The History of the Chair
Of all furniture pieces, the chair could be the most imperative. While the majority of other objects (apart from the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is intended to be used here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to complex chairs like the bench or sofa, which should be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously defined.
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 and/or an aesthetic craft; it historically is semiotic of social status. From the past royal courts there were social distinctions between sitting on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to cope with a stool. In the recent century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen a signifier of superior standing, and in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
In a furniture construction, the chair is employed for a variety of different makes. There are chairs designed to match man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). During historical times there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has demanded new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair kinds have been evolved to conform to growing human requirements. For its significant link with man, the chair lives to its full purpose only when being used. While it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there might be items inside or not, a chair is understood best and fairly tested with a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter need each other. Thus the individual elements of the chair are labeled as the limbs of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary work of the chair is to support our body, its credit is judged firstly from how suitably it fulfills this practical purpose. In the design of the chair, the chair maker is bound within particular static regulation and principal measurements. Through these limits, however, the chair creator has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair covered an era of several thousand years. There were peoples that have created individual chair shapes, expressions of the leading task in the spheres of skill and design. Among these cultures, individual note should 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 masterful craft, are now seen from tomb discoveries. One of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have four legs shaped not unlike those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this design a stable triangular form was obtained. There was apparently no marked variation in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary non-royals. The only change was in the decorative ornamentation, in the choice of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was manufactured for an easily portable seat for officers. As a camp stool the chair persisted for much later periods. But the stool then was made for the character of a ceremonial seat, its technical function as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the form of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats were created from wood. The simplistic manufacture of the folding stool, made of two frames that turn on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric held between them, came again at some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of this type is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient object still existing but as in a trove of pictorial material. The better known is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location near Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs are displayed. These odd legs were likely to have been manufactured of bent wood and were thus bore a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore very durable and were overtly indicated.
The Romans embued the Greek design; quite a few casts of seated Romans show designs of a denser and apparently rather more crudely built klismos. Both types, the light and heavy, were revived in the Classicist epoch. The klismos chair can be found in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some particular kinds of marked originality within Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China cannot be charted as well as that of Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged collection of drawings and artworks has been protected, displaying the inside and exteriors of Chinese homes and their furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are a number of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an astonishing similarity to images of ancient chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there existed two major chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair can be seen both with and without arms though always with its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to support the back. In one style, however, the stiles had been delicately curved above the arms to conform correctly to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the back). Together, the three parts were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the innovation of a back splat then had a foundation for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only to a particular limit embolden corner joints (and furthermore were loose in the bargain) signify a feature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which finishes over the rounded staves. Members are round in section or has rounded edges—an acknowledgement maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and occasionally had a plaited texture. These chairs demanded of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; when too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to collapse. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs presumably were only for the senior people, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have travelled to China from the West. It does not vary very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is elegantly joined to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is more often than not seen with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the overall effect of both these furniture styles is stylized. The construction and aesthetic elements are combined in a way that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual members do not seem to have been fixed together by use of either glue or screws, but are mortised into one another and locked into place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its name on the chair. Artworks show a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same era, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be found in engravings of the interiors 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 is also found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not believed that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in large amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The design asserts itself with its shapely proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that was, to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes its popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methods in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are constructed from wood of quite thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and finer items might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engravings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and won favour 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 popular 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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