From all the furniture pieces, the chair may be primary. While the majority of other pieces (except the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair must be viewed here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to derivative forms including the bench or sofa, which can be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly distinguished.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and an aesthetic craft; it is historically an indicator of social standing. From the past royal courts there were social connotations between being led to a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, and having to cope with a stool. Since the 20th century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen a symbol of superior position, like in democratic governments the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
In a furniture creation, the chair holds a variety of various models. There are chairs structured to suit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past times there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and/or 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.
Contemporary lifestyle has designated particular chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All these chair shapes have been changed to suit to different human needs. Due to its significant relationship with man, the chair exists to its full advantage only when being utilised. While it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there might be items inside or not, a chair is really seen and fairly judged by a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the individual limbs of a chair were given names as the areas of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elemental function of a chair is to support our body, its credit is judged primarily for how completely it measures up to this practical role. In the structure of a chair, the chair maker is limited with particular static rules and principal measurements. Under these limitations, however, the chair creator has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair is an epoch of several thousand years. There is evidence of civilizations that had distinctive chair forms, seen of the foremost craft in the arenas of skill and art. From those peoples, individual note must 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 construct of skilled scheme, are today seen from tomb discoveries. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair has four legs formed like those of an animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this design a strong triangular structure was crafted. There was to our knowledge no notable variation from the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical non-royals. The main change lies in the level of ornamentation, in the selection of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was made to be an easily packed seat for army officers. As a camp stool this stool stayed until much later points. But the stool then was made for the character of a ceremonial seat, its original task as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the structure of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats are formed of wood. The simple manufacture of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that spin on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric held between them, came again somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this form is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is known not in any ancient fossil still extant but as seen from a trove of pictorial items. The best recognised is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them can be visible. These curving legs were considered to have been executed of bent wood and were likely to have been put under a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very strong and were particularly indicated.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek designs; evidence of statues of seated Romans display designs of a thicker and which appear to be a rather more crudely designed klismos. Both features, the light and the heavy, were revived as part of the Classicist time. The klismos influence is evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular brands of notable originality around Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China cannot be traced as well as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed folio of drawings and artworks was kept safe, displaying the interior and outer parts of Chinese households and the kinds of furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are some chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that show an amazing resemblance to styles of past chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there were two iconic chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair is seen both with or without arms although always having a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one design, it must be said, the stiles could be marginally curved on top of the arms to conform correctly to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the back). Together, all three limbs are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Though the style of a back splat had an introduction for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that merely to a particular capability support corner joints (and furthermore were loose to top that off) indicate a signature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which finishes upon the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—an acknowledgement as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and may have a plaited seat. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs most likely were reserved only for elderly individuals in the family, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have come to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is elegantly affixed to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is generally designed with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resulting effect of these two furniture items is stylized. The structure and decoration parts are combined in a style that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the way that the individual parts do not look to have been adjoined by use of either glue or screws, but had been mortised with one another and locked into position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its name on the chair. Works of art project 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 between, stitched to bring up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, in the same era, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be found in engravings of the interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this kind of chair is also seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not decided that the design actually was born in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in vast quantities, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself by its elegant proportions and fine 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, as created in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike methodology despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of quite thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been sanded away, and more expensive examples may be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more variable in design than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles throughout 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 well-known 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 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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