Of all furniture objects, the chair could be primary. While the majority of other forms (save the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is intended to be looked upon here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to derivative forms like the bench and sofa, which can be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly labeled.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and an aesthetic craft; it is also an indicator of social rank. In the historical royal courts there were plain differences between sitting on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to make do with a stool. From the 20th century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen a symbol of superior status, and in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a raised level.
As its furniture purpose, the chair can be utilised for a number of different makes. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since historical days there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has demanded special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair types has been evolved to conform to differing human needs. For its unique importance with man, the chair exists to its full meaning only when in employ. While it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there is anything inside or not, a chair is best seen and judged best by a person using it, because chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the individual limbs of a chair were given names as the limbs of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the basic work of the chair is to support our body, its credit is evaluated basically on how suitably it measures up to this practical function. In the manufacture of a chair, the maker is bound by certain static rules and principal measurements. In these regulations, however, the chair designer has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair was dates of several thousand years. There were cultures that made significant chair forms, seen of the foremost work in the spheres of skill and aesthetics. Within these societies, individual note must 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 design, are today known from findings made in tombs. The first one of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have four legs structured not unlike those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. From this a stable triangular structure was obtained. There was in our understanding no particular variation in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical populace. The simple variation lies in the complex ornamentation, in the selection of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was crafted for an easily carried seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool that type stayed til much later days. But the stool then was created as the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical history as a folding stool being forgotten. This can now be observed, 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 are constructed in the structure of folding stools but can not be folded as the seats are worked of wood. The plain manufacture of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, reappears but somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this form is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is known not as any ancient item still existing but from a trove of pictorial evidence. The best recognised is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place by Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs can be shown. These creative legs were presumed to be manufactured out of bent wood and were likely to have been needed to bear great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore extremely strong and were particularly pointed out.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek chair; designs of statues of seated Romans are chairs of a heavier and which appear to be a rather less delicately crafted klismos. Both designs, the light and the heavy, were brought back during the Classicist period. The klismos influence can be found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some special types of notable uniqueness within Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be charted as well as chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged serial of images and artworks has been kept safe, detailing the insides and outer parts of Chinese homes and the designs of furniture. Also preserved since the 16th century are a trove of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an intriguing similarity to pictures of ancient chairs.
Same as in Egypt, two chair forms dominated in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This chair can be seen both with and without arms though always having a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to hold up the back. In one design, it has been seen, the stiles are slightly curved by the arms for the purpose of conform to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the chairback). All three parts were mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the idea of a back splat exercised an introduction for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that just to a limited limit stabilise corner joints (and are loose additionally) represent an element exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which finishes about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or have rounded edges—acknowledging as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and might have had a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs most likely were kept only for the senior persons in the family, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have come to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is elegantly held to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is usually seen with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resultant effect of both of these furniture items is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic issues are combined in a manner that is at the same time naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual members do not appear to have been joined together with either glue or screws, but have been mortised with one another and held in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Artworks display a design 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 produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, in the same time, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is evidenced in engravings of the inside of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this style of chair is also seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not held that the style actually started in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast quantities, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself with its elegant proportions and delicate 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 styles—that is to say, as brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methodology in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of relatively thick density; but all the members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and finer designs may be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carvings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used in place of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and found 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 popularised 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 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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