Out of each of the furniture pieces, the chair might be of most importance. While the majority of other pieces (save for the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair was looked upon here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to developed pieces such as the 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 distinguished.

The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not only a physical support or an aesthetic piece of art; it historically is semiotic of social placement. At the historical royal courts there were important distinctions between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to make do with a stool. In the past century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been seen as a symbol of superior standing, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a high-set floor.

As a furniture creation, the chair can be employed for a range of different models. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past times there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs used 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. We make chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Modern living has derived new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair kinds has adapted to suit to growing human uses. From its unique importance with man, the chair exists to its full advantage only when utilised. While it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there might be things inside or not, a chair is really seen best and evaluated with a person using it, because chair and sitter suit the other. Thus the various elements of a chair were given labels corresponding to the names of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the original work of your chair is to support a body, its value is tested primarily by how fully it fulfills this practical job. Within the creation of the chair, the builder is restricted under particular static regulation and principal measurements. In these boundaries, however, the chair maker has great freedom.

The history of the chair lasted dates of several thousand years. There existed civilizations that held iconic chair shapes, as expressions of the foremost work in the areas of skill and creativity. From these civilisations, individual 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.

Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of masterful design, are now a finding from findings made in tombs. First of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair had four legs designed as akin to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this design a solid triangular structure was crafted. There was in our knowledge no noteworthy change between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular people. The simple change lies in the brand of ornamentation, in the particulars of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was made to be an easily portable seat for army officers. As a camp stool that kind stayed for much later points. But the stool also then was designed for the character of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be found, 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 made in the construction of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats were formed of wood. The simplistic manufacture of the folding stool, made of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, is seen some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of those is the folding stool, of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient item still around but from a variety of pictorial items. The better recognised is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs were seen. These odd legs were thought to have been executed in bent wood and were as such put under a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super solid and were plainly drawn.

The Romans borrowed from the Greek design; designs of statues of seated Romans are chairs of a thicker and which appear to be a slightly more crudely crafted klismos. Both kinds, light and heavy, were revived during the Classicist period. The klismos chair can be found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some brands of profound originality around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.

China
The history of the chair in China isn’t able to be traced as well as in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged series of drawings and paintings was kept safe, detailing the insides and exterior of Chinese homes and the furniture. Also preserved from the 16th century are some chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that show an amazing similarity to representations of older chairs.

As in Egypt, there existed two particular chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair has been designed both with or without arms but always with a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one design, it has been seen, the stiles could be slightly curved above the arms to conform correctly to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a chairback). Together, the three sections had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of a back splat later had an influence on English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that could only to a restricted capability support corner joints (and then were loose in the result) indicate a signature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops upon the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or is given rounded edges—referable maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have had a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs presumably were reserved only for elderly family members, for they were held in great respect.

The Chinese folding stool is believed to have taken to China from the West. It is akin much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is intricately held to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is more often than not designed with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the ultimate effect of both of these furniture designs is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic aspects are combined in a manner that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the manner that the individual items do not look to have been fixed together by use of either glue or screws, but have been mortised onto one another and fixed in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Paintings project a kind of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to bring out a pattern of little pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture for traveling which, during the same era, held the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be seen in engravings of interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this kind of chair is also made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not decided that the form actually began in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in impressive numbers, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of those chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself by its elegant proportions and expensive 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 is, as brought out in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes this popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of rather thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and more expensive chairs may be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engravings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used in place of upholstery.

English chairs of the 18th century were more open in design than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and won favour 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 well-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 versions 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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