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Out of all furniture items, the chair may be the paramount one. While most of the other pieces (except the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair can be used here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to complex chairs including a bench or sofa, which may be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently distinguished.

The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support and/or aesthetic item; it can also be semiotic of social ranking. From the old royal courts there were clear signifiers between sitting on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to utilise a stool. In the past century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been a signifier of superior standing, as well as in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on an elevated platform.

As a furniture purpose, the chair is used for a wealth of various makes. There are chairs structured to fit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the past there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (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 can have chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Modern living has developed new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair kinds has been changed to fit to differing human uses. Due to its particular importance with man, the chair appears to its full advantage only when being used. Though it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there might be items inside or not, a chair is really seen best and tested by a person utilising it, for chair and sitter complement one another. Thus the individual elements of a chair were given names likened to the names of the human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the clear job of a chair is to support a human body, its value is tested generally on how suitably it fulfills this practical role. Within the construction of a chair, the carpenter is limited for certain static legislation and principal measurements. Inside these boundaries, however, the chair builder has great freedom.

The history of the chair extends over an era of several thousand years. There were societies that made unique chair shapes, as seen of the highest object in the industries of craft and aesthetics. From such cultures, particular 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.

Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of skilled design, are today a finding from tomb findings. The first of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have had four legs crafted akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this design a stable triangular structure was crafted. There was in our knowledge no significant change in the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical peasantry. The only difference exists in the complex ornamentation, in the selection of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was designed for an easily portable seat for officers. As a camp stool this kind persisted for much later points. But the stool also was created as the use of a ceremonial seat, its original function as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today be found, 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 are in the construction of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats were created from wood. The plain structure of the folding stool, composed of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, appeared somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of this kind is the folding stool, made from ashwood, which can now be found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not as any ancient fossil still around but as found in a large amount of pictorial objects. The best recognised is the klismos placed 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, but only two of them are shown. These curved legs were considered to have been crafted with bent wood and were probably needed to bear a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore super stable and were plainly indicated.

The Romans adopted the Greek design; quite a few statues of seated Romans offer designs of a more heavyset and apparently rather less intricately designed klismos. Both designs, light or heavy, were seen again within the Classicist era. The klismos influence is seen in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular forms of marked originality within Denmark and Sweden during 1800.

China
The history of the chair in China can not be tracked as far back as in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full folio of drawings and paintings has been kept, detailing the interior and outside of Chinese households and the furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are a trove of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an astonishing similarity to pictures of past chairs.

As were the designs in Egypt, there existed two particular chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair has been designed both with or without arms although always having its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to give support to the back. In one style, it has been found, the stiles could be lightly curved above the arms in order to fit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a chairback). Together, all three sections were mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the innovation of the back splat had a foundation for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that would only to a limited ability stabilise corner joints (and furthermore were loose to top that off) represent a design solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends upon the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or possesses rounded edges—an acknowledgement as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and occasionally had a plaited texture. These chairs demanded of the sitter to be stiff and upright; if too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs most likely were allowed only for elderly persons, for they were held in great esteem.

The Chinese folding stool is thought to have taken to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is intricately joined to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is more often than not designed with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of both furniture forms is stylized. The manufacture and decorative issues are combined in a manner that is at the same time naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the way that the individual members do not look to have been put together by either glue or screws, but are mortised on one another and locked into its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its name on the chair. Works of art display a type of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, at the same era, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be found 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 type of chair can also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not decided that the innovation actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in impressive numbers, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious 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 of styles—that was, as created in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike principles in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of them use wood of quite thick measurements; but all the members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been taken away, and more upmarket designs may be further embellished with special delicate and decorative engravings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used rather than upholstery.

English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in design than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and won favour 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
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 styles 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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