Of all furniture pieces, the chair might be paramount. While most other items (save the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair must be used here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to further items such as the bench or sofa, which should be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously defined.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not only a physical support or aesthetic item; it was also a symbol of social placement. At the old royal courts there were social distinctions between having a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to use a stool. During the 20th century, the director’s and manager’s chair has become a symbol of superior standing, and in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a high-set level.
In a furniture construction, the chair holds a range of various makes. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the olden days there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has derived particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair shapes have been adapted to suit to differing human desires. Due to its close connection with man, the chair appears to its full meaning only when used. Although it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there is anything inside or not, a chair is seen best and fairly evaluated by a person using it, for chair and sitter need each other. Thus the individual parts of a chair have been given names like the areas of a human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the basic purpose of the chair is to support the human body, its worth is judged principally on how suitably it does measure up to this practical job. Within the structure of a chair, the carpenter is bound for some static rules and principal measurements. Within these restrictions, however, the chair designer has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair covered an era of several thousand years. There existed cultures that made unique chair forms, as expressions of the topmost endeavour in the arenas of technique and design. Out of these such societies, particular 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of masterful make, are seen from tomb findings. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have had four legs crafted similar to those of an animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this design a strong triangular form was obtained. There appears to be no noteworthy change in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common people. The main change exists in the level of ornamentation, in the evidence of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was developed to be an easily carried seat for officers. As a camp stool this stool continued til much later periods of time. But the stool also then was designed as the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original function as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can today be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the shape of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats were created out of wood. The easy structure of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, then came up at some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this form is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient object still extant but as in a wealth of pictorial material. The better known is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them were seen. These creative legs were most likely to be crafted from bent wood and were likely to have been needed to bear a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super solid and were clearly signified.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; designs of models of seated Romans are designs of a more heavyset and apparently kind of more crudely constructed klismos. Both designs, the light and heavy, were popularised within the Classicist period. The klismos style is used in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some special forms of marked originality in Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China can not be traced as far as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged collection of sketches and artworks has been protected, showing the inside and outer parts of Chinese buildings and the designs of furniture. Also kept since the 16th century are a number of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an interesting similarity to styles of previous chairs.
Same as in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This chair has been designed both with or without arms but always having the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to support the back. In one style, though, the stiles were lightly curved above the arms for the purpose of conform correctly to the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of a back). Together, the three limbs were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Although the style of this back splat had an inspiration for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden items that would only to a particular extent reinforce corner joints (as well as being loose to top that off) indicate a feature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops about the rounded staves. All members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—acknowledging perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and had on occasion a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; when too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs presumably were only for senior people, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have come to China from the West. It is not dissimilar so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is prettily affixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is more often than not provided with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resulting effect of both furniture designs is stylized. The manufacture and decoration aspects are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the manner that the individual parts do not seem to have been held together by use of either glue or screws, but are mortised on one another and fixed in place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Artworks show a kind 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, stitched to produce a pattern of little pads. The front board and a corresponding board from the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same time, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be evidenced in engravings of interiors of wealthy 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 can also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not determined that the form actually originated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in large quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of these chairs lined up along a wall. The design asserts itself by its shapely proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that is, as brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes the popularity to a combination of leisure and charm. The seat adheres 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 tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike principles even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are made from wood of fairly thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been taken away, and more expensive designs might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carvings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and was popularised 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 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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