Out of each of the furniture forms, the chair could be the most imperative. While most other items (save the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is meant to be regarded here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to complex kinds such as the bench and sofa, which should be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly definitive.

The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and/or an aesthetic creation; it is also symbolic of social hierarchy. At the old royal courts there were social signifiers between being seated on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to cope with a stool. From the recent century, a director’s and manager’s chair has developed a signifier of superior dignity, and even in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on an elevated level.

As its furniture purpose, the chair is employed for a range of various makes. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since the past there were chairs for births (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Our modern lifestyle has demanded special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair kinds has changed to match to differing human uses. For its close importance with man, the chair appears to its full advantage only when utilised. While it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there are items inside or not, a chair is really seen best and tested with a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter require the other. Thus the several elements of a chair have been labeled as the areas of our human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the principal role of the chair is to support our body, its worth is judged basically by how fully it measures up to this practical function. In the manufacture of a chair, the builder is bound in particular static law and principal measurements. Through these limitations, however, the chair creator has awesome freedom.

The history of the chair was dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of societies that created iconic chair shapes, as expressive of the leading work in the industries of craft and creativity. In those civilisations, a 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 upshot of expert craft, are today found from tombs. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair has four legs designed similar to those of some animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this design a durable triangular construction was made. There seemed to be no particular variation between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common non-royals. The main change lies in the kind of ornamentation, in the particulars of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was manufactured to be an easily stored seat for officers. As a camp stool the chair stayed around for much later periods. But the stool then also was created for the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical task as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the shape of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats are formed of wood. The simplistic manufacture of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric held between them, is seen at some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this form is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient specimen still around but in a large amount of pictorial material. The most well known is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground near Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs were shown. These curved legs were considered to have been manufactured in bent wood and were as such subjected to great pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore very durable and were plainly denoted.

The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; some models of seated Romans display evidence of a heavier and apparently slightly more crudely crafted klismos. Both kinds, the light or heavy, were popularised within the Classicist era. The klismos style can be found in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some special forms of notable iconicism within Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.

China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be charted as far as in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed series of drawings and paintings has been protected, showing the inside and exteriors of Chinese households and the furniture. Also preserved of the 16th century are a trove of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an astonishing resemblance to representations of ancient chairs.

As was the case in Egypt, there were two major chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This chair was designed both with or without arms but never missing a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to give support to the back. In one kind, it has been seen, the stiles had been delicately curved by the arms to sit correctly with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the chairback). All three parts were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. While the style of a back splat later had an introduction for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that would only to a particular ability reinforce corner joints (and then were loose additionally) indicate an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which stops about the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or has rounded edges—referable perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and had on occasion a plaited bottom. These chairs demanded of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for when too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs likely were only for the senior persons, for they were respected greatly.

The Chinese folding stool is thought to have been brought to China from the West. It is not dissimilar that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is delicately joined to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is usually designed with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the overall effect of these furniture items is stylized. The constructive and decoration elements are combined in a manner that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual items do not appear to have been adjoined by either glue or screws, but are mortised with one another and locked into its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Works of art show a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, in the same period, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be displayed in engravings of interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this design of chair is also found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not held that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in considerable amounts, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its elegant proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed 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—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The chair owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of rather thick measurements; but all the members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and more upmarket examples might 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 all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used in place of upholstery.

English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in design than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and won 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 popular 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 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.

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