Out of each of the furniture items, the chair could be the paramount one. While many other items (except the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair must be looked upon here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to developed makes like a bench and sofa, which may be considered 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 stimulating as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support or an aesthetic object; it was also an indicator of social placement. From the historical royal courts there were plain distinctions between sitting on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to sit on a stool. Since the past century, the director’s and manager’s chair has risen an indicator of superior position, and even in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a higher platform.
As its furniture form, the chair can be used for a range of different models. There are chairs manufactured to suit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the olden days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). There are 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.
Modern day living has designated new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair forms has adapted to conform to evolving human uses. From its unique connection with man, the chair lives to its full advantage only when being used. Though it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is really understood and tested with a person utilising it, because chair and sitter need each other. Thus the different areas of a chair were labeled likened to the parts of our human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first role of a chair is to support our human body, its credit is tested firstly on how fully it measures up to this practical function. Within the manufacture of the chair, the builder is restricted within the static rules and principal measurements. Inside these limits, however, the chair maker has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair extends over a period of several thousand years. There are peoples that made individual chair types, seen of the topmost task in the industries of technique and aesthetics. Out of those peoples, a mention needs to 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 construct of careful make, are now known from discoveries made in tombs. The first of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have four legs formed not unlike those of some animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular construction was obtained. There was from our view no noteworthy differentiation from the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary populace. The real change was in the kind of ornamentation, in the evidence of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was crafted for an easily packed seat for army. As a camp stool that form stayed around til much later days. But the stool also then was designed as the task of a ceremonial seat, its technical role as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from today be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the form of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats are worked from wood. The simple manufacture of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric set between them, then appeared somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of this type is the folding stool, of ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient item still extant but as seen in a wealth of pictorial material. The best recognised is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of which are visible. These curved legs were thought to be executed of bent wood and were likely to have been needed to bear great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore super durable and were visibly denoted.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek designs; quite a few statues of seated Romans are chairs of a thicker and in appearance somewhat less delicately built klismos. Both features, the light and the heavy, were popularised during the Classicist period. The klismos style can be seen in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular forms of considerable originality around Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as far back as the progression of the chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed series of drawings and artworks has been kept safe, showing the inside and outside of Chinese houses and the furniture. Also preserved since the 16th century are a collection of chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that show an intriguing similarity to pictures of previous chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair has been designed both with or without arms although always with its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to give support to the back. In one image, it has been seen, the stiles are delicately curved by the arms for the purpose of sit right with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of its chairback). Together, all three limbs had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of this back splat had an influence on English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that only to a particular capability reinforce corner joints (and were loose to top it off) represent an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. Members are round in section or have rounded edges—referable perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and might have had a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for if too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs likely were kept for senior people, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have come to China from the West. It does not differ so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is elegantly held to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resultant effect of these furniture styles is stylized. The constructive and decorative issues are combined in a way that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the way that the individual items do not look to have been affixed with either glue or screws, but have been mortised with one another and locked into position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Paintings display a type of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same era, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is found in engravings of the interiors 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 design of chair is also seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not decided that the style actually originated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in considerable numbers, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself by its elegant 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 is to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The design owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat suits to the human body and permits 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 over the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof use wood of rather thick dimensions; but each member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and more upmarket items can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in style than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and was popular 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
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 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 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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