The History of the Chair
From all the furniture objects, the chair may be primary. While many other forms (apart from the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is meant to be viewed here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to complex forms for example a bench and sofa, which might be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly definitive.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and aesthetic piece; it was historically semiotic of social placement. Within the Medieval royal courts there were social differences between sitting on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to make do with a stool. From the recent century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been an identifier of superior status, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a raised platform.
As a furniture creation, the chair is used for a variety of various forms. There are chairs designed to match man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show 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 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 can make chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has demanded particular chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair kinds has adapted to conform to evolving human uses. For its unique link with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when being used. Whereas it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there are items inside or not, a chair is understood best and tested by a person using it, because chair and sitter require the other. Thus the different elements of a chair have been named according to the limbs of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal role of a chair is to support the human body, its value is evaluated basically on how completely it does measure up to this practical job. Within the creation of the chair, the maker is restricted under particular static regulation and principal measurements. Through these boundaries, however, the chair builder has great freedom.
The history of the chair extends over an era of several thousand years. There existed cultures that created distinctive chair shapes, expressions of the highest task in the arenas of skill and design. Out of these peoples, special 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 objects of masterful make, are now a finding from discoveries made in tombs. One of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair has four legs shaped as akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular construction was created. There was in our view no marked difference from the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular populace. The general difference was in the complexity of ornamentation, in the particulars of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was crafted to be an easily portable seat for soldiers. As a camp stool this type persevered for much later points in time. But the stool then also was designed as the task of a ceremonial seat, its technical role as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from today be found, 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 made in the form of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats are created of wood. The easy manufacture of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric set between them, is seen again some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of this type is the folding stool, of ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is found not from any ancient object still extant but seen in a large amount of pictorial objects. The better known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location by Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those are displayed. These creative legs were considered to have been executed of bent wood and were as such put under extreme pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore super strong and were overtly signified.
The Romans embued the Greek chair; a number of models of seated Romans are designs of a heavier and which appear to be a somewhat crudely designed klismos. Both styles, the light and the heavy, were revived during the Classicist period. The klismos influence can be seen in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some special types of marked uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China isn’t able to be charted as well as the progression of the chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed collection of images and artworks has been preserved, showing the interior and exteriors of Chinese buildings and their furniture. Also kept of the 16th century are a collection of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an interesting familiarity to designs of previous chairs.
Just as in Egypt, two particular chair forms existed in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That chair can be found both with or without arms although never without its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to give support to the back. In one type, however, the stiles were delicately curved on top of the arms in order to sit right with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of its back). Together, the three sections are mortised on the yoke-like top rail. While the innovation of the back splat later had a foundation for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden members that would only to a particular capability reinforce corner joints (and were loose as a result) indicate an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which finishes over the rounded staves. All members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—an acknowledgement as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have had a plaited texture. These chairs needed the sitter to remain stiff and upright; if too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a way of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs presumably were only for the senior people in the family, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It is akin much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is intricately joined to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is often designed with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resultant effect of both these furniture forms is stylized. The manufacture and decoration elements are combined in a style that is all at once both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual members do not seem to have been fixed together with either glue or screws, but have been mortised onto one another and locked into position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Works of art project a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to show up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same time, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is seen in engravings of the interior of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this design of chair can also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not held that the form actually began in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in impressive quantities, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of these chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself with its shapely proportions and delicate 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 is to say, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes this popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat adheres 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 little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover 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 are made from wood of quite thick dimensions; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been taken away, and more upmarket examples might be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carvings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and found 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 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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