From each of the furniture items, the chair could be paramount. While most of the other objects (except the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair can be regarded here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to developed forms for example the bench or sofa, which can be regarded 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 curious as its history as art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and aesthetic creation; it can also be semiotic of social ranking. Within the historical royal courts there were clear signifiers between possessing a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to make do with a stool. Since the last century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has developed an indicator of superior rank, and even in democratic governments the speaker sits on a raised floor.

In its furniture purpose, the chair can be utilised for a range of different makes. There are chairs manufactured to match man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since past times there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Our modern lifestyle has developed new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair shapes has been perfected to conform to changing human requirements. From its unique relationship with man, the chair lives to its full advantage only when being used. Whereas it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there might be anything inside or not, a chair is understood and fairly evaluated with a person using it, because chair and sitter require the other. Thus the individual limbs of the chair were given labels likened to the limbs of our human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the first purpose of a chair is to support the human body, its credit is evaluated primarily by how suitably it measures up to this practical job. In the build of a chair, the designer is limited with the static law and principal measurements. Through these rules, however, the chair maker has great freedom.

The history of the chair lasted over dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of societies that created distinctive chair types, expressive of the highest endeavour in the areas of skill and creativity. Among these such peoples, particular mention needs to 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 expert make, were a finding from discoveries made in tombs. The first one of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair has four legs shaped not unlike those of some animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this way a durable triangular form was obtained. There appeared to be no noteworthy change between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical peasantry. The general difference exists in the type of ornamentation, in the particulars of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was manufactured for an easily portable seat for army. As a camp stool this type stayed during much later days. But the stool then was made for the use of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical role as a folding stool being forgotten. This can already be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the shape of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats were made from wood. The easy build of the folding stool, being of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, is seen again but some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of those is the folding stool, made from ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not in any ancient fossil still existing but as seen in a trove of pictorial objects. The significant kind is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs would be visible. These unique legs were understood to be manufactured from bent wood and were likely to have been bore great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore extremely solid and were particularly pointed out.

The Romans borrowed from the Greek design; designs of statues of seated Romans display chairs of a more heavyset and are a somewhat less delicately crafted klismos. Both types, the light or the heavy, were revived as part of the Classicist era. The klismos influence is used in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some particular types of considerable originality within Denmark and Sweden during 1800.

China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as far back as chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged serial of images and works of art has been kept safe, detailing the interior and exterior of Chinese buildings and the kinds of furniture. Also kept since the 16th century are a number of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that hold an interesting likeness to styles of previous chairs.

Just the same as in Egypt, there were two standard chair forms in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair was found both with and without arms though never without its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one image, it has been found, the stiles are slightly curved over the arms for the purpose of conform correctly to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a chairback). Together, the three limbs had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. While the style of this back splat exercised an influence on English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden items that would merely to a restricted limit reinforce corner joints (and then are loose as a result) represent a signature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which stops upon the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or is given rounded edges—a left over as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have had a plaited form. These chairs demanded of the sitter to be stiff and upright; if too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs most likely were kept for elderly family members, for they were given great esteem.

The Chinese folding stool is believed to have been brought to China from the West. It is not dissimilar very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is delicately held to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is more often than not provided with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the overall effect of both these furniture items is stylized. The manufacture and decorative elements are combined in a way that is all at once both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual parts do not appear to have been held together by either glue or screws, but had been mortised with 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 had its mark on the chair. Artworks project a design of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same era, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is displayed in engravings of the interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this kind of chair can also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not determined that the innovation actually originated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in large numbers, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of these chairs lined up against a wall. The style asserts itself by its shapely proportions and delicate 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 forms—that was, as progressed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The design owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of them have wood of quite thick dimensions; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been taken away, and more upmarket examples would be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used rather than upholstery.

English chairs from the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and was popularised 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 popularised 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.

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