Out of each of the furniture needs, the chair could be primary. While most of the other pieces (save the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is meant to be looked upon here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to derivative chairs including the bench and sofa, which should be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly defined.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and aesthetic craft; it historically was symbolic of social hierarchy. In the Medieval royal courts there were plain signifiers between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to squat on a stool. During the last century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been regarded as iconic of superior status, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a higher platform.
In a furniture construction, the chair can be used for a wealth of various models. There are chairs manufactured to fit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In the past there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, and/or 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 developed particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair shapes have changed to suit to growing human desires. Due to its particular relationship with man, the chair appears to its full purpose only when in employ. Though it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there might be things inside or not, a chair is understood best and fairly regarded with a person utilising it, because chair and sitter complement the other. Thus the several parts of a chair are named like the elements of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary purpose of a chair is to support a human body, its credit is tested basically from how well it does measure up to this practical purpose. In the structure of a chair, the carpenter is bound under some static legislation and principal measurements. In these limitations, however, the chair maker has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair is dates of several thousand years. There are cultures that held individual chair types, expressive of the highest craft in the areas of craft and creativity. Among such peoples, special 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of careful make, were found from tomb findings. The first of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair has four legs structured as akin to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this design a solid triangular form was obtained. There was from our view no notable differentiation from the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common populace. The real variation existed in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the evidence of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was made for an easily packed seat for soldiers. As a camp stool the form persevered during much later points in time. But the stool then also took on the use of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical role as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can from today be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the structure of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats were formed from wood. The easy construction of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, appeared but somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of these is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is known not with any ancient fossil still existing but as seen in a trove of pictorial material. The iconic kind is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of which could be visible. These creative legs were likely to be executed out of bent wood and were in that case needed to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore super stable and were visibly indicated.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; evidence of statues of seated Romans offer evidence of a denser and which appear to be a slightly more crudely crafted klismos. Both features, the light and heavy, were popularised as part of the Classicist period. The klismos chair is used in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in particular types of marked uniqueness in Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be tracked as long as chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed folio of images and works of art had been preserved, displaying the interiors and exterior of Chinese homes and the designs of furniture. Also preserved from the 16th century are a number of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that display an intriguing resemblance to styles of previous chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, two particular chair forms existed in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair can be found both with or without arms however never without its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one design, it has been found, the stiles were delicately curved above the arms to fit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its back). Each of the three sections had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Though the design of the Chinese back splat then had an influence on English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that merely to a limited ability reinforce corner joints (as well as being loose into the bargain) are an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which stops about the rounded staves. All members are round in section or have rounded edges—referable maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have had a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs likely were kept for elderly people in the family, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have travelled to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is usually designed with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of both these furniture forms is stylized. The constructive and decorative parts are combined in a way that is all at once naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the way that the individual items do not appear to have been constructed with either glue or screws, but are mortised into one another and held in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Paintings project a kind 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 bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same period, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is displayed in engravings of interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this design of chair might also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not certain that the design actually began in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable amounts, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its elegant 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 of forms—that was, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The model owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat suits 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 covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike principles despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are made from wood of fairly thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been taken away, and finer items would be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engravings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more open in style than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and was popularised 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 popular 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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