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Out of all furniture objects, the chair could be paramount. While many other pieces (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair must be looked upon here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to derivative makes such as a bench and sofa, which may be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly distinguished.

The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support or aesthetic artwork; it can also be semiotic of social standing. Within the past royal courts there were plain distinctions between being led to a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, and having to make do with a stool. From the last century, a director’s and manager’s chair has developed a symbol of superior standing, as well as in democratic governments the speaker sits on a high-set floor.

As its furniture creation, the chair is utilised for a number of different purposes. There are chairs manufactured to fit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past times there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Modern living has designated new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair shapes has been perfected to fit to changing human desires. Because of its close association with man, the chair comes to its full purpose only when being utilised. Whereas it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there are things inside or not, a chair is seen best and regarded best with a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter need the other. Thus the different areas of a chair have been given names corresponding to the names of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the primary purpose of your chair is to support a human body, its credit is evaluated principally for how fully it measures up to this practical use. In the manufacture of a chair, the carpenter is restricted with particular static regulations and principal measurements. Under these limits, however, the chair maker has marvellous freedom.

The history of the chair is an epoch of several thousand years. There existed peoples that had made unique chair types, seen of the principal object in the arenas of technique and aesthetics. Out of such peoples, a 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.

Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the objects of expert design, were found from tomb discoveries. One of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair has four legs designed not unlike those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. From this a strong triangular construction was crafted. There appears to be no particular change between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular peasantry. The general change was in the decorative ornamentation, in the particulars of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was designed for an easily portable seat for army. As a camp stool this type continued for much later times. But the stool also took on the use of a ceremonial seat, its original job as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can now be noted, from as early as 1366 57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the structure of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats were created from wood. The easy structure of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric held between them, reappears but some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this form is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldh j (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not with any ancient fossil still existing but as in a variety of pictorial objects. The best known is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those are seen. These unusual legs were considered to be created of bent wood and were likely to have been bore great pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore very stable and were plainly indicated.

The Romans embued the Greek chair; some casts of seated Romans are designs of a thicker and which appear to be a somewhat less intricately crafted klismos. Both designs, the light and heavy, were brought back within the Classicist era. The klismos chair can be seen in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some special forms of notable originality in Denmark and Sweden around 1800.

China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be traced as far as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618 907) an unbroken serial of images and works of art has been preserved, showing the interiors and outside of Chinese homes and their furniture. Another preservation from the 16th century are a collection of chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that hold an astonishing resemblance to representations of previous chairs.

Just as in Egypt, there existed two iconic chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair was constructed both with or without arms however never missing its square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to firm the back. In one kind, it has been found, the stiles are delicately curved by the arms so as to sit correctly with the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a chairback). Together, all three areas had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Although the style of a back splat then had an influence on English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only just to a limited ability reinforce corner joints (and then are loose in the result) represent a feature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which ends about the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or has rounded edges references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and occasionally had a plaited texture. These chairs demanded of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; when too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs most likely were kept only for elderly members of the family, for they were given great esteem.

The Chinese folding stool is believed to have taken to China from the West. It does not differ so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is delicately affixed to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is more often than not designed with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the ultimate effect of both of these furniture styles is stylized. The construction and decorative issues are combined in a manner that is all at once both na ve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the manner that the individual items do not seem to have been held together by either glue or screws, but are mortised into one another and fixed in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Paintings display a design of chair with a relatively crude 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 small pads. The front board and a corresponding board from the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same era, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the inside of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this style of chair may also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not decided that the design actually began in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in large numbers, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of its elegant proportions and delicate 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 was, as created in Paris around 1750 conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The model owes its popularity to a combination of leisure and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike practices despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of those have wood of fairly thick dimensions; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and finer items would be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carvings. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used rather than upholstery.

English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and became the favourite 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 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 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 Eug ne Gaillard in France, Henry van de Velde in Belgium, Josef Hoffman in Austria, Antonio Gaud 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 M tro.

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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