The History of the Chair
From each of the furniture forms, the chair might be the paramount one. While the majority of other pieces (except the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is meant to be used here in the general sense, from stool to throne to derivative types including the bench or 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 clearly defined.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support or aesthetic craft; it historically is a symbol of social hierarchy. At the Medieval royal courts there were important signifiers between being led to a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to sit on a stool. During the 20th century, the director’s or manager’s chair has become an indicator of superior standing, like in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a higher floor.
In its furniture purpose, the chair is used for a variety of various forms. There are chairs manufactured to suit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since past times there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We have chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has developed new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair forms have perfected to match to differing human requirements. For its significant link with man, the chair lives to its full meaning only when being utilised. Although it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is understood best and tested by a person using it, because chair and sitter complement one another. Thus the individual limbs of the chair have been given names like the parts of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original job of a chair is to support a human body, its value is evaluated basically for how completely it fulfills this practical role. In the manufacture of the chair, the builder is limited with the static law and principal measurements. Under these boundaries, however, the chair creator has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over a period of several thousand years. There existed peoples that had made iconic chair forms, seen of the leading task in the areas of technique and creativity. Out of such societies, special note should 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of careful make, are now seen from tomb findings. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have four legs crafted as akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this a strong triangular structure was obtained. There was apparently no significant difference from the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical non-royals. The simple difference was in the kind of ornamentation, in the particulars of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was developed to be an easily carried seat for officers. As a camp stool that form existed for much later points in time. But the stool also then was made as the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its technical task as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can already be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the shape of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats were created from wood. The simplistic make of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, then came again somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of this type is the folding stool, made from ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not with any ancient specimen still extant but found in a trove of pictorial objects. 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 that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those could be seen. These curved legs were presumably crafted with bent wood and were likely to have been subjected to a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very strong and were plainly denoted.
The Romans embued the Greek style; evidence of models of seated Romans are designs of a more heavyset and are a rather more crudely built klismos. Both kinds, the light and the heavy, were popularised as part of the Classicist period. The klismos influence can be seen in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some types of marked individuality within Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China can not be tracked as long as the progression of the chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of drawings and artworks has been protected, showing the interiors and outer parts of Chinese buildings and the kinds of furniture. Also kept from the 16th century are a number of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an astonishing familiarity to designs of previous chairs.
As in Egypt, two chair designs dominated in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair is found both with or without arms however always having its square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to hold up the back. In one design, it has been seen, the stiles are lightly curved on top of the arms in order to conform to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the chairback). Together, the three limbs are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Although the innovation of the back splat then had a foundation for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that could merely to a restricted capability embolden corner joints (as well as being loose in the bargain) indicate a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops upon the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or has rounded edges—a left over maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have a plaited form. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; if too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a way of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs presumably were reserved for older individuals in the family, for they were respected greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have come to China from the West. It does not vary much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is delicately joined to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is usually possessing metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of these two furniture designs is stylized. The manufacture and aesthetic parts are combined in a way that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the manner that the individual items do not seem to have been adjoined by means of either glue or screws, but have been mortised with one another and locked into position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Paintings 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, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board in 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, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is seen in engravings of the interior 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 may also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not held that the form actually started in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in large numbers, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up against a wall. The design asserts itself by its harmonious proportions and expensive 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 styles—that was, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved 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 of them have wood of rather thick density; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and more upmarket items can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engravings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used in place of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and found favour 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 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 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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