Out of all furniture pieces, the chair may be primary. While the majority of other items (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is meant to be said here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to further pieces for example a 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 evidently definitive.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and aesthetic item; it can also be symbolic of social standing. At the historical royal courts there were clear connotations between having a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to sit on a stool. During the 20th century, a director’s or manager’s chair has been seen as a symbol of superior standing, and in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a higher level.
In its furniture purpose, the chair is employed for a number of various forms. There are chairs created to match man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the olden days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); since 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 can have chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has developed unique chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair forms has been perfected to fit to evolving human uses. Due to its unique link with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when utilised. Whereas it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there are things inside or not, a chair is understood best and judged with a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the several parts of a chair have been named as the elements of our human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the fundamental work of a chair is to support the human body, its value is evaluated primarily from how well it measures up to this practical purpose. In the manufacture of a chair, the carpenter is restricted within certain static rules and principal measurements. Under these limits, however, the chair designer has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair covered dates of several thousand years. There existed peoples that held distinctive chair types, expressions of the highest object in the spheres of skill and creativity. Among those civilisations, particular 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 skilled make, are found from tomb discoveries. The first of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have four legs shaped similar to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this way a solid triangular design was made. There was from our view no marked change from the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular peasantry. The only change lies in the decorative ornamentation, in the choice of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was developed as an easily packed seat for officers. As a camp stool this stool stayed until much later points. But the stool also was designed as the role of a ceremonial seat, its technical function as a folding stool ignored or 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 work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the structure of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats are created from wood. The plain manufacture of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric held between them, then appeared but somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this type 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 in any ancient fossil still around but as in a variety of pictorial objects. The archetype is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place by Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them were visible. These unusual legs were understood to be manufactured of bent wood and were therefore needed to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore super durable and were particularly pointed out.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; a number of casts of seated Romans are examples of a heavier and apparently rather crudely built klismos. Both designs, light or heavy, were revived in the Classicist era. The klismos style is evidenced in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in special brands of marked iconicism of Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China cannot be followed as long as the progression of the chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed collection of drawings and artworks was kept, displaying the interiors and outside of Chinese households and the designs of furniture. Preserved also of the 16th century are some chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that hold an astonishing resemblance to images of past chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, two chair forms persisted in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair can be seen both with and without arms though never missing its square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to hold up the back. In one style, it has been seen, the stiles could be lightly curved above the arms in order to sit right with the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its back). Each of the three parts had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Though the style of this back splat had a foundation for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden members that just to a restricted extent stabilise corner joints (as well as being loose in the result) signify a signature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. Members are round in section or has rounded edges—acknowledging maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and occasionally had a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs most likely were only for the senior persons, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have been brought to China from the West. It does not vary very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is prettily joined to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is more often than not provided with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resulting effect of both furniture designs is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic parts are combined in a manner that is all at once naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the fact that the individual members do not appear to have been joined together with either glue or screws, but have been mortised into one another and locked into place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Paintings display a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, in the same era, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is seen in engravings of the interior of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this design of chair may also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not certain that the design actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in considerable quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up against a wall. The form 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 style—that is to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The chair owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are made from wood of relatively thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and finer designs might be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within 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 popularised 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 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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