The History of the Chair
June 26th, 2010
Out of all furniture items, the chair may be primary. While most of the other objects (save for the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair can be said here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to complex types like the bench or sofa, which may be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly defined.
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 a signifier of social placement. Within the old royal courts there were significant connotations between being led to a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to squat on a stool. In the last century, a director’s and manager’s chair has become an identifier of superior status, like in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a higher floor.
As a furniture creation, the chair is utilised for a wealth of different makes. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past times there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); from 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 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 suit to differing human needs. Because of its particular link with man, the chair appears to its full importance only when used. Whereas it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is really understood and judged by a person utilising it, because chair and sitter complement one another. Thus the various elements of the chair were labeled as the parts of our human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the clear function of the chair is to support a human body, its worth is evaluated primarily by how completely it measures up to this practical job. In the design of the chair, the designer is limited by certain static laws and principal measurements. Within these limits, however, the chair builder has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair lasted over a period of several thousand years. There is evidence of cultures that had made iconic chair types, as expressive of the topmost work in the areas of skill and art. Within those civilisations, special note 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 expert craft, are known from discoveries made in tombs. One of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed like those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. From this a stable triangular design was obtained. There seemed to be no particular difference in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical non-royals. The only difference exists in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the evidence of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was made as an easily packed seat for officers. As a camp stool this chair continued until much later periods. But the stool also then was made as the character of a ceremonial seat, its technical task as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today be observed, 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 were made in the form of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats are made from wood. The easy make of the folding stool, composed of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, came again some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of this type is the folding stool, from ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not as any ancient object still existing but as in a variety of pictorial material. The best recognised is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location near Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those are displayed. These unique legs were most likely to be manufactured from bent wood and were thus bore extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore extremely durable and were overtly pointed out.
The Romans emulated the Greek chair; a number of models of seated Romans display evidence of a heavier and apparently kind of less delicately built klismos. Both types, the light and the heavy, were brought back within the Classicist period. The klismos design is evidenced in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some types of notable iconicism within Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China is not able to be followed as far back as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged series of drawings and artworks was protected, with images of the inside and outside of Chinese homes and the furniture. Another preservation from the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an interesting likeness to styles of older chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This chair has been constructed both with or without arms though always with a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one kind, though, the stiles were slightly curved above the arms so as to fit the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its chairback). Each of the three sections are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Though the idea of this back splat exercised an introduction for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only to a limited ability embolden corner joints (and are loose as a result) indicate an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops upon the rounded staves. Members are round in section or is given rounded edges—acknowledging perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have a plaited bottom. These chairs demanded of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs probably were kept only for senior family members, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled 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 joined to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is usually provided with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the ultimate effect of both these furniture forms is stylized. The manufacture and decoration parts are combined in a style that is at the same time naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual parts do not seem to have been fixed together with either glue or screws, but were mortised into one another and fixed in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Artworks display a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same period, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be found in engravings of the interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this kind of chair might also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not held that the form actually began in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast quantities, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of these chairs lined up against a wall. The design asserts itself by its harmonious proportions and delicate 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 progressed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes its popularity to a combination of leisure and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are made from wood of fairly thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and finer designs may be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engraving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in style than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and became the favourite 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 products 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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