Out of each of the furniture pieces, the chair might be the most important. While most other forms (save the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair should be regarded here in the general sense, from stool to throne to complex items such as 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 clearly defined.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support and an aesthetic artwork; it was also symbolic of social place. From the Medieval royal courts there were important differences between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to sit on a stool. Since the past century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been iconic of superior dignity, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a higher floor.
In a furniture construction, the chair can be utilised for a number of various purposes. There are chairs structured 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 past days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has developed special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair shapes have evolved to match to different human uses. Due to its significant importance with man, the chair appears to its full importance only when being used. Although it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is really seen and fairly regarded by a person using it, for chair and sitter need one another. Thus the various elements of the chair were labeled according to the names of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple work of a chair is to support the body, its value is valued principally from how suitably it measures up to this practical use. In the design of the chair, the builder is limited by some static laws and principal measurements. Inside these rules, however, the chair creator has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair lasted an era of several thousand years. There is evidence of cultures that had made individual chair types, seen of the premier task in the spheres of technique and aesthetics. From those societies, individual 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of skilled make, are now a finding from tomb discoveries. The first one of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair had four legs designed akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this a stable triangular design was crafted. There appeared to be no significant variation from the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common people. The simple variation lies in the type of ornamentation, in the selection of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was created for an easily packed seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool that chair stayed til much later times. But the stool also then was made for the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its technical history as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be found, 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 were made in the shape of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats are formed from wood. The simple manufacture of the folding stool, composed of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, can be seen at some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of those is the folding stool, from ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient object still around but as found in a variety of pictorial items. The archetype is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location 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 legs are displayed. These odd legs were thought to be manufactured out of bent wood and were therefore subjected to great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore extremely strong and were particularly denoted.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; a number of casts of seated Romans show chairs of a denser and apparently kind of crudely built klismos. Both designs, light or heavy, were seen again in the Classicist period. The klismos influence can be seen in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in particular brands of profound originality in Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be followed as long as that of Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed collection of images and paintings was kept, showing the interior and exterior of Chinese homes and their furniture. Preserved also of the 16th century are some chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that display an intriguing similarity to designs of previous chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there existed two major chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This chair can be designed both with and without arms though always having its square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to support the back. In one style, it has been found, the stiles are delicately curved over the arms so as to sit right with the form of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of its chairback). Each of the three areas were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Although the style of the back splat then had an introduction for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could merely to a restricted capability stabilise corner joints (and then were loose to top that off) signify a feature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops about the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—referable perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and occasionally had a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a way of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs likely were reserved for elderly individuals in the family, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have been brought to China from the West. It does not vary much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resulting effect of both furniture forms is stylized. The construction and decorative parts are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is a result of the way that the individual parts do not appear to have been put together with either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and fixed in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Paintings show a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same period, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the interior of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this type of chair is also made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not believed that the innovation actually was born in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast numbers, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself by its elegant proportions and fine 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 was, as progressed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The chair owes its popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike principles even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of relatively thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been sanded away, and more expensive chairs would be further embellished with special delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used in place of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the most distinguished 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 commonly known 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 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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