From all the furniture forms, the chair could be the paramount one. While most other items (save for the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair must be used here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to derivative pieces including a bench or sofa, which can be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly defined.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or aesthetic piece of art; it was also symbolic of social ranking. At the past royal courts there were clear differences between possessing a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to sit on a stool. In the last century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has become iconic of superior status, and in democratic governments the speaker sits on a raised platform.
As a furniture creation, the chair holds a range of various makes. There are chairs manufactured to suit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since the past there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (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 have chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has developed new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair kinds has perfected to fit to changing human needs. Due to its particular association with man, the chair exists to its full significance only when being used. Although it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there might be items inside or not, a chair is understood and tested by a person utilising it, for chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the different parts of a chair are named like the names of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal job of your chair is to support our body, its worth is tested basically on how fully it does fulfill this practical purpose. In the design of a chair, the builder is limited under certain static regulation and principal measurements. Within these limitations, however, the chair builder has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over an era of several thousand years. There are peoples that made significant chair forms, as seen of the leading work in the arenas of handling and art. Out of such peoples, special note should 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 design, are seen from findings made in tombs. One of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair has four legs formed similar to those of some animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this way a stable triangular form was made. There was in our view no notable difference in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular non-royals. The real variation lied in the brand of ornamentation, in the particulars of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was designed for an easily packed seat for officers. As a camp stool this stool existed for much later periods. But the stool then also was created for the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical task as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the shape of folding stools but are not able to be folded because the seats were created with wood. The simplistic construction of the folding stool, made of two frames that spin on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, then appeared but some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of those is the folding stool, of ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is known not as any ancient item still extant but as seen from a variety of pictorial objects. The better known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area outside Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs could be displayed. These unique legs were most likely executed from bent wood and were therefore subjected to huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very durable and were visibly indicated.
The Romans adopted the Greek designs; quite a few statues of seated Romans offer designs of a more heavyset and apparently somewhat less intricately built klismos. Both styles, the light and the heavy, were revived in the Classicist epoch. The klismos chair can be evidenced in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in special kinds of considerable originality in Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China is not able to be charted as well as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed serial of images and artworks has been protected, displaying the interior and exteriors of Chinese households and their furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an astonishing familiarity to pictures of past chairs.
As in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This chair is seen both with and without arms though always having a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to firm the back. In one form, however, the stiles are delicately curved by the arms so as to sit correctly with the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its back). Together, the three sections were mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the idea of this back splat later had an inspiration for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden members that would only to a particular limit embolden corner joints (and furthermore were loose as a result) indicate a design exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops around the rounded staves. Members are round in section or has rounded edges—a left over as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and had on occasion a plaited bottom. These chairs needed the sitter to be stiff and upright; if too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs probably were kept for the senior members of the family, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It does not differ very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is usually provided with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the ultimate effect of both furniture forms is stylized. The constructive and decorative parts are combined in a way that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual items do not seem to have been joined together by means of either glue or screws, but were mortised with one another and held in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left 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, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same era, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be seen in engravings of the interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this kind of chair may also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not certain that the style actually began in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in large amounts, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of these chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious 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 created in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat adheres 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 tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methodology in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of fairly thick density; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and more expensive chairs might be further embellished with very delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and found favour 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 reknowned and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
During 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 products 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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