From each of the furniture objects, the chair could be the imperative one. While many other items (save for the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is meant to be regarded here in the general sense, from stool to throne to derivative kinds like a bench and sofa, which should be viewed 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 intriguing as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and an aesthetic craft; it can also be a signifier of social ranking. At the old royal courts there were important connotations between being led to a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to squat on a stool. Since the 20th century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been regarded as a symbol of superior position, as well as in democratic governments the speaker sits on a higher floor.
As its furniture creation, the chair holds a wealth of various forms. There are chairs created to match man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past 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, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has developed new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair shapes has been evolved to fit to different human requirements. For its close association with man, the chair comes to its full advantage only when being utilised. Though it doesn’t 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 best seen and evaluated by a person utilising it, because chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the different areas of a chair are given labels likened to the parts of our human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the fundamental work of your chair is to support our body, its credit is judged firstly for how well it fulfills this practical job. In the build of the chair, the maker is bound in some static law and principal measurements. Within these rules, however, the chair designer has great freedom.
The history of the chair lasted an era of several thousand years. There are civilizations that held individual chair forms, expressions of the foremost work in the industries of handling and aesthetics. In these such cultures, a 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of skilled craft, were known from tomb findings. The first one of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs shaped like those of an animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this design a solid triangular construction was created. There was to all appearances no particular difference in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary peasantry. The simple change exists in the kind of ornamentation, in the particulars of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was crafted to be an easily stored seat for officers. As a camp stool this stool stayed during much later days. But the stool also then played the task of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical history as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the construction of folding stools but are not able to be folded because the seats were worked of wood. The easy make of the folding stool, being of two frames that spin on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, also appeared but somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of these is the folding stool, of ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not as any ancient object still extant but seen in a variety of pictorial material. The significant kind is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them are visible. These unique legs were presumably manufactured out of bent wood and were therefore subjected to great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore super durable and were particularly signified.
The Romans embued the Greek chair; a number of models of seated Romans display chairs of a more heavyset and in appearance rather more crudely constructed klismos. Both kinds, the light and heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist epoch. The klismos chair can be seen in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in special brands of profound individuality within Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China can not be charted as far back as chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed collection of sketches and paintings had been protected, displaying the interior and outside of Chinese households and the designs of furniture. Another preservation since the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an interesting familiarity to styles of past chairs.
Just as in Egypt, two iconic chair forms existed in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair has been seen both with or without arms however never without its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to firm the back. In one style, it has been found, the stiles had been marginally curved on top of the arms so as to conform to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of its back). The three areas had been mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. While the design of the Chinese back splat then had an inspiration for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that only to a restricted extent reinforce corner joints (and then were loose to top it off) signify a feature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or is given rounded edges—references maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have had a plaited texture. These chairs demanded of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs probably were only for older individuals, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have come to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is elegantly held to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resulting effect of both furniture items is stylized. The construction and decoration elements are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the fact that the individual members do not seem to have been fixed with either glue or screws, but had been mortised into one another and held 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. Artworks display a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined 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 corresponding board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, in the same era, gave 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 affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this design of chair is also found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not believed that the style actually started in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast numbers, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself with its elegant proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that was, as developed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes its popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike methodology in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of quite thick measurements; but all the members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and finer items would be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engraving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles through 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 commonly 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 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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