Of all furniture items, the chair could be paramount. While many other objects (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is regarded here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to developed types such as the bench and sofa, which can be considered 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 curious as its history as a creative art. The chair is not just a physical support or an aesthetic piece; it historically was a symbol of social ranking. Within the past royal courts there were significant signifiers between sitting on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to use a stool. In the past century, a director’s and manager’s chair has developed a symbol of superior rank, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a higher platform.
In a furniture creation, the chair can be employed for a number of different purposes. There are chairs structured to suit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In the olden days there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has designated new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair shapes have changed to suit to differing human desires. From its significant association with man, the chair lives to its full significance only when being utilised. Whereas it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there might be items inside or not, a chair is seen best and fairly regarded with a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the various limbs of a chair are given names like the parts of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal function of the chair is to support a human body, its value is judged basically on how well it measures up to this practical function. Within the creation of a chair, the maker is bound in certain static regulation and principal measurements. Inside these restrictions, however, the chair designer has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair was a period of several thousand years. There were peoples that created unique chair types, as seen of the premier endeavour in the spheres of craft and art. From those peoples, special 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of careful craft, are today found from findings made in tombs. One of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair had four legs crafted similar to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this way a strong triangular design was obtained. There was in our knowledge no particular differentiation in the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical non-royals. The real variation was in the kind of ornamentation, in the evidence of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was created to be an easily carried seat for army. As a camp stool the form continued during much later days. But the stool also was designed for the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can now be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the form of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats are made from wood. The plain build of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that spin on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric set between them, is seen again somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of these is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is known not in any ancient fossil still extant but as found in a trove of pictorial evidence. The most well known is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those are displayed. These odd legs were most likely to have been crafted of bent wood and were as such bore huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore super strong and were visibly signified.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; designs of models of seated Romans display chairs of a heavier and in appearance somewhat crudely crafted klismos. Both designs, light and heavy, were popularised in the Classicist era. The klismos chair is known in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in special forms of considerable iconicism within Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be charted as far back as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full folio of sketches and paintings has been protected, detailing the interior and exteriors of Chinese homes and the kinds of furniture. Preserved also of the 16th century are a number of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that show an intriguing resemblance to representations of ancient chairs.
Same as in Egypt, there were two particular chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair can be seen both with and without arms however always having the square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to hold up the back. In one style, it has been found, the stiles could be delicately curved over the arms so as to suit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of its chairback). All three areas had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the design of the Chinese back splat then had a foundation for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could merely to a particular ability embolden corner joints (and furthermore were loose as well) indicate a signature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops around the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or is given rounded edges—an acknowledgement perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and might have had a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a way of toppling. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs likely were only for the senior individuals in the family, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have come to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is often provided with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the overall effect of these furniture items is stylized. The structure and aesthetic parts are combined in a way that is all at once both naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual parts do not appear to have been adjoined by use of either glue or screws, but are mortised on one another and fixed in position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Paintings project a type of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same period, possessed the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be found in engravings of interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this type of chair might also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not held that the style actually began in The Netherlands. Normally, 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 unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in large quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by its shapely 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 form—that is, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and charm. 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 little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are constructed from wood of relatively thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and more expensive items might be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engravings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and became the preference in large 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
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 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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