Of all furniture forms, the chair could be of most importance. While most other objects (apart from the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair should be looked upon here in the general sense, from stool to throne to further items including a bench and sofa, which may be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously definitive.

The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or aesthetic artwork; it can also be symbolic of social ranking. In the Medieval royal courts there were plain signifiers between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to use a stool. During the last century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been an identifier of superior status, and even in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a higher level.

In a furniture form, the chair is utilised for a wealth of different makes. There are chairs created to fit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the olden days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used 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. There are chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Our lifestyle has demanded particular chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair shapes have adapted to conform to differing human desires. For its significant association with man, the chair lives to its full advantage only when being utilised. Whereas it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there are things inside or not, a chair is seen best and tested with a person using it, for chair and sitter complement one another. Thus the several limbs of a chair are labeled corresponding to the parts of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the obvious job of your chair is to support the body, its worth is evaluated firstly for how fully it fulfills this practical job. Within the structure of the chair, the carpenter is restricted for certain static regulations and principal measurements. Through these limitations, however, the chair maker has great freedom.

The history of the chair was an era of several thousand years. There are societies that made iconic chair shapes, expressive of the premier endeavour in the spheres of technique and aesthetics. Within these civilisations, 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.

Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the objects of masterful scheme, are today a finding from tomb discoveries. The first of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have four legs shaped as akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular design was created. There seemed to be no particular differentiation in the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular people. The general variation exists in the brand of ornamentation, in the selection of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was designed as an easily packed seat for army officers. As a camp stool the stool stayed around til much later periods. But the stool then also existed in the use of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical job as a folding stool being forgotten. This can now be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the form of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats are created out of wood. The simple build of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric set between them, appeared some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of these is the folding stool, of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is found not as any ancient fossil still extant but as seen in a large amount of pictorial items. The most recognisable is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs can be seen. These strange legs were understood to have been created from bent wood and were likely to have been needed to bear great pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very stable and were visibly drawn.

The Romans adopted the Greek design; a number of casts of seated Romans are designs of a heavier and are a kind of less delicately constructed klismos. Both designs, the light or the heavy, were popularised as part of the Classicist time. The klismos design can be found in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of profound uniqueness in Denmark and Sweden around 1800.

China
The progression of the chair in China can not be traced as far back as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full collection of images and paintings has been protected, detailing the insides and exteriors of Chinese houses and the kinds of furniture. Another preservation of the 16th century are some chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that hold an astonishing resemblance to designs of ancient chairs.

As was the case in Egypt, two iconic chair forms existed in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair is designed both with or without arms but always with its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to give support to the back. In one design, though, the stiles were lightly curved over the arms to sit correctly with the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the chairback). All three areas are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the design of the Chinese back splat later had an influence on English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden items that just to a restricted capability embolden corner joints (and furthermore are loose to top that off) indicate a feature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which closes upon the rounded staves. All members are round in section or has rounded edges—acknowledging as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for when too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a way of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs probably were kept only for senior family members, for they were greatly esteemed.

The Chinese folding stool is thought to have come to China from the West. It is akin much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is more often than not provided with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resultant effect of these furniture items is stylized. The construction and aesthetic aspects are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual parts do not seem to have been put together with either glue or screws, but were mortised with one another and held in position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Artworks show a style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, at the same era, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be found in engravings of interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this type of chair can also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not decided that the design actually was born in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast numbers, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself by its shapely proportions and fine 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 was, as created in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes such popularity to a combination of leisure and charm. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of them use wood of fairly thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and more expensive examples can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used rather than upholstery.

English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in style than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and was popularised 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 well-known 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 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.

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