The History of the Chair

Out of each of the furniture needs, the chair could be the primary one. While many other items (save for the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair can be looked upon here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to complex forms for example a bench and sofa, which should be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly distinuishable.

The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support and aesthetic item; it was historically a signifier of social hierarchy. At the past royal courts there were significant differences between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or having to squat on a stool. From the last century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been seen as iconic of superior dignity, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a raised platform.

As a furniture purpose, the chair ranges from a wealth of various makes. There are chairs created to fit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In the olden days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Modern day living has demanded special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair types has adapted to fit to different human desires. Because of its unique connection with man, the chair comes to its full importance only when being utilised. While it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there might be items inside or not, a chair is best seen and fairly tested by a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter need the other. Thus the individual limbs of a chair are given names like the names of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the elementary purpose of the chair is to support a human body, its value is evaluated principally on how suitably it fulfills this practical use. In the construction of a chair, the builder is restricted within certain static laws and principal measurements. Under these regulations, however, the chair designer has awesome freedom.

The history of the chair was an era of several thousand years. There is evidence of peoples that created distinctive chair shapes, as expressive of the topmost craft in the spheres of technique and art. Out of these cultures, 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 upshot of skilled craft, are found from tombs. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair had four legs structured not unlike those of an animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this a strong triangular structure was created. There was to our knowledge no marked variation from the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular populace. The main difference lies in the complex ornamentation, in the choice of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was manufactured to be an easily portable seat for army officers. As a camp stool this chair persevered til much later days. But the stool then also took on the task of a ceremonial seat, its original task as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from today be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the construction of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats are formed out of wood. The simplistic construction of the folding stool, made of two frames that turn on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric set between them, then came again some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of those is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not as any ancient item still extant but found in a trove of pictorial objects. The best known is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs are displayed. These unusual legs were possibly executed of bent wood and were likely to have been put under extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore super stable and were clearly drawn.

The Romans embued the Greek chair; evidence of casts of seated Romans display examples of a heavier and which appear to be a rather more crudely crafted klismos. Both features, the light or the heavy, were seen again during the Classicist time. The klismos chair can be seen in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some forms of considerable uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden during 1800.

China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as long as that of Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full collection of drawings and paintings has been kept, detailing the insides and outer parts of Chinese homes and their furniture. Kept also since the 16th century are a number of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an amazing similarity to styles of previous chairs.

Just the same as in Egypt, there existed two iconic chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair can be designed both with or without arms but never missing the square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to firm the back. In one image, however, the stiles are slightly curved by the arms for the purpose of suit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the back). The three limbs were mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Although the innovation of the back splat exercised an influence on English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden members that would only to a limited ability support corner joints (and furthermore were loose to top that off) indicate a signature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends around the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or is given rounded edges—an acknowledgement perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and might have had a plaited form. These chairs needed the sitter to remain stiff and upright; when too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs likely were only for elderly people, for they were greatly esteemed.

The Chinese folding stool is thought to have been brought to China from the West. It is not dissimilar much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is more often than not possessing metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of these two furniture items is stylized. The structure and decorative aspects are combined in a way that is all at once both naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual members do not appear to have been joined together by means of either glue or screws, but are mortised into one another and fixed in position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Paintings display 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 in between the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same period, held the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be seen in engravings of 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 design of chair may also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not held that the form actually began in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; 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 surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up against a wall. The design asserts itself with 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 was, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes its popularity to a combination of leisure 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 tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of rather thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and finer items may be further embellished with special delicate and decorative engravings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.

English chairs from the 18th century were more open in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and was popular 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 commonly 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 versions 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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