The History of the Chair
Of all furniture objects, the chair could be primary. While many other pieces (apart from the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is intended to be looked upon here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to developed types such as a bench or 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 stimulating as its history as art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and/or aesthetic item; it historically is a signifier of social placement. In the past royal courts there were plain connotations between possessing a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, and having to sit on a stool. In the past century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been iconic of superior standing, as well as in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated floor.
In its furniture creation, the chair is used for a number of various makes. There are chairs manufactured to fit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical times there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We have chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has demanded special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair forms has been changed to match to different human needs. Because of its unique link with man, the chair appears 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 might be anything inside or not, a chair is seen best and judged by a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter need the other. Thus the various elements of a chair are given names as the areas of the human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary purpose of a chair is to support the body, its value is judged principally from how suitably it fulfills this practical role. Within the design of the chair, the maker is bound with some static legislation and principal measurements. Through these restrictions, however, the chair maker has great freedom.
The history of the chair covers dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of cultures that held individual chair types, as expressive of the premier craft in the areas of skill and design. In such cultures, 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of careful make, are a finding from tomb discoveries. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have four legs designed as akin to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this design a strong triangular form was made. There was from our view no marked differentiation between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular populace. The real variation lies in the complexity of ornamentation, in the evidence of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was created to be an easily carried seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool this form stayed around for much later points. But the stool then was made for the role of a ceremonial seat, its original history as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the structure of folding stools but are not able to be folded because the seats are worked of wood. The simple structure of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that spin on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric set between them, appeared again at some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of this kind is the folding stool, made from ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is known not as any ancient object still around but as found in a variety of pictorial objects. The archetype is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground just out of 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 seen. These strange legs were presumed to be executed out of bent wood and were probably had great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore very solid and were overtly pointed out.
The Romans embued the Greek design; a number of casts of seated Romans are designs of a more heavyset and which appear to be a rather less delicately crafted klismos. Both features, the light and heavy, were revived in the Classicist epoch. The klismos influence is found in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some special forms of notable originality around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be charted as far back as that of Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of images and paintings was preserved, with images of the insides and outside of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Also preserved of the 16th century are a trove of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an amazing resemblance to pictures of past chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there were two iconic chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That chair was found both with or without arms but never without a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to firm the back. In one design, it has been found, the stiles were marginally curved over the arms in order to suit the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a chairback). Together, the three parts were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. While the innovation of this back splat exercised an influence on English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could only to a particular ability support corner joints (and then were loose into the bargain) are a feature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends around the rounded staves. All members are round in section or have rounded edges—an acknowledgement as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and might have had a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to be stiff and upright; for when too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs most likely were only for older members of the family, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have taken to China from the West. It does not vary much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is delicately fixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is usually provided with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resulting effect of these two furniture forms is stylized. The construction and aesthetic aspects are combined in a way that is all at once both naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual members do not look to have been adjoined by either glue or screws, but were mortised onto one another and held in its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Artworks display a kind of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to bring up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, during the same time, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is seen in engravings of the inside of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this kind of chair is also found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not believed that the design actually began in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in large numbers, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of these chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by its harmonious 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 of forms—that is, as brought out in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat suits to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methods in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are constructed from wood of rather thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been taken away, and finer examples may be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engraving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and was popularised 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 commonly 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 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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