The History of the Chair
Of all furniture forms, the chair may be of the most importance. While the majority of other items (except the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair must be viewed here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to developed forms for example the bench or sofa, which can be considered 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 interesting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or aesthetic piece of art; it is historically an indicator of social ranking. From the past royal courts there were plain distinctions between possessing a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to cope with a stool. In the past century, the director’s and manager’s chair has developed iconic of superior rank, as well as in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a raised platform.
As a furniture form, the chair is employed for a number of different purposes. There are chairs manufactured to attend to man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the olden days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We have chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has designated special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair forms has been perfected to match to different human desires. Due to its close link with man, the chair lives to its full meaning only when being used. Although it doesn’t make a difference 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 clearly evaluated with a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter need each other. Thus the several areas of the chair are given labels like the areas of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original purpose of a chair is to support the body, its credit is valued principally for how suitably it does measure up to this practical purpose. In the manufacture of a chair, the chair maker is limited with the static regulations and principal measurements. Inside these limits, however, the chair creator has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair is an epoch of several thousand years. There is evidence of societies that held iconic chair forms, expressions of the principal object in the spheres of technique and art. Out of these cultures, particular mention needs to 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 expert make, are today a finding from tomb findings. The first one of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair has four legs crafted not unlike those of a particular animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. From this a strong triangular design was crafted. There was to our understanding no marked difference between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common peasantry. The real difference existed in the decorative ornamentation, in the choice of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was crafted to be an easily portable seat for officers. As a camp stool this stool persevered until much later points in time. But the stool then existed in the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical task as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can now be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the shape of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats are made from wood. The simplistic structure of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric held between them, appeared but somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of these is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is found not in any ancient item still extant but as in a trove of pictorial objects. The better recognised is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those are visible. These strange legs were presumed to be crafted with bent wood and were as such needed to bear great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore extremely solid and were particularly signified.
The Romans embued the Greek designs; designs of models of seated Romans display chairs of a thicker and which appear to be a somewhat crudely crafted klismos. Both designs, the light or heavy, were popularised as part of the Classicist epoch. The klismos chair is seen in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some particular types of notable individuality around Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China cannot be tracked as far back as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full collection of sketches and artworks was kept, with images of the interior and outer parts of Chinese homes and the designs of furniture. Also preserved of the 16th century are a number of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that show an astonishing similarity to designs of past chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there existed two particular chair forms in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair has been designed both with and without arms although always with the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one image, it has been found, the stiles had been slightly curved over the arms for the purpose of conform correctly to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its chairback). Each of the three parts were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. While the idea of this back splat had an inspiration for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden members that would merely to a particular capability reinforce corner joints (and furthermore are loose to top that off) indicate an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which finishes around the rounded staves. All members are round in section or have rounded edges—referable as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; if too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a way of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs likely were reserved only for older people in the family, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have come to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is elegantly affixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is more often than not designed with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the overall effect of both these furniture designs is stylized. The manufacture and decoration aspects are combined in a manner that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual parts do not appear to have been adjoined by either glue or screws, but have been mortised into one another and fixed in position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Paintings display a kind of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture while traveling which, in the same era, had the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this design of chair is also made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not determined that the form actually started in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable numbers, as indicated 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 with its harmonious 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 style—that was, as progressed in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes this popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed seated 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 constructed strongly on craftsmanlike methodology despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of fairly thick measurements; but all the members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and finer designs would be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in style than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and became the favourite 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 well-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 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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