair shapes has been evolved to suit to evolving human requirements. From its particular importance with man, the chair exists to its full purpose only when in employ. Although it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there is anything inside or not, a chair is really seen best and evaluated with a person using it, for chair and sitter suit the other. Thus the different limbs of a chair were given labels like the names of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the fundamental job of your chair is to support our human body, its credit is tested basically on how completely it measures up to this practical function. In the construction of a chair, the designer is restricted with the static legislation and principal measurements. Through these boundaries, however, the chair designer has large freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over an epoch of several thousand years. There is evidence of cultures that made significant chair types, seen of the principal work in the industries of technique and design. Within those civilisations, particular note must 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 result of expert scheme, were seen from tomb findings. The first one of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have had four legs crafted not unlike those of an animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular construction was created. There was in our view no notable difference between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular non-royals. The main variation lied in the complexity of ornamentation, in the particulars of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was developed to be an easily carried seat for soldiers. As a camp stool that kind persisted until much later times. But the stool also then was created as the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can already be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the structure of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats are created with wood. The simplistic structure of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, was then seen at some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of this kind is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient specimen still extant but seen in a trove of pictorial objects. The iconic kind is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those were shown. These curved legs were possibly manufactured of bent wood and were likely to have been needed to bear huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super durable and were overtly drawn.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek design; a number of casts of seated Romans are evidence of a denser and in appearance kind of more crudely constructed klismos. Both designs, light or heavy, were popularised as part of the Classicist era. The klismos chair is found in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in particular types of notable iconicism in Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China is not able to be charted as far back as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full folio of drawings and works of art was kept safe, with images of the interior and exterior of Chinese homes and the designs of furniture. Preserved also since the 16th century are a trove of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that show an intriguing resemblance to styles of past chairs.
Just like in Egypt, two chair forms dominated in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That chair can be designed both with and without arms however always having a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to hold up the back. In one kind, it must be said, the stiles are delicately curved by the arms in order to fit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its back). Each of the three sections were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the innovation of the back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only just to a restricted ability embolden corner joints (and are loose into the bargain) represent a signature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends upon the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or is given rounded edges—references as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and had on occasion a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs probably were reserved for elderly persons in the family, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It is akin that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is intricately affixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is usually designed with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of both of these furniture styles is stylized. The manufacture and decorative parts are combined in a style that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the fact that the individual members do not appear to have been fixed by means of either glue or screws, but had been mortised with one another and locked into its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Paintings project a kind of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at 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 found in engravings of the inside 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 type of chair is also seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not believed that the innovation actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in considerable quantities, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its elegant proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that is, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes this popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are constructed from wood of fairly thick dimensions; but all the members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and finer items would be further embellished with special delicate and decorative engraving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and became the preference 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 popularised 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.
For a great deal on office storage in Sydney contact Fast Office Furniture today and check our specials.
Sphere: Related Content