The History of the Chair

Out of each of the furniture needs, the chair may be the paramount one. While the majority of other forms (except the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is intended to be regarded here in the common sense, from stool to throne to derivative makes like a bench or sofa, which may be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly distinguished.

The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support or aesthetic item; it was historically a signifier of social rank. From the past royal courts there were clear differences between sitting 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 20th century, a director’s or manager’s chair has been an identifier of superior rank, and in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on an elevated floor.

In a furniture form, the chair can be utilised for a variety of various purposes. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). There are 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 for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Contemporary lifestyle has developed special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All these chair kinds have changed to fit to growing human needs. From its close importance with man, the chair lives to its full meaning only when being utilised. While it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is seen best and fairly evaluated by a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter suit the other. Thus the individual elements of the chair are labeled corresponding to the elements of our human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the simple role of the chair is to support a human body, its value is evaluated principally from how completely it does measure up to this practical use. In the build of the chair, the carpenter is restricted by certain static law and principal measurements. Through these restrictions, however, the chair designer has great freedom.

The history of the chair covers an era of several thousand years. There is evidence of civilizations that have created individual chair types, as expressive of the premier endeavour in the arenas of technique and aesthetics. In these such cultures, individual 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 result of skilled scheme, are a finding from tomb findings. One of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs shaped like those of some animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. From this design a solid triangular construction was created. There seemed to be no significant differentiation between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical citizens. The only variation exists in the complexity of ornamentation, in the selection of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was manufactured for an easily carried seat for army. As a camp stool the kind existed until much later times. But the stool then also was created as the role of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today be seen, 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 are in the construction of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats are made of wood. The plain construction of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric set between them, came up some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this kind is the folding stool, of ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not with any ancient fossil still around but in a large amount of pictorial material. The iconic kind is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs were seen. These odd legs were probably crafted in bent wood and were as such 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 durable and were particularly indicated.

The Romans embued the Greek chair; a number of models of seated Romans show designs of a thicker and in appearance somewhat more crudely designed klismos. Both styles, the light or heavy, were revived within the Classicist period. The klismos chair is seen in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some particular forms of considerable iconicism in Denmark and Sweden during 1800.

China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be traced as well as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed collection of drawings and paintings has been preserved, with images of the insides and outer parts of Chinese houses and the kinds of furniture. Also kept since the 16th century are some chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that display an astonishing familiarity to styles of previous chairs.

Just as in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That chair was seen both with or without arms though never without a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to give support to the back. In one style, though, the stiles are delicately curved on top of the arms in order to sit correctly with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the back). The three limbs were mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the style of a back splat then had an inspiration for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden items that merely to a limited capability reinforce corner joints (and are loose in the bargain) indicate a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes about the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or have rounded edges—acknowledging perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs most likely were reserved for senior people, for they were greatly esteemed.

The Chinese folding stool is thought to have come to China from the West. It is not dissimilar much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is intricately affixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is usually seen with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the ultimate effect of both these furniture forms is stylized. The constructive and decoration aspects are combined in a manner that is all at once naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual items do not seem to have been fixed together with either glue or screws, but are mortised into one another and locked into its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Paintings project a style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board from the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture while traveling which, in the same era, held the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is found in engravings of the interior of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this type of chair may also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not held that the style actually originated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable numbers, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of such chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself by its harmonious 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 is, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes its popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of those have wood of rather thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and finer items can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carvings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes used in place of upholstery.

English chairs in the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and was popularised in several 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
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 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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