From all the furniture pieces, the chair may be the imperative one. While many other forms (save the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is meant to be regarded here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to complex chairs such as the bench and sofa, which might be regarded 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 an art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support or aesthetic craft; it can also be an indicator of social place. In the old royal courts there were clear signifiers between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to squat on a stool. Since the past century, a director’s and manager’s chair has developed a symbol of superior rank, like in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
In its furniture construction, the chair ranges from a number of different purposes. There are chairs structured to suit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). During historical days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has designated special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All these chair types has been perfected to conform to evolving human uses. From its particular relationship with man, the chair appears to its full advantage only when utilised. While it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there are things inside or not, a chair is understood best and fairly regarded by a person using it, for chair and sitter need each other. Thus the different parts of the chair were given names likened to the names of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal work of your chair is to support a human body, its credit is evaluated generally from how well it fulfills this practical use. In the design of the chair, the maker is limited under particular static law and principal measurements. Inside these regulations, however, the chair creator has large freedom.
The history of the chair lasted an era of several thousand years. There were cultures that made unique chair shapes, as expressive of the principal task in the arenas of skill and design. Out of these societies, particular note 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 skilled scheme, were known from tombs. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have four legs crafted akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. From this a stable triangular design was obtained. There was to our understanding no significant difference from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary citizens. The main change exists in the complex ornamentation, in the evidence of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was created as an easily stored seat for officers. As a camp stool that chair existed until much later periods. But the stool also was created for the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its technical history as a folding stool being forgotten. This can today be noted, 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 were in the structure of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats were created out of wood. The plain manufacture of the folding stool, made of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric set between them, came again but somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this type is the folding stool, made from ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient object still extant but as seen from a variety of pictorial evidence. The most well known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which would be shown. These creative legs were considered to be created out of bent wood and were likely to have been put under a large amount of pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very strong and were overtly drawn.
The Romans adopted the Greek design; some models of seated Romans are examples of a denser and apparently somewhat less intricately designed klismos. Both designs, light and heavy, were brought back during the Classicist era. The klismos style is evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular kinds of profound iconicism of Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be charted as long as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full collection of images and paintings has been kept safe, showing the interiors and exterior of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Kept also since the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that hold an interesting familiarity to images of previous chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there existed two iconic chair designs in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair is constructed both with or without arms though always with a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to hold up the back. In one style, however, the stiles could be marginally curved on top of the arms to conform correctly to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of the chairback). All three parts had been mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Though the style of a back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only just to a limited limit support corner joints (as well as being loose as well) signify an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends upon the rounded staves. All members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—acknowledging perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have had a plaited texture. These chairs needed the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; when too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs probably were kept for elderly individuals, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is intricately affixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is often seen with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the ultimate effect of both these furniture styles is stylized. The construction and decorative parts are combined in a style that is all at once both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual members do not seem to have been fixed by use of either glue or screws, but are mortised on one another and fixed in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Works of art 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 in the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, in the same period, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is seen in engravings of the interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this design of chair can also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not decided that the style actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in considerable amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The design asserts itself with its shapely 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, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat suits to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting 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 achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike practices despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are constructed from wood of quite thick dimensions; but all the members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and more expensive designs might be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carvings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used in place of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and became the preference 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 popular 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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