Of all furniture items, the chair might be of most importance. While most of the other forms (save the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair was looked upon here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to further makes like a bench and sofa, which may be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly labeled.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and an aesthetic artwork; it was historically semiotic of social hierarchy. In the past royal courts there were plain distinctions between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to sit on a stool. During the 20th century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been seen as an identifier of superior dignity, and in democratic governments the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
In its furniture construction, the chair can be used for a number of various makes. There are chairs manufactured to match man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since historical times there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, or 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 contemporary lifestyle has designated special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair types have evolved to conform to changing human desires. For its unique relationship with man, the chair exists to its full importance only when being utilised. Although it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there is anything inside or not, a chair is seen best and fairly regarded by a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter require one another. Thus the several limbs of a chair are given names according to the limbs of a human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary function of the chair is to support our body, its value is tested primarily from how suitably it does fulfill this practical use. In the manufacture of the chair, the maker is bound under some static law and principal measurements. In these limits, however, the chair creator has great freedom.
The history of the chair covered dates of several thousand years. There are peoples that had made unique chair shapes, as expressions of the foremost object in the areas of craft and design. Among these societies, individual 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of masterful scheme, are known from tomb discoveries. One of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have had four legs structured not unlike those of a designated animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this a strong triangular form was obtained. There appears to be no particular difference from the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular populace. The only difference exists in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the particulars of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was created as an easily carried seat for soldiers. As a camp stool the type stayed around until much later times. But the stool also then was designed for the use of a ceremonial seat, its technical history as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can now be noted, 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 made in the form of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats are formed from wood. The easy construction of the folding stool, being of two frames that spin on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, also appeared somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of those is the folding stool, of ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not as any ancient object still existing but as in a large amount of pictorial objects. The archetype is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those were seen. These creative legs were considered to be created in bent wood and were probably bore huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore very solid and were plainly pointed out.
The Romans embued the Greek designs; designs of casts of seated Romans show evidence of a more heavyset and apparently rather less delicately built klismos. Both kinds, light and heavy, were seen again within the Classicist time. The klismos influence is found in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in particular brands of considerable uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China can not be charted as far back as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed serial of images and works of art has been kept, displaying the interiors and outside of Chinese homes and the designs of furniture. Also preserved since the 16th century are a number of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that display an astonishing similarity to representations of ancient chairs.
As were the designs in Egypt, there were two iconic chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This chair was found both with or without arms but always with the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to give support to the back. In one style, it must be said, the stiles were slightly curved over the arms in order to sit correctly with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of a back). Together, all three parts were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the design of the back splat then had an introduction for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only just to a restricted ability stabilise corner joints (and were loose as well) signify a design signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which finishes about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or has rounded edges—acknowledging maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and may have a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; when too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a way of toppling. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs most likely were kept only for senior persons in the family, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It does not vary very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is delicately held to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is generally provided with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the ultimate effect of these furniture styles is stylized. The constructive and decoration issues are combined in a style that is all at once both naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual items do not seem to have been put together with either glue or screws, but are mortised into one another and held in place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Artworks project a type of chair with a relatively unrefined 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 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 in traveling which, in the same period, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be found in engravings of the interior of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this design of chair can also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not held that the form actually originated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in vast numbers, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of such chairs lined up by a wall. The form 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 form—that is to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The design owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and permits 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 covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved 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 thereof employ wood of rather thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and more upmarket chairs may be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engravings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more differentiated in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and won 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 well-known 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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