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From all the furniture forms, the chair could be paramount. While most of the other forms (except the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is looked upon here in the common sense, from stool to throne to developed pieces such as the bench and sofa, which might be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly definitive.

The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or an aesthetic creation; it historically is semiotic of social status. At the Medieval royal courts there were clear differences between being led to a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to cope with a stool. In the recent century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been regarded as an indicator of superior rank, as well as in democratic governments the speaker sits on an elevated floor.

In a furniture purpose, the chair encompasses a variety of different forms. There are chairs created to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past times there were chairs for births (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Our modern lifestyle has developed new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair types have been adapted to match to growing human requirements. For its particular relationship with man, the chair lives to its full importance only when being utilised. Though it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is really understood and tested by a person utilising it, because chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the several areas of the chair were given names like the limbs of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the primary role of your chair is to support a human body, its credit is evaluated generally from how fully it does measure up to this practical purpose. Within the build of a chair, the designer is limited for particular static laws and principal measurements. Under these limits, however, the chair maker has awesome freedom.

The history of the chair covered an era of several thousand years. There were cultures that had made iconic chair types, seen of the foremost endeavour in the areas of technique and creativity. Out of those civilisations, special mention should 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 result of careful scheme, are today known from discoveries made in tombs. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair had four legs crafted like those of some animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this design a solid triangular construction was crafted. There was in our knowledge no noteworthy change between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular peasantry. The real difference existed in the kind of ornamentation, in the particulars of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was crafted to be an easily portable seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool this kind existed during much later periods of time. But the stool then was created as the task of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical role as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from evidence be observed, 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 were made in the construction of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats are worked from wood. The simplistic structure of the folding stool, composed of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric set between them, can be seen at some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this form is the folding stool, from ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is known not as any ancient object still extant but from a variety of pictorial items. The significant kind is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground near Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs can be displayed. These curved legs were considered to be crafted from bent wood and were as such put under huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore super stable and were clearly pointed out.

The Romans emulated the Greek chair; a number of statues of seated Romans display chairs of a more heavyset and are a somewhat crudely designed klismos. Both kinds, the light or the heavy, were revived as part of the Classicist epoch. The klismos influence can be seen in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in particular types of notable iconicism around Denmark and Sweden from 1800.

China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be followed as far as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed folio of images and works of art had been kept, showing the inside and outside of Chinese houses and the kinds of furniture. Also kept of the 16th century are a number of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that show an interesting similarity to styles of previous chairs.

Same as in Egypt, there were two iconic chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair is found both with or without arms however always with the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to give support to the back. In one style, though, the stiles are lightly curved over the arms to sit right with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of its chairback). Together, the three areas had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of this back splat then had an inspiration for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden items that could only to a limited capability reinforce corner joints (and then are loose in the result) signify an element 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 has rounded edges—references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have had a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; if too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs probably were reserved for senior persons, for they were respected greatly.

The Chinese folding stool is understood to have taken to China from the West. It is akin so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is intricately affixed to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is generally provided with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the overall effect of these furniture items is stylized. The construction and aesthetic elements are combined in a style that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual items do not seem to have been constructed by either glue or screws, but had been mortised with one another and locked into position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Works of art project a kind of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same era, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be seen in engravings of interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this style of chair is also found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not believed that the design actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in impressive numbers, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of those chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its shapely proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.

France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that was, to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and grants 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 are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike practices in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are constructed from wood of relatively thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and more upmarket items may be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engraving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used instead of upholstery.

English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in style than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and was popularised 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 popular 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 versions 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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