The History of the Chair
Of all furniture items, the chair could be the imperative one. While most of the other pieces (save the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is intended to be said here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to derivative pieces for example a bench and sofa, which should be seen 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 intriguing as its history as a creative art. The chair is not simply a physical support and an aesthetic item; it historically was semiotic of social place. In the past royal courts there were significant signifiers between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or having to use a stool. In the 20th century, the director’s and manager’s chair has been iconic of superior position, as well as in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a higher platform.
In its furniture construction, the chair can be used for a number of various makes. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since historical times there were chairs for births (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has demanded particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair kinds has perfected to match to growing human uses. For its significant link with man, the chair comes to its full advantage only when in employ. Whereas it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there might be things inside or not, a chair is understood best and tested by a person using it, because chair and sitter need the other. Thus the various areas of the chair were given labels according to the parts of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original role of your chair is to support our human body, its value is valued primarily from how fully it measures up to this practical function. Within the design of a chair, the builder is bound under the static regulation and principal measurements. Through these regulations, however, the chair builder has great freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over an era of several thousand years. There are cultures that held significant chair forms, as expressions of the topmost work in the arenas of technique and design. Among these such civilisations, a 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 items of careful design, are found from tomb findings. One of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have four legs structured like those of an animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this way a stable triangular form was made. There seems to be no significant variation between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical peasantry. The real change lies in the kind of ornamentation, in the selection of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was created for an easily stored seat for officers. As a camp stool the stool persisted for much later times. But the stool then also was made as the role of a ceremonial seat, its original function as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today be observed, 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 can’t be folded as the seats are formed of wood. The plain build of the folding stool, composed of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric set between them, also appeared some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of those is the folding stool, from ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is found not in any ancient specimen still extant but from a large amount of pictorial material. The better recognised is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them can be shown. These unusual legs were most likely to be manufactured from bent wood and were thus had huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super solid and were plainly indicated.
The Romans adopted the Greek designs; designs of models of seated Romans offer chairs of a heavier and which appear to be a slightly crudely crafted klismos. Both features, the light and heavy, were brought back within the Classicist time. The klismos style is used in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some special forms of notable individuality within Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as far back as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken series of drawings and artworks was protected, displaying the interiors and exteriors of Chinese buildings and the kinds of furniture. Also preserved from the 16th century are a collection of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an astonishing familiarity to images of past chairs.
Just as in Egypt, two chair designs dominated in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This chair is found both with and without arms although always with a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to give support to the back. In one design, it must be said, the stiles could be delicately curved by the arms so as to fit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a back). The three limbs are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the style of this back splat later had a foundation for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that would merely to a restricted extent stabilise corner joints (and are loose in the result) signify a feature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes over the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or is given rounded edges—references maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and occasionally had a plaited texture. These chairs required of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs probably were allowed only for the senior members of the family, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have come to China from the West. It is not dissimilar that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is usually seen with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the overall effect of both of these furniture forms is stylized. The structure and decoration elements are combined in a way that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual members do not appear to have been adjoined with either glue or screws, but had been mortised with one another and fixed in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Artworks display a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same time, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be displayed in engravings of interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this design of chair can also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not decided that the style actually started in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself with its harmonious 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 style—that was, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes such popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of rather thick density; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been removed, and more expensive chairs can be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engravings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which came from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and became the preference 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 reknowned 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 products 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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