Of all furniture objects, the chair may be paramount. While most of the other forms (save for the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair should be regarded here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to derivative kinds including a bench and sofa, which should be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly definitive.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as a creative art. The chair is not simply a physical support and/or aesthetic piece of art; it was also semiotic of social placement. In the historical royal courts there were important differences between having a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to make do with a stool. During the past century, the director’s or manager’s chair has developed an identifier of superior standing, as well as in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a raised level.
As a furniture construction, the chair ranges from a range of various purposes. There are chairs created to match man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). From historical days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has designated new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair shapes has adapted to match to growing human needs. Because of its significant connection with man, the chair exists to its full importance only when being utilised. Whereas it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there might be things inside or not, a chair is really seen best and clearly evaluated with a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter require the other. Thus the individual limbs of the chair were labeled like the names of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first role of the chair is to support a human body, its value is tested principally for how completely it measures up to this practical function. Within the structure of the chair, the designer is limited for particular static legislation and principal measurements. In these rules, however, the chair designer has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair covers dates of several thousand years. There existed societies that had made distinctive chair shapes, as expressions of the principal task in the spheres of craft and art. Within these civilisations, a 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 items of masterful design, are seen from tomb discoveries. The first one of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have had four legs designed akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this a stable triangular design was made. There was to all appearances no significant difference in the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary citizens. The main difference exists in the level of ornamentation, in the particulars of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was crafted to be an easily stored seat for officers. As a camp stool the chair existed during much later periods. But the stool also then was designed for the role of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can 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 were in the construction of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats were formed from wood. The simple make of the folding stool, being of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric held between them, then came again some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of these 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 recognised not with any ancient specimen still around but as seen in a trove of pictorial material. The better known is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which could be seen. These odd legs were considered to have been executed from bent wood and were as such subjected to extreme pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore very solid and were particularly indicated.
The Romans adopted the Greek designs; existing statues of seated Romans are examples of a heavier and apparently rather less delicately crafted klismos. Both types, the light or the heavy, were revived in the Classicist epoch. The klismos style can be evidenced in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some types of considerable individuality of Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China cannot be charted as long as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken collection of images and artworks had been preserved, displaying the insides and outer parts of Chinese households and the furniture. Also preserved since the 16th century are a number of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that display an amazing likeness to representations of previous chairs.
As in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair can be constructed both with or without arms however always with the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to give support to the back. In one kind, it must be said, the stiles were delicately curved by the arms in order to sit right with the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the back). Together, all three limbs had been mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the style of a back splat later had an influence on English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that would only to a restricted extent reinforce corner joints (and furthermore are loose into the bargain) signify a feature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes over the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or possesses rounded edges—references as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and occasionally had a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; when too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs most likely were kept for the senior family members, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It is not dissimilar so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is intricately affixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is usually provided with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resultant effect of these furniture styles is stylized. The structure and decoration issues are combined in a style that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the fact that the individual parts do not look to have been joined together by means of either glue or screws, but have been mortised on one another and fixed in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Works of art show a style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring out a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same era, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be displayed 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 style of chair is also found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not believed that the design actually was born in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in impressive quantities, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of these chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that was, as created in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat adheres to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of relatively thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and more expensive designs may be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the royal 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 popularised 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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