The History of the Chair

Out of each of the furniture needs, the chair may be the primary one. While the majority of other items (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is intended to be viewed here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to developed pieces including a bench or sofa, which might be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently distinguished.

The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and/or an aesthetic piece of art; it historically is symbolic of social rank. From the Medieval royal courts there were significant distinctions between being led to a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to sit on a stool. Since the past century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has developed an indicator of superior dignity, and even in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a higher level.

As its furniture construction, the chair can be used for a number of different makes. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). During historical times there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Contemporary lifestyle has derived special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All these chair kinds have evolved to conform to changing human needs. For its particular association with man, the chair appears to its full meaning only when used. Whereas it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there are items inside or not, a chair is seen best and evaluated by a person using it, for chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the individual limbs of a chair are given labels as the names of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the first role of your chair is to support the human body, its worth is evaluated principally from how completely it does measure up to this practical use. In the creation of the chair, the carpenter is bound with particular static law and principal measurements. In these limits, however, the chair builder has large freedom.

The history of the chair was an era of several thousand years. There were civilizations that made iconic chair forms, as expressions of the highest work in the spheres of technique and creativity. In these such civilisations, 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.

Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of masterful make, are found from tomb discoveries. The first of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have had four legs crafted similar to those of some animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. From this a strong triangular form was made. There was apparently no notable variation from the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical people. The main variation lies in the kind of ornamentation, in the selection of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was made to be an easily portable seat for army officers. As a camp stool this type stayed around for much later days. But the stool also then existed in the use of a ceremonial seat, its technical history as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can already be observed, 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 constructed in the form of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats were made out of wood. The simple manufacture of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that spin on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, then appeared at some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this type is the folding stool, made from ashwood, which can now be found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not from any ancient item still around but in a large amount of pictorial objects. The significant kind is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which can be seen. These strange legs were considered to be created from bent wood and were as such subjected to huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super solid and were visibly pointed out.

The Romans emulated the Greek designs; evidence of casts of seated Romans display designs of a denser and are a somewhat less intricately built klismos. Both features, the light and heavy, were revived during the Classicist period. The klismos style is used in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular brands of considerable iconicism around Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.

China
The past of the chair in China isn’t able to be traced as far back as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken series of images and paintings had been protected, showing the insides and outer parts of Chinese homes and their furniture. Also preserved from the 16th century are a collection of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that show an amazing likeness to representations of ancient chairs.

Just the same as in Egypt, there were two standard 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 but always having its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to hold up the back. In one design, it must be said, the stiles were slightly curved on top of the arms to suit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of the chairback). Together, the three limbs were mortised into the yoke-like top rail. While the style of a back splat later had a foundation for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that only to a limited limit support corner joints (and then are loose as a result) are a signature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes around the rounded staves. Members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—a left over maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited texture. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; if too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a way of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs likely were kept only for senior individuals in the family, for they were held in great esteem.

The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It is not dissimilar so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is elegantly fixed to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is usually possessing metal mounts. From a Western point of view the overall effect of these furniture items is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic elements are combined in a way that is all at once naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the fact that the individual members do not look to have been fixed together by use of either glue or screws, but were mortised on one another and fixed in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Artworks display a kind of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same time, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be seen in engravings of the interior of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this design of chair can also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not decided that the form actually began in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of thin dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast quantities, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and fine 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 brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The style owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are constructed from wood of quite thick density; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and more expensive chairs would be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engraving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used in place of upholstery.

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

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