Out of all furniture objects, the chair could be of the most importance. While most other pieces (save the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair should be looked upon here in the general sense, from stool to throne to complex chairs such as the bench or sofa, which may be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently definitive.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and aesthetic craft; it can also be a symbol of social status. Within the old royal courts there were social distinctions between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or having to sit on a stool. In the past century, a director’s or manager’s chair has been a symbol of superior status, as well as in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
As a furniture construction, the chair can be utilised for a range of various forms. There are chairs designed to suit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the olden days there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We make 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, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has demanded unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair shapes have adapted to match to differing human requirements. From its unique relationship with man, the chair comes to its full advantage only when used. Although it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there might be items inside or not, a chair is seen best and regarded best with a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter need the other. Thus the various limbs of a chair have been given labels corresponding to the elements of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary function of a chair is to support a body, its worth is evaluated primarily by how completely it fulfills this practical job. In the creation of a chair, the maker is bound with certain static regulations and principal measurements. In these limits, however, the chair designer has large freedom.
The history of the chair lasted over an era of several thousand years. There is evidence of cultures that created individual chair shapes, as expressions of the topmost task in the spheres of skill and art. Out of those peoples, 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of masterful scheme, are now seen from findings made in tombs. The first one of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have four legs formed as akin to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. From this design a durable triangular structure was created. There was apparently no marked variation in the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical non-royals. The simple change lied in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the evidence of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was developed as an easily portable seat for soldiers. As a camp stool this form persevered during much later points. But the stool then also was made as the character of a ceremonial seat, its technical role as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from evidence be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the shape of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats are worked with wood. The easy construction of the folding stool, being of two frames that spin on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, is seen somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of those is the folding stool, made from ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not from any ancient item still existing but seen in a wealth of pictorial objects. The best known is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them could be visible. These curving legs were most likely executed of bent wood and were likely to have been needed to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore extremely solid and were particularly pointed out.
The Romans emulated the Greek style; designs of casts of seated Romans offer evidence of a thicker and apparently slightly less delicately constructed klismos. Both styles, the light or heavy, were revived as part of the Classicist period. The klismos style is found in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some particular types of notable uniqueness in Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China is not able to be traced as long as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged collection of sketches and artworks has been preserved, detailing the inside and exteriors of Chinese households and their furniture. Also preserved from the 16th century are a collection of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an amazing familiarity to pictures of previous chairs.
As in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This chair is constructed both with or without arms but always having a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to give support to the back. In one type, however, the stiles were lightly curved over the arms so as to suit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the back). Together, the three areas are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of the back splat later had an influence on English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that just to a particular ability embolden corner joints (and furthermore are loose in the result) are a feature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which closes upon the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or have rounded edges—references as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and might have had a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs probably were allowed only for the senior members of the family, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have taken to China from the West. It is not dissimilar much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is elegantly fixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is often provided with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of both of these furniture items is stylized. The manufacture and decoration issues are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual parts do not look to have been affixed by either glue or screws, but were mortised on one another and locked into position 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. Paintings show a design 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 produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, at the same time, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is found in engravings of interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this design of chair may also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not certain that the innovation actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be 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 manufactured in impressive amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of its elegant proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged 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—spread through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are constructed from wood of relatively thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and more upmarket examples might be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used in place of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and found favour in many 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 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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