The History of the Chair

Of all furniture objects, the chair could be primary. While the majority of other forms (save the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is looked upon here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to further makes like a bench or sofa, which may be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently labeled.

The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and aesthetic piece; it can also be semiotic of social status. Within the old royal courts there were important signifiers between possessing a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, and having to use a stool. Since the past century, the director’s and manager’s chair has become an indicator of superior rank, and in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a raised floor.

In a furniture construction, the chair ranges from a variety of variations. There are chairs structured to fit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). During historical times there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); in 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 can have chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Modern living has derived new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair shapes have evolved to suit to different human desires. From its unique importance with man, the chair appears to its full meaning only when being used. While it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there might be things inside or not, a chair is really seen and evaluated by a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter need one another. Thus the various elements of the chair were named likened to the areas of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the obvious function of the chair is to support a body, its credit is tested generally on how fully it does fulfill this practical function. Within the creation of a chair, the carpenter is restricted within some static regulations and principal measurements. Through these boundaries, however, the chair designer has large freedom.

The history of the chair was a period of several thousand years. There is evidence of peoples that created unique chair types, as expressive of the topmost task in the areas of craft and creativity. From those civilisations, 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.

Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of expert design, are now found from findings made in tombs. The first of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair had four legs formed like those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. In this way a solid triangular design was made. There was from our understanding no notable differentiation from the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical populace. The only difference lies in the type of ornamentation, in the evidence of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was designed as an easily packed seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool the kind persevered until much later times. But the stool also was designed for the use of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical role as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can now be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the shape of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats were made with wood. The plain manufacture of the folding stool, made of two frames that spin on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, also appeared but some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this type is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not from any ancient specimen still in form but as seen in a large amount of pictorial items. The best known is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground near Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs were seen. These curving legs were most likely to be executed in bent wood and were thus bore great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore super stable and were overtly pointed out.

The Romans embued the Greek designs; evidence of casts of seated Romans show examples of a heavier and which appear to be a kind of more crudely built klismos. Both features, the light and heavy, were brought back during the Classicist era. The klismos design is evidenced in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in particular brands of marked originality in Denmark and Sweden from 1800.

China
The history of the chair in China cannot be followed as long as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken collection of images and artworks had been kept, detailing the inside and outer parts of Chinese buildings and the designs of furniture. Also preserved of the 16th century are a number of chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that show an intriguing familiarity to designs of older chairs.

Like in Egypt, two fundamental chair forms existed in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That chair has been designed both with or without arms though always with the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to firm the back. In one style, however, the stiles had been lightly curved on top of the arms for the purpose of sit right with the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a chairback). Each of the three sections are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. While the style of the back splat exercised an influence on English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could merely to a limited ability reinforce corner joints (and furthermore are loose as well) represent a feature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes around the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or has rounded edges—acknowledging perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and might have had a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; when too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs likely were reserved for the senior individuals, for they were esteemed greatly.

The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It does not differ much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is delicately held to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is generally designed with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of these furniture forms is stylized. The manufacture and decorative aspects are combined in a manner that is all at once both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual items do not appear to have been affixed with either glue or screws, but are mortised with one another and held in position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Works of art show a design of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of little pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same period, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is seen 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 style of chair is also seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not held that the innovation actually started in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in vast quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of such chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself by its elegant proportions and expensive 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, to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike methodology in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are constructed from wood of fairly thick dimensions; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been sanded away, and more upmarket designs would be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engraving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used in place of upholstery.

English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and was popularised 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 commonly 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 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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