The History of the Chair
From all the furniture forms, the chair might be of the most importance. While the majority of other forms (apart from the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair can be said here in the general sense, from stool to throne to complex kinds including the bench or sofa, which might 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 intriguing as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support or aesthetic piece of art; it is also an indicator of social placement. At the historical royal courts there were social connotations between possessing a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to squat on a stool. From the past century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been regarded as a signifier of superior rank, and in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
As a furniture creation, the chair can be used for a range of variations. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). During historical days there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has derived new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair types have perfected to conform to growing human needs. For its significant relationship with man, the chair comes to its full purpose only when in employ. Although it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there might be items inside or not, a chair is really seen best and clearly evaluated with a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter complement the other. Thus the different elements of a chair have been named according to the areas of our human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first role of the chair is to support a human body, its worth is tested basically from how completely it fulfills this practical role. Within the build of the chair, the builder is limited within particular static rules and principal measurements. Through these restrictions, however, the chair builder has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair covers an epoch of several thousand years. There is evidence of societies that held iconic chair shapes, as expressions of the highest object in the arenas of technique and creativity. Out of such cultures, particular mention 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of careful make, were a finding from tombs. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair had four legs designed as akin to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this way a strong triangular form was crafted. There was in our understanding no noteworthy differentiation from the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary populace. The general difference lies in the kind of ornamentation, in the choice of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was made to be an easily portable seat for army. As a camp stool the kind continued for much later periods. But the stool then also was created for the character of a ceremonial seat, its technical function as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the structure of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats were formed of wood. The simple structure of the folding stool, made of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric set between them, reappeared but some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of those is the folding stool, made of ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is known not as any ancient item still existing but found in a trove of pictorial objects. The archetype is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs are displayed. These unusual legs were most likely to be created out of bent wood and were as such had extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very solid and were visibly denoted.
The Romans adopted the Greek style; quite a few statues of seated Romans display examples of a denser and which appear to be a slightly less delicately designed klismos. Both kinds, light and heavy, were brought back as part of the Classicist period. The klismos style can be seen in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some special brands of marked iconicism in Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be followed as far back as chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full folio of drawings and artworks has been kept, detailing the interiors and outer parts of Chinese households and the kinds of furniture. Another preservation from the 16th century are a collection of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that display an intriguing resemblance to pictures of ancient chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there existed two major chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This chair has been seen both with or without arms although always having the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to firm the back. In one style, though, the stiles are delicately curved by the arms to sit right with the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the back). Together, the three limbs were mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Though the design of a back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that only just to a limited limit reinforce corner joints (and then are loose as a result) are a feature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes about the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—references perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and had on occasion a plaited texture. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs most likely were allowed only for senior people in the family, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It does not vary very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is intricately held to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of both these furniture items is stylized. The construction and decoration parts are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the manner that the individual members do not seem to have been affixed with either glue or screws, but have been mortised into 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. Artworks show a kind of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same era, held the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be seen in engravings of the interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this kind of chair can also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not certain that the design actually began 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 considerable numbers, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of these chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself by its elegant proportions and fine 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 is, as created in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes the popularity to a combination of leisure and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally 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 disguise all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof have wood of rather thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been taken away, and finer items may be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engravings. The wood may 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 instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more open in style than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and won favour 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 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 styles 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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