The History of the Chair
Out of each of the furniture items, the chair may be of the most importance. While the majority of other items (save for the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair should be used here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to derivative pieces 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 evidently labeled.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support and an aesthetic artwork; it was historically a signifier of social standing. Within the old royal courts there were plain differences between possessing a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to cope with a stool. During the past century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been iconic of superior standing, and even in democratic governments the speaker sits on an elevated level.
In a furniture form, the chair can be utilised for a number of various forms. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the past there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We make 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 and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has derived special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair shapes have perfected to fit to changing human uses. Due to its close link with man, the chair exists to its full importance only when being used. Though it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is understood best and evaluated with a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter need each other. Thus the different elements of the chair were labeled as the elements of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary role of your chair is to support the human body, its value is valued basically from how suitably it does measure up to this practical role. Within the construction of the chair, the carpenter is bound with certain static legislation and principal measurements. Through these regulations, however, the chair maker has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair was dates of several thousand years. There were civilizations that made individual chair types, as expressive of the topmost work in the arenas of technique and design. From those cultures, a mention 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of expert make, are now known from tomb discoveries. The first one 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 not unlike those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this design a strong triangular structure was crafted. There seems to be no significant change in the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary non-royals. The only change exists in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the selection of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was made to be an easily stored seat for army. As a camp stool that type stayed around til much later periods of time. But the stool then also was created as the use of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can now be found, 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 made in the form of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats were created out of wood. The simplistic construction of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that spin on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, then appeared at some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this form is the folding stool, made of ashwood, which is now at Guldh j (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not in any ancient item still around but from a variety of pictorial items. The most recognisable is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs could be shown. These creative legs were understood to have been created in bent wood and were as such bore huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore extremely stable and were clearly drawn.
The Romans adopted the Greek designs; evidence of statues of seated Romans offer evidence of a heavier and which appear to be a somewhat less intricately crafted klismos. Both features, light and heavy, were brought back within the Classicist epoch. The klismos design is used in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some types of profound originality of Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China is not able to be followed as far as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618 907) an unscathed folio of images and works of art has been kept safe, displaying the interiors and exteriors of Chinese houses and the furniture. Another preservation of the 16th century are a number of chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that hold an intriguing resemblance to images of ancient chairs.
Like in Egypt, two particular chair forms existed in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair can be found both with and without arms however always with the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one style, though, the stiles were marginally curved above the arms to conform correctly to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the back). The three sections had been mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the style of a back splat later had an influence on English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only to a particular ability stabilise corner joints (as well as being loose to top that off) are a signature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes around the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or have rounded edges a left over perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and may have a plaited form. These chairs required the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a habit of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs likely were kept only for the senior family members, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have come to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is intricately joined to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is more often than not designed with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the ultimate effect of both these furniture items is stylized. The construction and aesthetic parts are combined in a way that is simultaneously na ve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual items do not appear to have been put together with either glue or screws, but had been mortised into 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. Paintings display a style of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture in traveling which, in the same era, held the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is found in engravings of the inside of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this kind of chair is also made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not certain that the innovation actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Generally, 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 patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in vast numbers, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself with its harmonious proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms that is to say, as created in Paris around 1750 disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike principles even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof use wood of fairly thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and finer examples may be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carvings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and became the favourite 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 reknowned 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 Eug ne Gaillard in France, Henry van de Velde in Belgium, Josef Hoffman in Austria, Antonio Gaud 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 M tro.
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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Posted by rowland on June 28th, 2010 :: Filed under Uncategorized
