From each of the furniture items, the chair could be the primary one. While the majority of other pieces (save for the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair was used here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to further pieces like a bench and sofa, which may be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously defined.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and/or an aesthetic creation; it is historically symbolic of social standing. At the past royal courts there were social connotations between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to make do with a stool. From the past century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen a signifier of superior rank, and in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
As a furniture construction, the chair is utilised for a number of different makes. There are chairs structured to suit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the olden days there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We have chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has developed special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair shapes have perfected to suit to differing human uses. Because of its significant relationship with man, the chair appears to its full meaning only when being utilised. Though it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there might be items inside or not, a chair is understood best and regarded best by a person utilising it, for chair and sitter need each other. Thus the different areas of the chair have been labeled corresponding to the limbs of the human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first work of the chair is to support a human body, its worth is tested principally by how fully it fulfills this practical use. In the manufacture of the chair, the designer is bound in particular static rules and principal measurements. In these rules, however, the chair designer has great freedom.
The history of the chair lasted an epoch of several thousand years. There existed peoples that had individual chair types, as expressions of the leading craft in the areas of craft and aesthetics. Within such peoples, special mention 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of expert craft, were a finding from tombs. The first of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this a solid triangular form was created. There seems to be no significant change in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common citizens. The general variation lies in the level of ornamentation, in the selection of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was created as an easily portable seat for army. As a camp stool the type continued until much later days. But the stool then played the task of a ceremonial seat, its technical task as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the construction of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats were worked out of wood. The simplistic construction of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, came again somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this kind is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is known not from any ancient fossil still extant but in a wealth of pictorial objects. The best recognised is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs could be displayed. These creative legs were understood to have been crafted from bent wood and were in that case subjected to huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore super solid and were clearly denoted.
The Romans emulated the Greek chair; a number of models of seated Romans offer examples of a heavier and apparently slightly less delicately built klismos. Both types, the light and heavy, were popularised in the Classicist period. The klismos design can be evidenced in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in particular kinds of marked originality in Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be charted as far as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken folio of sketches and paintings had been kept safe, displaying the interiors and exteriors of Chinese houses and the designs of furniture. Another preservation of the 16th century are some chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an amazing resemblance to styles of previous chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there existed two standard chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That chair can be constructed both with and without arms but never missing its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to firm the back. In one kind, it has been seen, the stiles had been marginally curved on top of the arms in order to sit right with the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the back). The three limbs were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the idea of this back splat then had an introduction for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that could only to a restricted capability reinforce corner joints (and then were loose in the result) are a design exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes upon the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or is given rounded edges—acknowledging maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have had a plaited seat. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; if too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs probably were only for the senior people in the family, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have come to China from the West. It does not vary much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is prettily joined to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is usually possessing metal mounts. From a Western point of view the ultimate effect of both furniture forms is stylized. The constructive and decoration elements are combined in a way that is all at once both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is a result of the way that the individual members do not seem to have been held together by use of either glue or screws, but were mortised on one another and held in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Paintings project a type of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, at the same period, held 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 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. Though this design of chair is also seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not determined that the design actually was born in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in considerable numbers, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself with its harmonious proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that was, to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The style owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methodology despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are constructed from wood of rather thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been taken away, and more upmarket chairs would be further embellished with very delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles over 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 commonly known 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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