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From all the furniture objects, the chair could be of most importance. While most of the other forms (save for the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair should be viewed here in the general sense, from stool to throne to developed makes like a bench and sofa, which should be considered 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 exciting as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and an aesthetic object; it can also be symbolic of social placement. Within the Medieval royal courts there were significant signifiers between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to sit on a stool. Since the last century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen a symbol of superior position, and even in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a higher level.

As its furniture purpose, the chair is utilised for a wealth of various models. There are chairs manufactured to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since the past there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). There are 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 lifestyle has derived unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair shapes have evolved to suit to evolving human desires. For its particular connection with man, the chair appears to its full meaning only when being used. While it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there might be anything inside or not, a chair is understood best and judged best by a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter require each other. Thus the different elements of a chair have been given names like the parts of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the clear function of your chair is to support a human body, its value is tested basically from how fully it does fulfill this practical use. Within the build of the chair, the designer is restricted by certain static rules and principal measurements. Within these regulations, however, the chair maker has marvellous freedom.

The history of the chair covered an epoch of several thousand years. There were cultures that held significant chair types, as seen of the premier object in the areas of handling and aesthetics. In these 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 items of skilled design, are found from tomb discoveries. One of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have four legs formed like those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. In this way a solid triangular design was crafted. There appears to be no significant change from the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary peasantry. The main variation was in the type of ornamentation, in the evidence of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was created to be an easily stored seat for soldiers. As a camp stool the stool persevered for much later periods. But the stool then also was created as the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical job as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the structure of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats were formed from wood. The simple structure of the folding stool, being of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, was then seen at some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this kind is the folding stool, made from ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is found not from any ancient fossil still around but from a trove of pictorial items. The better known is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of which can be visible. These curving legs were understood to have been executed of bent wood and were therefore had huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super stable and were clearly drawn.

The Romans embued the Greek designs; some statues of seated Romans display examples of a heavier and apparently kind of more crudely built klismos. Both kinds, the light and heavy, were revived during the Classicist epoch. The klismos design is evidenced in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some particular forms of profound originality of Denmark and Sweden from 1800.

China
The past of the chair in China cannot be charted as far as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed serial of sketches and works of art has been preserved, displaying the interiors and outer parts of Chinese houses and their furniture. Also preserved since the 16th century are a number of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that display an intriguing familiarity to images of older chairs.

As was the case in Egypt, two iconic chair forms existed in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair can be found both with or without arms although never missing its square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to hold up the back. In one kind, though, the stiles could be marginally curved on top of the arms to fit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a back). Each of the three areas were mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Though the innovation of the back splat then had a foundation for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden items that would merely to a limited limit embolden corner joints (and then were loose to top that off) signify a feature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which finishes around the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or is given rounded edges—references maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and might have had a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs most likely were kept only for older people in the family, for they were held in great respect.

The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have been brought to China from the West. It is not dissimilar that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is elegantly affixed to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is often designed with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the ultimate effect of both furniture designs is stylized. The structure and decoration elements are combined in a manner that is at the same time naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual items do not seem to have been affixed by either glue or screws, but had been mortised into one another and held in place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.

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

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is evidenced in engravings of the interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this design of chair can also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not decided that the form actually began in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in impressive amounts, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of such chairs lined up against a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.

France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that was, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and allows 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 covering the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of rather thick density; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and finer chairs may be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engravings. The wood could 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 in place of upholstery.

English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which came from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and became the preference 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 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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