From each of the furniture objects, the chair may be primary. While many other pieces (apart from the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair was used here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to further chairs for example 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 obviously distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and/or an aesthetic object; it historically is symbolic of social rank. At the Medieval royal courts there were important signifiers between being seated on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to use a stool. From the last century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been regarded as iconic of superior position, as well as in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated level.
In its furniture form, the chair can be used for a number of different purposes. There are chairs structured 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). Since past times there were chairs to be born in (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 can have chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has developed particular chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair forms have adapted to conform to differing human desires. Due to its close relationship with man, the chair lives to its full importance only when in use. Whereas it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there might be items inside or not, a chair is understood and regarded best with a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter need one another. Thus the various limbs of a chair are given names as the limbs of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the basic function of a chair is to support our body, its value is tested basically on how fully it does fulfill this practical role. In the design of a chair, the designer is restricted with particular static laws and principal measurements. Inside these boundaries, however, the chair designer has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair extended over dates of several thousand years. There are cultures that created significant chair types, seen of the foremost endeavour in the spheres of skill and art. Out of these peoples, a 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of careful craft, are today known from tombs. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed as akin to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this design a durable triangular form was created. There was in our knowledge no particular difference from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common citizens. The only variation lies in the type of ornamentation, in the evidence of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was designed to be an easily packed seat for officers. As a camp stool this type persisted until much later periods. But the stool then was designed for the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can now be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the form of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats were formed out of wood. The simple manufacture of the folding stool, made of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, then came again but somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this type is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is known not in any ancient object still around but in a variety of pictorial evidence. The archetype is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs are seen. These curved legs were probably created of bent wood and were in that case subjected to huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super stable and were clearly drawn.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; quite a few casts of seated Romans are chairs of a thicker and in appearance somewhat more crudely designed klismos. Both kinds, the light or the heavy, were seen again within the Classicist period. The klismos chair is evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some particular types of profound originality in Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China is not able to be traced as far as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged series of drawings and artworks had been kept, displaying the insides and exterior of Chinese houses and the furniture. Another preservation from the 16th century are a collection of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an amazing similarity to images of ancient chairs.
As were the designs in Egypt, there were two major chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This chair is constructed both with or without arms though always having its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one image, it has been found, the stiles are marginally curved over the arms in order to fit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the back). The three areas are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Although the innovation of the Chinese back splat had an influence on English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only to a restricted limit reinforce corner joints (and are loose to top it off) are a signature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which finishes around the rounded staves. Members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—references perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and had on occasion a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to stay 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 era armchairs likely were reserved only for elderly persons in the family, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have been brought to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is delicately affixed to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is often seen with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the ultimate effect of these furniture styles is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic parts are combined in a way that is all at once naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the manner that the individual members do not appear to have been held together by means of either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and locked into its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Works of art show a type of chair with a relatively unrefined 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 little pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture while traveling which, at the same time, possessed 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 inside of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this type of chair might also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not certain that the style actually started in The Netherlands. Usually, 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 clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in considerable quantities, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself with its shapely proportions and delicate 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 to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The design owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are made from wood of quite thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and more expensive examples would be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engraving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and became the preference 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 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 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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