The History of the Chair
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Out of each of the furniture needs, the chair could be the most important. While the majority of other items (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair can be regarded here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to developed pieces like the bench and sofa, which can 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 a creative craft. The chair is not just a physical support and aesthetic item; it is also semiotic of social placement. In the historical royal courts there were clear connotations between having a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to use a stool. During the recent century, the director’s and manager’s chair has been regarded as an identifier of superior dignity, and even in democratic governments the speaker sits on a high-set level.
In its furniture purpose, the chair can be used for a range of different makes. There are chairs designed to fit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From historical days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has designated new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair forms has been adapted to suit to evolving human uses. Because of its significant relationship with man, the chair appears to its full importance only when in employ. While it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there might be things inside or not, a chair is really understood and fairly evaluated with a person utilising it, because chair and sitter need each other. Thus the various areas of the chair have been labeled corresponding to the elements of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal purpose of your chair is to support our human body, its credit is evaluated basically by how fully it measures up to this practical purpose. Within the construction of a chair, the carpenter is bound for the static laws and principal measurements. Through these boundaries, however, the chair designer has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair is dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of cultures that had distinctive chair types, expressions of the principal task in the spheres of technique and creativity. Within these such societies, particular 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of careful scheme, were found from findings made in tombs. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have four legs crafted like those of some animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. In this design a solid triangular form was made. There appears to be no noteworthy change in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary peasantry. The general variation was in the kind of ornamentation, in the selection of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was made as an easily portable seat for army officers. As a camp stool the stool stayed around til much later days. But the stool also then was made as the character of a ceremonial seat, its original function as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can already be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the construction of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats were created of wood. The easy build of the folding stool, being of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric held between them, is seen again some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of those is the folding stool, made from ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not with any ancient object still extant but from a variety of pictorial items. The most well known is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place near Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs are visible. These odd legs were presumably executed with bent wood and were probably needed to bear great pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore super strong and were particularly pointed out.
The Romans emulated the Greek chair; some models of seated Romans show designs of a thicker and which appear to be a slightly less delicately designed klismos. Both features, the light or the heavy, were revived as part of the Classicist epoch. The klismos style can be found in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in special types of considerable iconicism in Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China cannot be followed as far back as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed folio of sketches and artworks had been kept, with images of the insides and outside of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Preserved also since the 16th century are some chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an intriguing similarity to designs of ancient chairs.
As in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair designs in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair is found both with and without arms though never missing its square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to give support to the back. In one design, it has been found, the stiles are marginally curved above the arms in order to sit correctly with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a back). Each of the three parts are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of a back splat had a foundation for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden items that just to a restricted capability embolden corner joints (and furthermore are loose in the bargain) indicate a signature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which stops about the rounded staves. All members are round in section or is given rounded edges—an acknowledgement as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and had on occasion a plaited texture. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs most likely were allowed only for the senior persons in the family, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have travelled to China from the West. It does not vary very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is intricately joined to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is usually designed with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resultant effect of both furniture styles is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic aspects are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual members do not seem to have been affixed by use of either glue or screws, but were mortised onto one another and locked into its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Works of art show a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, at the same period, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be evidenced in engravings of interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this style of chair can also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not determined that the innovation actually started in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in large amounts, 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 by its elegant 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 form—that was, as created in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes its popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting 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 conceal all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methodology despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are constructed from wood of quite thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been taken away, and finer chairs would be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engraving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles within 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 reknowned 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 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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