The History of the Chair

Out of each of the furniture items, the chair may be of the most importance. While many other items (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair must be looked upon here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to complex makes like a bench and sofa, which can be looked upon 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 interesting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not simply a physical support or an aesthetic piece of art; it can also be symbolic of social status. In the old royal courts there were significant distinctions between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, and having to make do with a stool. In the last century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has become an identifier of superior status, and even in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a high-set floor.

As its furniture creation, the chair encompasses a range of different forms. There are chairs manufactured to suit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the olden days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Contemporary lifestyle has demanded special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair types have been changed to match to evolving human requirements. For its particular association with man, the chair lives to its full importance only when used. Whereas it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is really understood and judged best with a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the individual parts of a chair are given labels corresponding to the areas of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the original function of the chair is to support a human body, its credit is judged basically from how suitably it measures up to this practical purpose. In the construction of the chair, the chair maker is limited with some static regulations and principal measurements. Under these limits, however, the chair builder has marvellous freedom.

The history of the chair covered a period of several thousand years. There are cultures that had significant chair types, as seen of the leading endeavour in the spheres of technique and aesthetics. From these civilisations, special mention can 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 objects of careful craft, are found from tomb discoveries. The first one of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed as akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this design a durable triangular design was created. There was from our knowledge no noteworthy differentiation between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common peasantry. The only difference exists in the kind of ornamentation, in the particulars of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was developed to be an easily stored seat for army officers. As a camp stool this kind existed during much later periods of time. But the stool then also was designed as the character of a ceremonial seat, its technical role as a folding stool being forgotten. This can now be found, 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 are in the shape of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats were made of wood. The simple construction of the folding stool, being of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric held between them, then appeared some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this form is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is found not from any ancient item still in form but from a trove of pictorial material. The iconic kind is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs would be shown. These unusual legs were considered to be executed from bent wood and were thus had to bear a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore extremely strong and were visibly denoted.

The Romans embued the Greek designs; a number of statues of seated Romans offer evidence of a heavier and are a rather more crudely built klismos. Both styles, the light and the heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist time. The klismos style can be found in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in special brands of notable iconicism around Denmark and Sweden from 1800.

China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be traced as far as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full series of drawings and artworks was kept safe, detailing the insides and exterior of Chinese households and the designs of furniture. Kept also of the 16th century are a number of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that show an interesting resemblance to images of past chairs.

As in Egypt, two chair forms persisted in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair can be seen both with and without arms however never without its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one kind, however, the stiles could be marginally curved on top of the arms for the purpose of fit the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a chairback). Together, the three limbs are mortised on the yoke-like top rail. While the idea of this back splat later had an influence on English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden members that just to a particular ability stabilise corner joints (and then were loose as a result) represent an element exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which closes over the rounded staves. Members are round in section or is given rounded edges—referable as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs likely were allowed only for older people, for they were greatly esteemed.

The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have travelled to China from the West. It does not differ very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is often designed with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resultant effect of these furniture designs is stylized. The manufacture and decoration parts are combined in a way that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual items do not appear to have been affixed by either glue or screws, but have been mortised into 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 had its name on the chair. Paintings project a type of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same period, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is evidenced 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 type of chair can also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not believed that the style actually began in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in considerable quantities, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The design 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 of styles—that was, as brought out in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and elegance. The seat adheres 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 little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof use wood of quite thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been taken away, and more upmarket examples can be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engraving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used rather than upholstery.

English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and was popularised 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
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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.

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