The History of the Chair

From all the furniture needs, the chair might be the most imperative. While the majority of other forms (apart from the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair can be said here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to further types like a bench or 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 overtly labeled.

The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and an aesthetic artwork; it is historically semiotic of social ranking. From the old royal courts there were plain connotations between being seated on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to make do with a stool. In the last century, a director’s or manager’s chair has risen iconic of superior position, and even in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a higher floor.

In its furniture purpose, the chair is used for a range of different purposes. There are chairs designed to match man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). During past days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (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. There are chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Contemporary lifestyle has developed new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair types have adapted to fit to evolving human desires. From its particular connection with man, the chair lives to its full significance only when being used. Although it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there might be items inside or not, a chair is seen best and clearly evaluated with a person utilising it, for chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the various areas of the chair have been given names as the limbs of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the primary function of your chair is to support our body, its value is evaluated firstly from how suitably it does fulfill this practical purpose. Within the build of a chair, the builder is limited under some static regulation and principal measurements. Under these limitations, however, the chair creator has large freedom.

The history of the chair extended over a period of several thousand years. There is evidence of civilizations that had made unique chair shapes, seen of the foremost task in the arenas of skill and design. Among those cultures, particular 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.

Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of expert craft, are now seen from tombs. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair has four legs formed like those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this way a solid triangular structure was made. There was to our understanding no particular differentiation between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular non-royals. The general change lies in the complexity of ornamentation, in the choice of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was developed as an easily packed seat for army. As a camp stool this chair stayed around for much later periods. But the stool also played the use of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can now be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the shape of folding stools but can not be folded as the seats are created out of wood. The simple build of the folding stool, being of two frames that spin on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, reappears but some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of these is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is found not from any ancient object still around but found in a large amount of pictorial items. The most well known is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area near Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those would be shown. These unusual legs were likely to have been crafted from bent wood and were in that case bore huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore extremely stable and were plainly drawn.

The Romans emulated the Greek design; designs of models of seated Romans are designs of a heavier and in appearance somewhat crudely constructed klismos. Both features, light and heavy, were brought back within the Classicist epoch. The klismos chair can be found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in particular types of notable iconicism of Denmark and Sweden from 1800.

China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be traced as far back as that of Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken serial of images and paintings had been protected, with images of the inside and outer parts of Chinese households and their furniture. Another preservation from the 16th century are a trove of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that hold an astonishing familiarity to designs of past chairs.

As were the designs in Egypt, there existed two major chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This chair is constructed both with or without arms though always having a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to give support to the back. In one form, however, the stiles had been delicately curved by the arms so as to conform to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of a back). Each of the three areas are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of a back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden items that would only to a limited limit embolden corner joints (and then were loose to top it off) represent a signature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which finishes around the rounded staves. Members are round in section or has rounded edges—an acknowledgement maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and occasionally had a plaited bottom. These chairs needed the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for if too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs most likely were reserved for elderly family members, for they were esteemed greatly.

The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is usually provided with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resultant effect of both furniture items is stylized. The construction and decoration parts are combined in a style that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is a result of the way that the individual members do not appear to have been put together by means of either glue or screws, but are mortised on one another and locked into place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Paintings display a kind of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, in the same era, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be found in engravings of the interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this style of chair can also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not decided that the form actually was born in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The design asserts itself by its harmonious 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 is, as brought out in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes such popularity to a combination of leisure and charm. The seat suits to the human body and allows 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 covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of rather thick density; but all the members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been taken away, and more expensive chairs might be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used instead of upholstery.

English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and found favour 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 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 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.

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