The History of the Chair
Out of all furniture objects, the chair may be the most important. While many other pieces (save for the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is used here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to further pieces like a bench or sofa, which should be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly definitive.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not only a physical support and an aesthetic artwork; it historically was a symbol of social standing. In the past royal courts there were significant connotations between having a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to sit on a stool. During the 20th century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has become an identifier of superior status, like in democratic governments the speaker sits on a raised floor.
In a furniture purpose, the chair can be employed for a number of different purposes. There are chairs created to fit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). During past times there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (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. There are chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has derived new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair forms has adapted to suit to changing human uses. Due to its unique importance with man, the chair lives to its full meaning only when utilised. Though it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there might be anything inside or not, a chair is understood best and fairly regarded with a person using it, for chair and sitter need the other. Thus the different areas of the chair were given labels as the names of our human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the basic job of a chair is to support your body, its credit is judged primarily from how well it does measure up to this practical function. In the build of a chair, the chair maker is bound under certain static regulation and principal measurements. Within these limits, however, the chair designer has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair lasted over an era of several thousand years. There are societies that had iconic chair shapes, seen of the topmost work in the spheres of craft and design. From those societies, special note 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of masterful design, are now found from tomb findings. One of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair had four legs structured like those of an animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this design a solid triangular structure was created. There was to our understanding no significant variation between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular populace. The general variation lies in the type of ornamentation, in the selection of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was created for an easily stored seat for army officers. As a camp stool this form existed til much later times. But the stool then also took on the use of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical history as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from evidence be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the structure of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats were created of wood. The simple construction of the folding stool, made of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, then appeared but some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of these is the folding stool, of ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient specimen still around but found in a trove of pictorial material. The most recognisable is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs were visible. These odd legs were understood to be executed with bent wood and were probably needed to bear great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore super solid and were clearly drawn.
The Romans emulated the Greek designs; designs of models of seated Romans display designs of a more heavyset and are a kind of crudely constructed klismos. Both types, the light or heavy, were revived in the Classicist epoch. The klismos influence is used in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in special brands of notable uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as far back as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full series of sketches and artworks had been preserved, displaying the inside and outside of Chinese houses and their furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that hold an astonishing resemblance to images of older chairs.
Like in Egypt, there existed two standard chair designs in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair is designed both with or without arms though never without a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to support the back. In one form, though, the stiles could be lightly curved by the arms in order to suit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the chairback). Together, the three parts were mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the idea of the back splat later had a foundation for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden members that would only to a particular limit reinforce corner joints (and are loose in the bargain) signify a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends around the rounded staves. Members are round in section or is given rounded edges—acknowledging perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have a plaited form. These chairs needed the sitter to remain stiff and upright; if too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs presumably were reserved only for elderly people in the family, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation 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 possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resulting effect of both of these furniture forms is stylized. The manufacture and decoration aspects are combined in a style that is both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an upshot of the way 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 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 type of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with 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 tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, at the same period, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is evidenced in engravings of interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this type of chair may also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not certain that the innovation actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in large numbers, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself with its shapely 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 of styles—that is to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes the popularity to a combination of leisure and charm. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of rather thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and finer examples may be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engraving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and was popularised 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 popular 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 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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