The History of the Chair
Of all furniture pieces, the chair might be of the most importance. While most of the other objects (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair should be said here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to further chairs like the bench and sofa, which can be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not just a physical support and an aesthetic piece of art; it was also symbolic of social hierarchy. In the Medieval royal courts there were important distinctions between being led to a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to squat on a stool. In the last century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been a symbol of superior dignity, and even in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a high-set level.
In a furniture construction, the chair holds a wealth of different forms. There are chairs created to fit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). From historical times there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We make 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 for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has developed special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair kinds have been perfected to fit to different human desires. For its significant association with man, the chair comes to its full advantage only when used. While it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there are items inside or not, a chair is best seen and fairly tested by a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter require one another. Thus the various elements of the chair are labeled corresponding to the parts of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple role of a chair is to support the body, its credit is tested principally for how completely it does fulfill this practical function. Within the creation of the chair, the maker is bound within the static law and principal measurements. Inside these limits, however, the chair designer has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair extended over an era of several thousand years. There were cultures that had individual chair shapes, as expressive of the leading object in the areas of technique and creativity. From such civilisations, particular mention 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 items of careful scheme, are now seen from tombs. One of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair has four legs formed similar to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. From this design a stable triangular construction was made. There was in our knowledge no significant change between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common non-royals. The general variation existed in the level of ornamentation, in the particulars of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was designed to be an easily packed seat for army. As a camp stool the kind stayed around until much later periods of time. But the stool also then was created for the use of a ceremonial seat, its technical function as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can already be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the structure of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats were created from wood. The simple structure of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, is seen but some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of those is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient fossil still around but seen in a trove of pictorial material. The best known is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those could be seen. These creative legs were likely to have been manufactured in bent wood and were in that case had a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore extremely solid and were visibly drawn.
The Romans adopted the Greek design; a number of statues of seated Romans offer chairs of a denser and apparently kind of less intricately constructed klismos. Both designs, light or heavy, were revived as part of the Classicist era. The klismos influence is seen in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some special forms of notable iconicism in Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as well as chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged collection of drawings and works of art was kept, displaying the interior and exterior of Chinese households and their furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are a number of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that show an interesting similarity to images of older chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, two fundamental chair forms existed in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair has been designed both with or without arms although never without the square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to firm the back. In one style, it has been found, the stiles are lightly curved by the arms to conform to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a chairback). The three limbs were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of a back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden members that merely to a restricted limit stabilise corner joints (as well as being loose as well) signify a signature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which finishes over the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or has rounded edges—references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have a plaited texture. These chairs required the sitter to be stiff and upright; if too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs presumably were allowed only for senior individuals in the family, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have come to China from the West. It is akin much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is delicately fixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is usually designed with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of both these furniture items is stylized. The manufacture and decorative aspects are combined in a manner that is all at once both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual items do not seem to have been put together with either glue or screws, but are mortised onto one another and locked into place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Paintings project a style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same time, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style 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. While this kind of chair can also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not certain that the form actually began in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in large quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its elegant proportions and delicate 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 is to say, as created in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The model owes its popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike practices despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof employ wood of quite thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been taken away, and more expensive examples can be further embellished with special delicate and decorative engravings. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and was popularised 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 popularised 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 brands 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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