Out of all furniture pieces, the chair may be paramount. While most of the other objects (save the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is intended to be regarded here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to complex kinds like the bench or sofa, which should be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently defined.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support and an aesthetic piece of art; it is historically an indicator of social status. At the old royal courts there were social differences between being led to a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to squat on a stool. From the recent century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been seen as an identifier of superior position, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a higher floor.
In a furniture form, the chair is employed for a wealth of different purposes. There are chairs created to match man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since the olden days there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has derived particular chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair shapes have been evolved to conform to growing human uses. Due to its close connection with man, the chair appears to its full significance only when being used. Whereas it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there might be items inside or not, a chair is really seen best and judged with a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter need one another. Thus the various areas of a chair have been given names like the elements of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary job of your chair is to support our human body, its credit is judged principally for how suitably it fulfills this practical purpose. In the construction of a chair, the designer is restricted within some static rules and principal measurements. Under these limitations, however, the chair creator has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair extended over a period of several thousand years. There are peoples that had made distinctive chair forms, as expressions of the leading endeavour in the areas of craft and art. From such peoples, 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 items of masterful craft, are known from tomb findings. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair had four legs designed akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this way a solid triangular form was made. There was in our knowledge no noteworthy variation from the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical citizens. The simple difference was in the type of ornamentation, in the choice of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was made for an easily stored seat for soldiers. As a camp stool this type persevered for much later periods of time. But the stool then took on the use of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool being forgotten. This can today be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the construction of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats are worked out of wood. The simple structure of the folding stool, being of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, is seen some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of this kind is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is known not from any ancient fossil still in form but as in a variety of pictorial evidence. The significant kind is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground by Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those were displayed. These curving legs were most likely to be executed from bent wood and were therefore needed to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super strong and were particularly denoted.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek designs; existing casts of seated Romans are evidence of a more heavyset and in appearance slightly less intricately crafted klismos. Both designs, light and heavy, were popularised in the Classicist time. The klismos design can be seen in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some types of marked iconicism within Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as long as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged series of drawings and artworks was kept safe, showing the interiors and exteriors of Chinese homes and the kinds of furniture. Also kept from the 16th century are a number of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an interesting resemblance to images of past chairs.
As in Egypt, two fundamental chair forms existed in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That chair is constructed both with and without arms but always having a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to give support to the back. In one style, it must be said, the stiles are marginally curved above the arms for the purpose of conform correctly to the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the back). All three parts were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Though the style of the Chinese back splat had an influence on English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only just to a restricted ability stabilise corner joints (and then are loose in the result) are an element exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which finishes upon the rounded staves. All members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—references maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; when too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a way of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs most likely were kept for the senior members of the family, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have taken to China from the West. It is akin much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is delicately held to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is generally provided with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the ultimate effect of both furniture forms is stylized. The manufacture and decoration elements are combined in a way that is all at once naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual items do not look to have been joined together by means of either glue or screws, but had been mortised on 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 left its signature on the chair. Works of art display a kind of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same time, held the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be found in engravings of interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this design of chair might also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not certain that the innovation actually originated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in considerable quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of this kind of chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of styles—that is, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes its popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike principles even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are constructed from wood of rather thick measurements; but all the members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been taken away, and finer designs may be further embellished with special delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used in place of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more open in style than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and was popular 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 commonly known 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 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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