The History of the Chair

Of all furniture pieces, the chair could be the imperative one. While most of the other forms (except the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair was viewed here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to derivative pieces like a bench or sofa, which can be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly labeled.

The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or an aesthetic creation; it is historically a signifier of social hierarchy. In the Medieval royal courts there were clear connotations between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to utilise a stool. From the recent century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been seen as iconic of superior standing, and even in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a high-set level.

As its furniture form, the chair is used for a range of different makes. There are chairs designed to fit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the olden days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (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 can have chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Our lifestyle has designated unique chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair forms have adapted to suit to different human requirements. Due to its close association with man, the chair exists to its full advantage only when in employ. While 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 and tested by a person using it, because chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the different limbs of a chair have been named like the areas of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the original job of a chair is to support the human body, its credit is judged generally from how well it fulfills this practical purpose. In the build of a chair, the chair maker is restricted for particular static laws and principal measurements. Through these rules, however, the chair maker has awesome freedom.

The history of the chair extended over an era of several thousand years. There were cultures that made distinctive chair shapes, seen of the highest work in the industries of craft and art. Among such cultures, a mention 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 upshot of skilled make, 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 iconic Egyptian chair has four legs structured akin to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this way a durable triangular construction was crafted. There seemed to be no notable difference from the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common populace. The real change was in the complex ornamentation, in the choice of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was manufactured as an easily carried seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool that type existed until much later days. But the stool also then was made as the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can today be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the structure of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats are worked out of wood. The simplistic build of the folding stool, made of two frames that spin on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, reappears some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of these is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not with any ancient object still extant but from a large amount of pictorial material. The most well known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area near Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them could be seen. These odd legs were presumably manufactured of bent wood and were likely to have been subjected to huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super strong and were plainly denoted.

The Romans embued the Greek style; evidence of casts of seated Romans show evidence of a more heavyset and which appear to be a rather crudely designed klismos. Both designs, the light or the heavy, were revived during the Classicist period. The klismos style is evidenced in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some types of notable individuality around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.

China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be charted as far back as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged serial of drawings and works of art had been protected, displaying the inside and outside of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Another preservation of the 16th century are some chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an astonishing similarity to designs of past chairs.

As in Egypt, two fundamental chair forms existed in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This chair is found both with and without arms but never without the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to firm the back. In one image, it has been seen, the stiles had been delicately curved on top of the arms to sit correctly with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its chairback). Together, the three parts were mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the style of the back splat had a foundation for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden items that merely to a limited capability embolden corner joints (and furthermore are loose as a result) represent an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which stops over the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or is given rounded edges—a left over perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and occasionally had a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to stay stiff and upright; when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a way of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs probably were reserved only for older persons in the family, for they were given great respect.

The Chinese folding stool is thought to have come to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is more often than not seen with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resulting effect of both furniture styles is stylized. The structure and decorative issues are combined in a way that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual items do not appear to have been joined together by use of either glue or screws, but are mortised onto one another and locked into its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Works of art display a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same period, gave 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 interior 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 is also found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not certain that the style actually began in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in large quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of these chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself by 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 of styles—that was, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are 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 fairly thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and finer designs might be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engraving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used instead of upholstery.

English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and became the favourite 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 popular and was widely distributed throughout the world.

Late 18th to 20th century
Within 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 products 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.

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