The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative art. The chair is not only a physical support and aesthetic object; it historically was a signifier of social ranking. In the past royal courts there were important differences between being seated on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to sit on a stool. In the last century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been an identifier of superior status, as well as in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a raised floor.

As its furniture creation, the chair is utilised for a number of different forms. There are chairs manufactured to match man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since past times there were chairs for births (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). There are 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 demanded unique chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair types has changed to fit to differing human requirements. Due to its close connection with man, the chair lives to its full importance only when in employ. Though it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there is anything inside or not, a chair is understood best and evaluated with a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter complement the other. Thus the different limbs of a chair are labeled likened to the parts of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the primary role of a chair is to support the human body, its credit is tested principally for how fully it fulfills this practical function. Within the creation of a chair, the builder is bound by particular static rules and principal measurements. Within these rules, however, the chair designer has marvellous freedom.

The history of the chair extended over an epoch of several thousand years. There were civilizations that held iconic chair forms, as seen of the premier task in the industries of skill and design. From those peoples, special mention needs to 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 upshot of careful make, are found from tomb discoveries. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have four legs designed similar to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this a durable triangular structure was crafted. There was in our knowledge no particular difference from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular citizens. The general variation was in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the selection of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was designed to be an easily packed seat for army officers. As a camp stool that chair persisted during much later periods of time. But the stool also played the character of a ceremonial seat, its technical task as a folding stool fast 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 in the construction of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats were made from wood. The plain construction of the folding stool, made of two frames that turn on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, is seen again at some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of this kind is the folding stool, made of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is found not as any ancient object still in form but found in a trove of pictorial objects. The archetype is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs are shown. These curved legs were considered to have been executed with bent wood and were probably put under huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very stable and were plainly signified.

The Romans adopted the Greek design; designs of casts of seated Romans show evidence of a heavier and apparently somewhat more crudely built klismos. Both designs, the light and heavy, were popularised within the Classicist epoch. The klismos influence is used in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some forms of profound uniqueness in Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.

China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be followed as far back as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full collection of drawings and paintings has been preserved, with images of the interior and outside of Chinese houses and the kinds of furniture. Also kept from the 16th century are a trove of chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an astonishing familiarity to representations of past chairs.

Like in Egypt, there were two particular chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair was constructed both with and without arms though always having its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one type, however, the stiles could be lightly curved on top of the arms to sit correctly with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a back). Each of the three areas are mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of the back splat later had a foundation for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that could only to a particular capability stabilise corner joints (and are loose as well) signify a signature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which ends upon the rounded staves. All members are round in section or has rounded edges—acknowledging as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and might have had a plaited seat. These chairs needed the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; if too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs likely were allowed only for the senior family members, for they were esteemed greatly.

The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have come to China from the West. It does not differ so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is elegantly joined to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is usually seen with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of these two furniture styles is stylized. The construction and decoration elements are combined in a way that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the manner that the individual items do not seem to have been held together by either glue or screws, but were mortised into one another and locked into position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Works of art display a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same time, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is displayed in engravings of interiors of affluent 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 can also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not determined that the design actually was born in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in large numbers, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself with its shapely proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.

France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that is to say, as brought out in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. 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 tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike principles despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of relatively thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and finer designs would be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engraving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used rather than upholstery.

English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and was popular 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.

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