From all the furniture pieces, the chair might be the paramount one. While most other objects (except the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair can be used here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to developed chairs such as the 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 obviously distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and an aesthetic object; it can also be semiotic of social standing. At the old royal courts there were plain differences between being led to a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to utilise a stool. Since the past century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been an indicator of superior status, and in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a high-set level.
In a furniture purpose, the chair is used for a variety of various models. There are chairs manufactured to fit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In the past there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We have 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 up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has demanded unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair kinds has been evolved to conform to evolving human uses. Because of its significant connection with man, the chair appears to its full purpose only when being used. While it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there might be items inside or not, a chair is best seen and fairly tested with a person using it, because chair and sitter require one another. Thus the several limbs of a chair have been named according to the elements of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious work of your chair is to support the body, its worth is evaluated principally by how suitably it measures up to this practical role. Within the manufacture of the chair, the maker is limited in certain static rules and principal measurements. Under these regulations, however, the chair maker has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair lasted dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of civilizations that had made iconic chair types, as expressions of the foremost task in the arenas of technique and design. In these cultures, 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 objects of careful make, were found from tomb discoveries. The first one of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have had four legs designed not unlike those of some animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular structure was created. There appears to be no notable variation from the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common non-royals. The simple variation lies in the level of ornamentation, in the selection of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was designed for an easily portable seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool this type persevered until much later days. But the stool then was designed for the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can already 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 are not able to be folded because the seats were made from wood. The simple construction of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that spin on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, can be seen but somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this type is the folding stool, made of ashwood, which can now be found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is known not from any ancient fossil still extant but found in a variety of pictorial material. The best recognised is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them are seen. These odd legs were understood to be manufactured with bent wood and were likely to have been needed to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore very strong and were clearly indicated.
The Romans emulated the Greek design; designs of statues of seated Romans are designs of a denser and are a slightly more crudely constructed klismos. Both designs, the light or the heavy, were revived as part of the Classicist epoch. The klismos style can be found in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some special brands of considerable individuality within Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China can not be charted as far back as in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged collection of drawings and artworks was kept, detailing the insides and outside of Chinese households and their furniture. Also kept since the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an astonishing likeness to representations of older chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there existed two particular chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair is seen both with and without arms although always with the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to firm the back. In one form, however, the stiles had been delicately curved by the arms to conform to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the chairback). All three areas had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Though the innovation of a back splat then had an inspiration for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could merely to a particular extent support corner joints (and furthermore were loose as well) signify an element particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which stops upon the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—acknowledging as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and had on occasion a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs presumably were only for senior family members, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have been brought to China from the West. It is akin that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is more often than not possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resulting effect of both these furniture items is stylized. The constructive and decorative aspects are combined in a way that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual items do not seem to have been constructed with either glue or screws, but are mortised on 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 name on the chair. Paintings display 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 between, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a similar 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 in traveling which, in the same time, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this type of chair is also seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not certain that the innovation actually began in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in large numbers, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of such chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its elegant proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that was, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those have wood of fairly thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and more upmarket items would be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carvings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more varied in style than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and won favour in many 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 reknowned 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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