26 Jun 10 The History of the Chair
Out of each of the furniture items, the chair could be the primary one. While most other forms (save for the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is viewed here in the common sense, from stool to throne to derivative types such as the bench and sofa, which might 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 craft. The chair is not only a physical support and/or an aesthetic item; it historically was symbolic of social standing. In the old royal courts there were significant signifiers between possessing a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to cope with a stool. From the past century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been seen as a signifier of superior dignity, as well as in democratic governments the speaker sits on a high-set level.
As a furniture purpose, the chair ranges from a number of variations. There are chairs created to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). During past days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has demanded special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair shapes have adapted to conform to changing human uses. For its particular importance with man, the chair lives to its full significance only when being utilised. Though it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is understood best and tested with a person using it, because chair and sitter complement the other. Thus the different elements of the chair have been labeled according to the areas of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary purpose of a chair is to support a human body, its value is valued principally for how suitably it fulfills this practical function. Within the manufacture of a chair, the carpenter is bound in certain static law and principal measurements. Within these regulations, however, the chair creator has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair covers dates of several thousand years. There were peoples that made iconic chair forms, expressions of the foremost craft in the arenas of craft and creativity. In those civilisations, individual mention can 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 construct of careful craft, are today found from tomb findings. One of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair had four legs shaped akin to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. From this a stable triangular form was crafted. There was to our understanding no significant variation in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical non-royals. The general variation lied in the level of ornamentation, in the choice of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was manufactured to be an easily carried seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool this form existed for much later points in time. But the stool also then took on the character of a ceremonial seat, its technical function as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can from evidence be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the structure of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats are worked from wood. The simple structure of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric held between them, is seen again somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of those is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not with any ancient object still existing but as seen from a large amount of pictorial material. The iconic kind is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs would be visible. These unusual legs were probably crafted with bent wood and were in that case put under extreme pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore very durable and were particularly pointed out.
The Romans adopted the Greek style; a number of statues of seated Romans display evidence of a thicker and in appearance rather crudely designed klismos. Both kinds, the light or the heavy, were seen again within the Classicist time. The klismos design can be found in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some forms of marked individuality within Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China can not be traced as far as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of sketches and paintings had been protected, displaying the interiors and outer parts of Chinese homes and the furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an interesting likeness to images of older chairs.
Same as in Egypt, there were two major chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That chair was seen both with and without arms but always having the square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to hold up the back. In one style, it must be said, the stiles were marginally curved by the arms for the purpose of fit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a back). Together, all three areas were mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of a back splat exercised an influence on English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that would merely to a limited ability support corner joints (and were loose as a result) are a signature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops over the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or is given rounded edges—acknowledging maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and had on occasion a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to be stiff and upright; when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs likely were kept only for elderly members of the family, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It is akin so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is generally seen with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resultant effect of both these furniture items is stylized. The manufacture and decoration issues are combined in a manner that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the manner that the individual items do not seem to have been joined together by 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 had its name on the chair. Paintings show a kind 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 bring out a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, in the same time, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is found in engravings of interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this type of chair might also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not believed that the style actually started in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in large numbers, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself with its elegant proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that was, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The model owes such popularity to a combination of leisure and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike practices in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof have wood of relatively thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and finer items can be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used in place of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more open in style than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and won favour in large 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
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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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