The History of the Chair
Out of all furniture forms, the chair could be the imperative one. While most other pieces (except the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is meant to be viewed here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to further makes such as the bench or sofa, which may be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously labeled.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative art. The chair is not simply a physical support and/or aesthetic object; it historically is semiotic of social rank. At the historical royal courts there were social differences between sitting on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to use a stool. Since the 20th century, a director’s or manager’s chair has been regarded as an identifier of superior position, like in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
As a furniture creation, the chair can be employed for a range of different forms. There are chairs structured to match man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical times there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs 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. There are chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has developed unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair types have perfected to suit to growing human uses. For its particular association with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when being utilised. Although it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there might be things inside or not, a chair is really seen best and evaluated with a person using it, because chair and sitter complement one another. Thus the various areas of a chair have been named corresponding to the areas of our human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary job of the chair is to support the body, its credit is evaluated principally on how fully it does fulfill this practical function. In the construction of the chair, the maker is bound within the static law and principal measurements. Within these limitations, however, the chair maker has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair extends over an era of several thousand years. There were peoples that created individual chair types, seen of the principal endeavour in the industries of handling and creativity. In those societies, a note must 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 skilled design, are a finding from discoveries made in tombs. The first of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed not unlike those of a designated animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this design a strong triangular design was crafted. There was in our understanding no notable change between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical populace. The main difference existed in the brand of ornamentation, in the choice of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was designed for an easily stored seat for officers. As a camp stool that form stayed around for much later days. But the stool also then was made as the task of a ceremonial seat, its technical function as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can today be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the structure of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats were created of wood. The plain build of the folding stool, made of two frames that turn on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric held between them, was then seen but some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this type is the folding stool, of ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not as any ancient fossil still around but seen in a large amount of pictorial evidence. The best recognised is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs are displayed. These unusual legs were understood to have been crafted from bent wood and were thus needed to bear extreme pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very stable and were plainly pointed out.
The Romans emulated the Greek style; existing statues of seated Romans are evidence of a denser and in appearance kind of less delicately built klismos. Both kinds, the light and the heavy, were brought back in the Classicist era. The klismos influence can be evidenced in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in particular forms of profound originality in Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China cannot be followed as far as the progression of the chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged serial of images and artworks had been kept, detailing the insides and exterior of Chinese homes and their furniture. Kept also of the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an amazing resemblance to images of older chairs.
As in Egypt, there was two major chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair was constructed both with or without arms however always with its square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to give support to the back. In one design, it has been found, the stiles had been lightly curved over the arms to suit the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its back). The three parts are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Though the style of a back splat had a foundation for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that would merely to a limited limit embolden corner joints (and are loose in the bargain) signify an element particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes over the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or possesses rounded edges—a left over as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to collapse. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs presumably were reserved only for the senior persons in the family, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have taken to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is usually designed with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the overall effect of these two furniture forms is stylized. The structure and decorative issues are combined in a manner that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual parts do not look to have been fixed by use of either glue or screws, but had been mortised into one another and fixed in its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Works of art project 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 bring up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, at the same time, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be seen in engravings of the inside of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this kind of chair may also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not determined that the design actually was born in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in large quantities, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of such chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its shapely proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that is, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The style owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat suits to the human body and permits 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 on the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of relatively thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and more expensive chairs might be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carvings. The wood can 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 in place of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more open in design than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles throughout 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
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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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