The History of the Chair
Of all furniture needs, the chair might be the paramount one. While most of the other pieces (save for the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair was said here in the common sense, from stool to throne to developed chairs including the bench and sofa, which should be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously definitive.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support or aesthetic creation; it can also be a symbol of social place. From the past royal courts there were plain distinctions between being led to a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, and having to squat on a stool. Since the 20th century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been seen as a symbol of superior rank, and in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a raised platform.
In its furniture construction, the chair is used for a variety of different models. There are chairs designed to fit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past times there were chairs for births (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 four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has derived new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair types have been perfected to fit to changing human needs. For its close link with man, the chair appears to its full advantage only when in employ. Though it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there might be items inside or not, a chair is best seen and tested by a person using it, because chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the different limbs of a chair have been given labels according to the limbs of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary purpose of the chair is to support the body, its value is valued generally by how well it does fulfill this practical job. In the build of the chair, the chair maker is limited under some static regulation and principal measurements. In these regulations, however, the chair creator has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair covers a period of several thousand years. There were civilizations that created individual chair forms, as expressions of the highest work in the arenas of skill and aesthetics. In those peoples, special 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of expert design, are a finding from findings made in tombs. The first of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs designed as akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this way a strong triangular structure was made. There seemed to be no marked differentiation in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary non-royals. The simple variation was in the complex ornamentation, in the particulars of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was created as an easily carried seat for army officers. As a camp stool the form stayed til much later days. But the stool also then was designed as the use of a ceremonial seat, its technical task as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from evidence be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the construction of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats were worked with wood. The simplistic structure of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, then came again some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this form is the folding stool, from ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not from any ancient item still in form but as found in a large amount of pictorial objects. The iconic kind is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location by Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them would be displayed. These curving legs were most likely created out of bent wood and were as such subjected to a large amount of pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore super solid and were overtly denoted.
The Romans adopted the Greek design; quite a few casts of seated Romans show evidence of a denser and apparently rather less delicately crafted klismos. Both designs, the light or heavy, were brought back as part of the Classicist era. The klismos style can be seen in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some special types of considerable uniqueness within Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China cannot be traced as well as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken folio of sketches and works of art was preserved, detailing the insides and outside of Chinese buildings and the designs of furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are a number of chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that display an intriguing resemblance to styles of past chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there was two major chair designs in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This chair was constructed both with and without arms however never without the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one form, it must be said, the stiles are delicately curved by the arms to conform correctly to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the back). Together, the three sections are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the style of the Chinese back splat then had an influence on English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only just to a restricted limit support corner joints (and furthermore are loose to top that off) indicate a signature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends upon the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or has rounded edges—referable perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and had on occasion a plaited texture. These chairs needed the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for if too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a way of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs most likely were only for older persons in the family, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have come to China from the West. It is not dissimilar very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is delicately fixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is more often than not possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resulting effect of both of these furniture styles is stylized. The construction and decoration parts are combined in a manner that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the way that the individual items do not look to have been affixed with either glue or screws, but were mortised onto one another and held in position 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. Artworks show a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same era, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is found in engravings of the inside of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this kind of chair may also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not determined that the form actually was born in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in vast amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of such chairs lined up along 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 created in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes such popularity to a combination of leisure and charm. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methodology in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof use wood of fairly thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been sanded away, and more upmarket designs may be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more open in style than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and was popular 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 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 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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