From each of the furniture needs, the chair could be the paramount one. While most of the other items (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is intended to be looked upon here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to further chairs such as the bench or sofa, which might be seen 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 a creative art. The chair is not only a physical support or aesthetic craft; it was also symbolic of social placement. At the old royal courts there were important signifiers between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to utilise a stool. From the 20th century, a director’s or manager’s chair has been regarded as an identifier of superior rank, as well as in democratic governments the speaker sits on a higher level.

In a furniture construction, the chair is employed for a number of various makes. There are chairs designed to suit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From historical times there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (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 have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Our lifestyle has demanded unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair shapes has been changed to fit to evolving human desires. For its close link with man, the chair exists to its full importance only when being used. Although 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 really seen and fairly regarded by a person using it, for chair and sitter suit the other. Thus the individual parts of the chair were given names as the names of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the obvious job of the chair is to support your body, its credit is judged generally from how suitably it fulfills this practical job. Within the creation of the chair, the maker is limited with particular static legislation and principal measurements. Inside these regulations, however, the chair creator has large freedom.

The history of the chair is an era of several thousand years. There were civilizations that had individual chair forms, as expressions of the highest craft in the areas of craft and design. Among these civilisations, a 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.

Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of careful design, are today known from discoveries made in tombs. The first of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair had four legs formed not unlike those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this way a solid triangular structure was made. There appeared to be no marked difference in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary people. The real change existed in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the choice of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was crafted for an easily stored seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool the kind continued during much later periods of time. But the stool also then existed in the character of a ceremonial seat, its technical history as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the form of folding stools but can not be folded as the seats were formed from wood. The easy build of the folding stool, being of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric held between them, then came up but some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this kind is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which can now be found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not as any ancient object still existing but as in a wealth of pictorial material. The better recognised is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which could be shown. These strange legs were presumed to be executed in bent wood and were as such bore great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore very strong and were particularly indicated.

The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; a number of casts of seated Romans offer designs of a thicker and in appearance slightly more crudely crafted klismos. Both designs, the light or heavy, were seen again during the Classicist epoch. The klismos design is seen in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some types of considerable uniqueness in Denmark and Sweden during 1800.

China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be charted as far as that of Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of images and works of art had been preserved, displaying the interiors and exterior of Chinese houses and their furniture. Also preserved of the 16th century are some chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that display an amazing similarity to designs of older chairs.

As were the designs in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This chair has been designed both with or without arms however always with a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to firm the back. In one kind, it has been seen, the stiles could be delicately curved on top of the arms for the purpose of conform correctly to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its back). All three limbs are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. While the style of the back splat then had an introduction for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that only to a restricted ability embolden corner joints (and furthermore are loose to top it off) are an element signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. Members are round in section or is given rounded edges—a left over perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and had on occasion a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to be stiff and upright; when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs most likely were allowed only for older members of the family, for they were esteemed greatly.

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 variation in that the top rail is elegantly affixed to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is often provided with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the overall effect of both of these furniture items is stylized. The constructive and decorative issues are combined in a manner that is all at once naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is a result of the manner that the individual members do not look to have been affixed by either glue or screws, but had been mortised into one another and held in its 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. Paintings display a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board from the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same period, possessed 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 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 kind of chair may also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not determined that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in large quantities, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of those chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its shapely 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 has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes its popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike methods in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are constructed from wood of relatively thick dimensions; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and finer chairs can be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carvings. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used instead of upholstery.

English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in style than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and was popular in large 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.

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