The History of the Chair
Out of all furniture items, the chair may be the most important. While most other forms (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair should be used here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to developed types such as a bench and sofa, which can be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support or aesthetic piece; it is also symbolic of social hierarchy. In the Medieval royal courts there were significant distinctions between sitting on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to utilise a stool. During the past century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been seen as a signifier of superior dignity, and even in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on an elevated floor.
As a furniture creation, the chair encompasses a wealth of different makes. There are chairs designed to match man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since the olden days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). There are 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 and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has developed particular chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair shapes has adapted to conform to differing human requirements. For its significant connection with man, the chair lives to its full significance only when being utilised. Though it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there is anything inside or not, a chair is seen best and clearly evaluated with a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter require the other. Thus the several parts of the chair have been given labels like the parts of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious job of a chair is to support our human body, its credit is valued firstly for how suitably it measures up to this practical purpose. In the structure of the chair, the chair maker is restricted in the static rules and principal measurements. Through these boundaries, however, the chair designer has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair was dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of societies that had iconic chair shapes, as expressive of the premier endeavour in the arenas of craft and creativity. Within these such societies, special 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of skilled craft, are now known from tomb findings. One of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair had four legs formed as akin to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. In this way a strong triangular form was obtained. There was apparently no particular variation in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary citizens. The simple change lied in the level of ornamentation, in the particulars of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was created for an easily stored seat for officers. As a camp stool this stool persevered for much later periods of time. But the stool also existed in the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original job as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from today be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the shape of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats were created of wood. The easy make of the folding stool, made of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, is seen somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of this type is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is known not as any ancient specimen still existing but found in a trove of pictorial evidence. The significant kind is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those can be seen. These unusual legs were likely to be manufactured from bent wood and were thus subjected to great pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very stable and were clearly indicated.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; some casts of seated Romans show evidence of a more heavyset and apparently kind of more crudely crafted klismos. Both types, the light or the heavy, were revived within the Classicist period. The klismos style is found in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in special kinds of profound individuality around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China can not be followed as well as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken collection of images and works of art had been preserved, detailing the insides and exterior of Chinese houses and their furniture. Kept also of the 16th century are a number of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that show an interesting resemblance to representations of previous chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, two chair forms dominated in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair is constructed both with and without arms though always with its square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to support the back. In one design, it has been seen, the stiles could be lightly curved by the arms in order to suit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a back). Together, all three parts had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Though the idea of this back splat then had a foundation for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that merely to a limited limit support corner joints (as well as being loose to top that off) indicate a feature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or has rounded edges—references maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and might have had a plaited texture. These chairs required the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to collapse. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs probably were kept only for elderly people, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have been brought to China from the West. It is not dissimilar very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is prettily affixed to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of these two furniture designs is stylized. The constructive and decoration aspects are combined in a way that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual members do not look to have been joined together by either glue or screws, but have been mortised into one another and locked into its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its name on the chair. Works of art project a style of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same time, possessed the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is displayed in engravings of the interior of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this kind of chair is also found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not determined that the form actually started in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in impressive amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its shapely 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 style—that was, to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes such popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved 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 of those employ wood of fairly thick density; but all the members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been sanded away, and finer chairs can be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engravings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the premier 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 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 styles 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 chairs in Brisbane contact Fast Office Furniture today and check our specials.
Comments
Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
Translator
