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From each of the furniture forms, the chair may be the imperative one. While most of the other pieces (apart from the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair must be looked upon here in the general sense, from stool to throne to derivative pieces for example 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 distinguished.

The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support or aesthetic artwork; it is historically an indicator of social ranking. At the Medieval royal courts there were plain distinctions between having a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to utilise a stool. In the recent century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been a signifier of superior dignity, and in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on an elevated level.

As a furniture purpose, the chair ranges from a range of different models. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). During historical times there were chairs used 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/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 demanded special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair types has been changed to conform to changing human requirements. For its close association with man, the chair comes to its full significance only when being utilised. While it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is really seen and evaluated by a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the different areas of a chair have been given labels as the elements of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the clear role of the chair is to support a human body, its value is judged principally on how well it fulfills this practical function. In the build of a chair, the maker is restricted in some static regulation and principal measurements. Inside these boundaries, however, the chair creator has awesome freedom.

The history of the chair extended over an era of several thousand years. There were civilizations that have created distinctive chair types, expressive of the highest work in the industries of technique and design. Out of such civilisations, individual note 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.

Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of careful craft, are today seen from tomb discoveries. First 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 particular animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this design a durable triangular structure was crafted. There seems to be no notable change from the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary people. The simple variation existed in the level of ornamentation, in the evidence of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was developed to be an easily portable seat for army officers. As a camp stool that type stayed around til much later times. But the stool then was created for the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original function as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the shape of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats were created with wood. The easy manufacture of the folding stool, made of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, appeared again at some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of this form is the folding stool, of ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not with any ancient fossil still extant but found in a wealth of pictorial material. The archetype is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those are seen. These curving legs were presumed to have been executed with bent wood and were as such had extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore super solid and were plainly indicated.

The Romans emulated the Greek designs; a number of models of seated Romans are evidence of a more heavyset and which appear to be a rather less intricately constructed klismos. Both styles, the light or heavy, were seen again within the Classicist era. The klismos design is seen in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in particular forms of marked uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.

China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be followed as long as in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged serial of drawings and paintings was kept safe, displaying the insides and exterior of Chinese houses and the kinds of furniture. Preserved also of the 16th century are a number of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an intriguing likeness to representations of past chairs.

As was the case in Egypt, there were two iconic chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This chair can be constructed both with or without arms but never without the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to firm the back. In one type, it has been seen, the stiles are marginally curved over the arms so as to conform correctly to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its back). Each of the three sections are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the design of this back splat later had an introduction for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only just to a limited ability embolden corner joints (and then are loose to top that off) represent an element signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which finishes around the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or is given rounded edges—referable perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and might have had a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; when too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a way of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs most likely were only for elderly persons in the family, for they were greatly respected.

The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It does not vary that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is generally provided with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resulting effect of both furniture items is stylized. The construction and aesthetic aspects are combined in a way that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the fact that the individual members do not seem to have been fixed together by means of either glue or screws, but were mortised on one another and held in place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left its name on the chair. Artworks show a type of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to bring up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same period, held the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be displayed in engravings of the inside of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this design of chair might also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not held that the design actually started in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in impressive amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of such chairs lined up along 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 is, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are constructed from wood of rather thick density; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been removed, and finer chairs might be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engravings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used as an alternative to upholstery.

English chairs in the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles through 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 popularised and was widely distributed throughout the world.

Late 18th to 20th century
In 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.

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