The History of the Chair
Out of each of the furniture objects, the chair might be of the most importance. While many other pieces (save for the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair can be viewed here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to derivative chairs for example the bench and sofa, which should be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently definitive.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or an aesthetic craft; it is historically a symbol of social place. At the historical royal courts there were important signifiers between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to utilise a stool. In the last century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been an identifier of superior standing, and even in democratic governments the speaker sits on a raised floor.
As a furniture form, the chair can be used for a wealth of various purposes. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From historical days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We make 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, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has developed new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair shapes has adapted to match to changing human requirements. Due to its unique relationship with man, the chair exists to its full significance only when being utilised. Though it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is really seen and judged by a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter need each other. Thus the individual parts of the chair have been given names according to the names of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elemental job of a chair is to support your body, its worth is tested principally on how well it does fulfill this practical function. In the creation of the chair, the chair maker is bound in the static rules and principal measurements. Under these boundaries, however, the chair designer has great freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over an era of several thousand years. There is evidence of societies that created distinctive chair shapes, as seen of the principal task in the areas of craft and design. Among such societies, 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of careful craft, are now found from tombs. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair has four legs shaped similar to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this way a solid triangular form was crafted. There was in our understanding no significant difference between the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common populace. The real difference was in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the particulars of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was crafted to be an easily packed seat for soldiers. As a camp stool the type stayed around for much later points in time. But the stool then also was created as the task of a ceremonial seat, its original task as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from evidence be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the shape of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats are formed of wood. The easy manufacture of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that turn on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric set between them, then appeared some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of these is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not from any ancient fossil still extant but as found in a variety of pictorial items. The best known is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them can be shown. These odd legs were presumably manufactured out of bent wood and were likely to have been put under huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super strong and were clearly pointed out.
The Romans adopted the Greek style; a number of statues of seated Romans display evidence of a denser and which appear to be a somewhat less delicately built klismos. Both features, the light and heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist time. The klismos style is seen in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some special types of notable iconicism of Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China cannot be traced as far back as chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of images and works of art has been kept safe, showing the insides and exteriors of Chinese homes and the kinds of furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are a collection of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an amazing similarity to styles of past chairs.
Like in Egypt, there existed two particular chair forms in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That chair has been designed both with or without arms although never without the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to support the back. In one image, it must be said, the stiles are marginally curved by the arms so as to sit right with the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its back). Together, all three areas are mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Although the style of a back splat exercised an influence on English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden items that just to a particular extent support corner joints (and are loose as well) indicate a signature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which stops over the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or has rounded edges—acknowledging perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and occasionally had a plaited texture. These chairs demanded of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of toppling. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs presumably were allowed only for older individuals, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have travelled to China from the West. It does not differ much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the overall effect of both of these furniture items is stylized. The construction and decoration aspects are combined in a style that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual members do not look to have been constructed by means of either glue or screws, but had been mortised on 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 name on the chair. Works of art display a style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same era, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be seen in engravings of the interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this kind of chair can also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not certain that the innovation actually was born in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in large amounts, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of these chairs lined up against a wall. The style asserts itself by its harmonious proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that was, to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The model owes such popularity to a combination of leisure and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally 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 conceal 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 density; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been removed, and more upmarket designs may be further embellished with special delicate and decorative engravings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used in place of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in design than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and became the preference 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
Within 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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