Of all furniture items, the chair could be of most importance. While most other items (apart from the bed) are designed 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 further makes for example a bench or sofa, which might be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously definitive.

The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support or an aesthetic piece of art; it is historically symbolic of social rank. In the past royal courts there were significant distinctions between possessing a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, and having to use a stool. Since the recent century, a director’s or manager’s chair has developed iconic of superior status, as well as in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a raised level.

As a furniture creation, the chair ranges from a number of various purposes. There are chairs created to fit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since past days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs 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. There are chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Modern living has demanded particular chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair types has been adapted to fit to different human desires. From its close association with man, the chair appears to its full meaning only when used. Though it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there is anything inside or not, a chair is really seen best and judged with a person using it, because chair and sitter need one another. Thus the several parts of the chair are labeled likened to the areas of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the principal job of a chair is to support your body, its worth is evaluated principally on how completely it fulfills this practical job. Within the structure of a chair, the chair maker is bound under certain static laws and principal measurements. Through these limitations, however, the chair designer has extensive freedom.

The history of the chair lasted over a period of several thousand years. There is evidence of cultures that had unique chair forms, expressive of the leading work in the arenas of craft and aesthetics. From these societies, a mention needs to 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.

Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of masterful scheme, were known from tombs. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair had four legs structured not unlike those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this design a durable triangular form was crafted. There appeared to be no significant variation between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary non-royals. The main change lies in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the choice of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was developed for an easily stored seat for army officers. As a camp stool the chair persisted for much later periods. But the stool also then was made for the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical role as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from evidence be found, 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 in the construction of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats are created of wood. The plain build of the folding stool, made of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, then came again some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of these is the folding stool, from ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not with any ancient fossil still extant but seen in a large amount of pictorial objects. The most well known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place near Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs were displayed. These odd legs were understood to have been crafted in bent wood and were thus had a large amount of pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore very solid and were particularly indicated.

The Romans adopted the Greek chair; a number of casts of seated Romans show chairs of a heavier and apparently somewhat less intricately constructed klismos. Both styles, the light and heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist epoch. The klismos influence is used in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in special brands of marked iconicism within Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.

China
The ancestry of the chair in China can not be charted as well as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed series of sketches and paintings had been kept, detailing the inside and outside of Chinese homes and the furniture. Another preservation from the 16th century are some chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an amazing familiarity to designs of older chairs.

As were the designs in Egypt, two chair designs dominated in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair is designed both with or without arms but always with a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to give support to the back. In one form, it has been seen, the stiles were delicately curved above the arms in order to suit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the chairback). Together, the three limbs had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the design of the back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden members that merely to a limited extent support corner joints (and furthermore were loose to top that off) represent a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which ends around the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—an acknowledgement as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have had a plaited form. These chairs needed the sitter to be stiff and upright; if too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to collapse. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs probably were kept for older people in the family, for they were given great esteem.

The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It is not dissimilar so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is prettily affixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is often designed with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the overall effect of both these furniture designs is stylized. The construction and aesthetic issues are combined in a style that is at the same time naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual parts do not appear to have been put together by use of either glue or screws, but have been mortised with one another and locked into place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Works of art show a kind of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same time, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is evidenced in engravings of the interior of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this style of chair can also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not certain that the style actually began in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable amounts, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself with 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 brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes its popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methodology in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are constructed from wood of rather thick density; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and more upmarket chairs would be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engravings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.

English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in style than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles through 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 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 brands 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.

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