From each of the furniture items, the chair might be the most important. While most other items (except the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair must be said here in the general sense, from stool to throne to derivative chairs for example the bench and sofa, which might be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly distinguished.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or an aesthetic craft; it was also an indicator of social status. At the old royal courts there were significant connotations between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to make do with a stool. In the recent century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been regarded as an indicator of superior position, and in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a higher floor.
As a furniture creation, the chair can be employed for a range of variations. There are chairs structured to fit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical times 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, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has derived special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair types has been adapted to match to changing human requirements. For its close importance with man, the chair comes to its full importance only when in use. While it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there might be things inside or not, a chair is really seen best and evaluated by a person utilising it, because chair and sitter need the other. Thus the several areas of the chair have been labeled like the areas of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original role of the chair is to support our body, its credit is judged firstly from how suitably it measures up to this practical purpose. In the manufacture of a chair, the builder is bound for certain static law and principal measurements. In these boundaries, however, the chair maker has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair was a period of several thousand years. There are societies that had made significant chair forms, as expressions of the highest object in the areas of skill and creativity. Among such cultures, special note 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of expert design, are now seen from tombs. One of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have four legs formed similar to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this a solid triangular design was created. There was to our knowledge no significant differentiation in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary people. The only change was in the kind of ornamentation, in the selection of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was manufactured for an easily stored seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool this stool continued until much later periods. But the stool also then was created for the task of a ceremonial seat, its original function as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can already be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the shape of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats are made with wood. The plain make of the folding stool, composed of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric set between them, then came again at some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of this kind is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is known not as any ancient item still around but in a wealth of pictorial items. The best recognised is the klismos placed 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, only two of these legs could be seen. These unique legs were most likely to have been executed from bent wood and were as such had to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore super stable and were plainly pointed out.
The Romans emulated the Greek designs; existing casts of seated Romans display evidence of a thicker and in appearance slightly less delicately constructed klismos. Both designs, the light or heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist time. The klismos style can be seen in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in special types of profound iconicism around Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as well as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full collection of sketches and paintings had been kept safe, detailing the insides and exteriors of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Also preserved from the 16th century are a collection of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that display an interesting familiarity to representations of older chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there existed two iconic chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair is designed both with or without arms but never missing the square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to hold up the back. In one style, it has been seen, the stiles were slightly curved above the arms in order to suit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a chairback). Together, all three parts were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. While the idea of the back splat exercised an introduction for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden members that would merely to a particular ability stabilise corner joints (and furthermore are loose to top it off) indicate an element particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which stops about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or has rounded edges—references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and had on occasion a plaited texture. These chairs needed the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs most likely were kept for elderly people, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have been brought to China from the West. It does not differ so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is delicately fixed to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is usually provided with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resultant effect of both furniture designs is stylized. The manufacture and decorative elements are combined in a style that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the manner that the individual parts do not seem to have been adjoined by either glue or screws, but are mortised onto 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. Works of art display a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, at the same period, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the interior of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this type of chair is also made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not decided that the design actually started in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in considerable quantities, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of these chairs lined up against 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 of forms—that is, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The design owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and charm. The seat adheres to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike practices despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of fairly thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and more expensive designs can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in style than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles throughout 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 commonly 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 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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