Out of all furniture objects, the chair may be the most important. While the majority of other forms (save the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair was regarded here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to derivative forms for example the bench or sofa, which should be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously definitive.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not only a physical support and/or aesthetic craft; it historically is symbolic of social rank. From the historical royal courts there were important distinctions between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to make do with a stool. During the past century, the director’s and manager’s chair has developed a signifier of superior status, and even in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a raised platform.
As a furniture purpose, the chair holds a wealth of various models. There are chairs manufactured to match man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since past times there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has demanded special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair shapes has been changed to conform to different human requirements. From its significant connection with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when in use. Though it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there are things inside or not, a chair is really seen and judged best by a person using it, because chair and sitter suit the other. Thus the several limbs of a chair are labeled likened to the names of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal work of your chair is to support a body, its worth is valued firstly on how well it does fulfill this practical use. In the build of a chair, the builder is limited within particular static regulations and principal measurements. Through these limitations, however, the chair designer has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair covers an era of several thousand years. There is evidence of societies that had unique chair types, as expressions of the principal work in the areas of skill and art. From such societies, 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of masterful craft, were found from tomb findings. The first one of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair had four legs structured similar to those of some animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. In this design a strong triangular form was created. There appears to be no particular difference in the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular non-royals. The main difference lies in the complex ornamentation, in the particulars of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was designed as an easily carried seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool this kind stayed around for much later points. But the stool also took on the character of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be found, 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 were constructed in the structure of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats were made of wood. The simple construction of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric held between them, is seen again somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of those is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is found not from any ancient fossil still around but in a large amount of pictorial objects. The better recognised is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them were visible. These strange legs were thought to have been executed from bent wood and were thus had extreme pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super solid and were overtly drawn.
The Romans adopted the Greek design; a number of statues of seated Romans display evidence of a more heavyset and which appear to be a slightly more crudely constructed klismos. Both features, light and heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist period. The klismos style is seen in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some forms of marked originality of Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be charted as well as in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of sketches and paintings had been preserved, with images of the interiors and exteriors of Chinese buildings and the designs of furniture. Another preservation since the 16th century are some chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that show an astonishing familiarity to styles of previous chairs.
As in Egypt, there were two major chair forms in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair was seen both with and without arms though always with its square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to firm the back. In one kind, it has been found, the stiles had been lightly curved by the arms in order to sit right with the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of its chairback). The three sections are mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Though the idea of a back splat later had an influence on English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden items that would merely to a restricted extent embolden corner joints (and then are loose in the result) represent a feature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops over the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or have rounded edges—references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and may have had a plaited bottom. These chairs needed the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs presumably were reserved only for elderly family members, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have travelled to China from the West. It is not dissimilar that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is elegantly fixed to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is generally provided with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of both of these furniture items is stylized. The constructive and decoration aspects are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual members do not appear to have been held together by use of either glue or screws, but are mortised onto one another and held in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Artworks display a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, in the same period, possessed 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 interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this type of chair is also seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not certain that the form actually began in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in vast quantities, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by its shapely proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that was, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation 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 over the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike practices in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are constructed from wood of fairly thick dimensions; but all the members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been removed, and finer designs can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and found favour in several 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 brands 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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