Out of all furniture objects, the chair could be the paramount one. While many other items (apart from the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is meant to be said here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to further types such as a bench and sofa, which might be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently distinguished.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative art. The chair is not only a physical support or an aesthetic piece; it was historically a signifier of social placement. In the historical royal courts there were social connotations between being seated on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to make do with a stool. From the past century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been seen as iconic of superior rank, and even in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
As its furniture creation, the chair can be employed for a variety of various forms. There are chairs manufactured to fit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). During historical times there were chairs for births (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs 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, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has demanded new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair types has been evolved to suit to growing human requirements. Because of its significant link with man, the chair appears to its full advantage only when being utilised. Although it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there might be items inside or not, a chair is really seen best and regarded best with a person utilising it, because chair and sitter need each other. Thus the several elements of the chair have been given names likened to the elements of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the basic work of your chair is to support your body, its credit is evaluated generally from how fully it does measure up to this practical role. In the construction of a chair, the chair maker is bound within some static law and principal measurements. Through these limits, however, the chair designer has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair covered an era of several thousand years. There is evidence of civilizations that had unique chair types, as expressive of the principal work in the arenas of craft and creativity. In these societies, particular mention 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 careful craft, were a finding from discoveries made in tombs. One of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have had four legs structured not unlike those of an animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this way a solid triangular design was crafted. There appears to be no noteworthy change between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical people. The real difference lied in the kind of ornamentation, in the selection of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was manufactured to be an easily packed seat for army officers. As a camp stool the kind stayed around for much later points. But the stool then was designed for the character of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can already be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the shape of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats were created of wood. The plain manufacture of the folding stool, made of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, also appeared somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of these is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient fossil still around but as seen from a variety of pictorial items. The better known is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them were seen. These creative legs were probably created in bent wood and were likely to have been had a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very stable and were plainly indicated.
The Romans adopted the Greek style; a number of casts of seated Romans offer examples of a denser and apparently kind of less delicately constructed klismos. Both designs, light and heavy, were popularised within the Classicist epoch. The klismos style can be evidenced in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in particular brands of profound iconicism in Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be tracked as well as chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of sketches and artworks was preserved, detailing the inside and exteriors of Chinese houses and the designs of furniture. Kept also of the 16th century are a number of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an intriguing resemblance to designs of ancient chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there existed two iconic chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair has been designed both with or without arms but never missing a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to firm the back. In one type, it must be said, the stiles are marginally curved on top of the arms in order to conform to the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of the chairback). Together, all three limbs had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Though the idea of this back splat had an introduction for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only to a restricted ability support corner joints (and are loose in the bargain) indicate an element particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes over the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or is given rounded edges—references maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have a plaited seat. These chairs needed the sitter to be stiff and upright; when too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs presumably were kept for the senior persons in the family, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is more often than not seen with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resulting effect of both furniture forms is stylized. The manufacture and decorative elements are combined in a way that is all at once naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is a result of the way that the individual items do not look to have been held together by either glue or screws, but had been mortised with one another and held in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Works of art show a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring out a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same era, held the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be displayed in engravings of 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 style of chair can also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not believed that the innovation actually was born in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast numbers, as indicated 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 its shapely 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 developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The design owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike principles despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof employ wood of fairly thick density; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and more upmarket designs would be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and became the favourite 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 popular and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
In 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 brands 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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