The History of the Chair
From each of the furniture needs, the chair could be paramount. While many other objects (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is intended to be viewed here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to complex pieces including a bench and sofa, which may be regarded 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 interesting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not simply a physical support or an aesthetic piece of art; it is also symbolic of social hierarchy. Within the historical royal courts there were social distinctions between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to sit on a stool. During the 20th century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen an indicator of superior status, as well as in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated floor.
As its furniture purpose, the chair encompasses a wealth of different makes. There are chairs structured to match man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). During historical times there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, 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.
Modern living has designated new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All these chair kinds has adapted to suit to evolving human needs. From its close link with man, the chair comes to its full purpose only when in employ. Though it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there are items inside or not, a chair is understood best and evaluated with a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter suit each other. Thus the individual elements of the chair are given labels as the limbs of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary role of your chair is to support the human body, its worth is judged basically for how suitably it measures up to this practical purpose. In the creation of a chair, the builder is bound in the static rules and principal measurements. Through these limitations, however, the chair maker has great freedom.
The history of the chair extended over an era of several thousand years. There are peoples that held significant chair shapes, seen of the topmost work in the arenas of technique and aesthetics. Among these civilisations, a mention 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of masterful scheme, are today known from discoveries made in tombs. First of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have four legs designed as akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this a strong triangular design was obtained. There appears to be no significant variation in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common peasantry. The main change exists in the type of ornamentation, in the particulars of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was manufactured as an easily carried seat for soldiers. As a camp stool that stool continued until much later periods. But the stool also was created as the task of a ceremonial seat, its original job as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can already be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the form of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats are worked of wood. The easy build of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric set between them, was then seen but somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this kind is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not from any ancient object still existing but as seen in a variety of pictorial objects. The archetype is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location near Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which could be displayed. These unusual legs were most likely created from bent wood and were therefore had to bear great pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super stable and were visibly signified.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek designs; a number of casts of seated Romans display designs of a more heavyset and which appear to be a slightly less delicately crafted klismos. Both designs, light and heavy, were seen again in the Classicist epoch. The klismos chair can be found in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some forms of considerable uniqueness within Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China isn’t able to be tracked as far back as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged serial of drawings and paintings had been protected, displaying the inside and outer parts of Chinese homes and the designs of furniture. Preserved also of the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an intriguing resemblance to representations of past chairs.
As in Egypt, there were two standard chair forms in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This chair is seen both with and without arms though always with the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to give support to the back. In one style, it has been found, the stiles were marginally curved by the arms to fit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a back). All three parts were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Although the design of a back splat then had an influence on English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden items that merely to a restricted capability reinforce corner joints (and are loose to top that off) indicate an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends about the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—a left over perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and might have had a plaited form. These chairs needed the sitter to be stiff and upright; for if too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a way of toppling. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs likely were only for the senior persons in the family, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have taken to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the ultimate effect of these furniture designs is stylized. The construction and aesthetic parts are combined in a manner that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the manner that the individual items do not seem to have been joined together with either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and held in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Paintings project a design of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring out a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, at the same time, granted 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 the inside of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this style of chair is also made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not determined that the style actually began in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in impressive numbers, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of those chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself by its shapely 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, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat adheres 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 small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike principles in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are constructed from wood of rather thick measurements; but all the members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been removed, and more upmarket designs might be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in style than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and became the preference 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 commonly known 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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