From all the furniture objects, the chair may be the primary one. While many other objects (save the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is meant to be said here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to further kinds including the bench and sofa, which might be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously distinguished.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or aesthetic creation; it historically was an indicator of social placement. Within the historical royal courts there were plain differences between sitting on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to sit on a stool. In the 20th century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been iconic of superior dignity, like in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a high-set level.
As a furniture form, the chair can be used for a variety of different forms. There are chairs structured to match man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since the past there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). There are 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, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has developed new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All these chair shapes have been adapted to suit to changing human needs. From its close connection with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when utilised. Although it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there are items inside or not, a chair is best seen and evaluated with a person using it, because chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the different parts of a chair were given names as the parts of the human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary role of the chair is to support our human body, its worth is valued primarily for how well it does measure up to this practical function. Within the manufacture of the chair, the builder is bound with some static regulation and principal measurements. Through these regulations, however, the chair creator has large freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over a period of several thousand years. There are societies that held distinctive chair types, seen of the foremost work in the industries of craft and creativity. From those societies, a mention should 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 structures of careful design, are now known from findings made in tombs. The first one of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair had four legs crafted not unlike those of some animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this way a strong triangular form was obtained. There was in our knowledge no notable variation between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular populace. The real difference was in the level of ornamentation, in the selection of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was developed to be an easily stored seat for officers. As a camp stool that form stayed for much later periods of time. But the stool also then existed in the task of a ceremonial seat, its technical history as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can now be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the shape of folding stools but are not able to be folded because the seats are formed of wood. The simplistic manufacture of the folding stool, composed of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, was then seen at some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this form is the folding stool, made from ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not as any ancient fossil still in form but in a wealth of pictorial objects. The most well known is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them can be shown. These creative legs were presumed to be manufactured of bent wood and were likely to have been put under great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super stable and were plainly indicated.
The Romans embued the Greek designs; some statues of seated Romans are examples of a denser and apparently somewhat crudely built klismos. Both kinds, the light and heavy, were brought back as part of the Classicist era. The klismos style is seen in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some special types of profound iconicism in Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be followed as long as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed series of images and artworks has been kept safe, showing the interiors and outer parts of Chinese houses and their furniture. Also preserved of the 16th century are some chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an astonishing familiarity to designs of previous chairs.
As were the designs in Egypt, there existed two particular chair designs in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair can be constructed both with or without arms however never without its square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to support the back. In one image, it has been found, the stiles are lightly curved on top of the arms so as to conform correctly to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a back). Each of the three limbs had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the innovation of this back splat then had a foundation for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that only just to a limited capability support corner joints (and furthermore were loose into the bargain) signify 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 possesses rounded edges—a left over as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have had a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to be stiff and upright; for when too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs presumably were allowed only for senior persons in the family, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have taken to China from the West. It does not differ much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is prettily joined to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is generally provided with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resultant effect of both of these furniture forms is stylized. The structure and decorative elements are combined in a style that is both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual parts do not appear to have been put together by either glue or screws, but had been mortised into one another and locked into place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Artworks show 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 show up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same time, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be found in engravings of the interior 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 type of chair is also made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not determined that the innovation actually started in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair are 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 numbers, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself with its shapely 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 is, as developed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The style owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and charm. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike practices despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those have wood of rather thick density; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and more upmarket examples can be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and became the favourite 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 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 styles 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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