From all the furniture items, the chair may be the primary one. While most of the other pieces (apart from the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair must be looked upon here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to developed items such as the bench and 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 intriguing as its history as a creative art. The chair is not simply a physical support or aesthetic object; it can also be a signifier of social ranking. From the past royal courts there were clear signifiers between sitting on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to cope with a stool. In the last century, a director’s or manager’s chair has become a signifier of superior dignity, as well as in democratic governments the speaker sits on a raised floor.

In its furniture creation, the chair can be utilised for a variety of different purposes. There are chairs created to match man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). In the past there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Modern living has demanded unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair forms has been perfected to match to different human uses. Because of its significant association with man, the chair appears to its full importance only when in use. While it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there might be anything inside or not, a chair is understood and judged best with a person utilising it, because chair and sitter suit each other. Thus the several limbs of the chair were labeled like the limbs of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the clear role of your chair is to support the human body, its worth is judged primarily by how fully it measures up to this practical job. In the construction of a chair, the maker is limited with the static legislation and principal measurements. Through these limitations, however, the chair builder has extensive freedom.

The history of the chair is an era of several thousand years. There is evidence of societies that have created distinctive chair forms, expressions of the highest endeavour in the arenas of craft and aesthetics. From such societies, a mention 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.

Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of careful design, were a finding from tomb findings. One of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have four legs formed not unlike those of an animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. From this a strong triangular design was made. There was from our view no particular differentiation in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical populace. The general variation exists in the type of ornamentation, in the selection of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was designed for an easily carried seat for army officers. As a camp stool this type existed during much later times. But the stool then also was created as the use of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the form of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats are made out of wood. The simplistic make of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, reappears somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of those is the folding stool, of ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not with any ancient object still in form but found in a variety of pictorial material. The most well known is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those would be visible. These strange legs were presumed to be manufactured of bent wood and were therefore had great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore super solid and were overtly pointed out.

The Romans adopted the Greek designs; some statues of seated Romans are examples of a denser and apparently somewhat less intricately crafted klismos. Both kinds, light or heavy, were revived as part of the Classicist epoch. The klismos style is seen in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in special brands of profound uniqueness of Denmark and Sweden during 1800.

China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be traced as well as that of Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full series of sketches and paintings has been kept, with images of the insides and exteriors of Chinese households and the kinds of furniture. Kept also since the 16th century are some chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that hold an amazing familiarity to designs of previous chairs.

As in Egypt, two chair designs persisted in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That chair was designed both with or without arms although always having the square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one form, it has been seen, the stiles are delicately curved above the arms to suit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a back). Together, the three parts had been mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the design of this back splat had an introduction for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that merely to a restricted capability embolden corner joints (and are loose in the result) represent a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes over the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or is given rounded edges—a left over perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited texture. These chairs required the sitter to be stiff and upright; for if too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of toppling. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs likely were kept only for senior individuals, for they were respected greatly.

The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It is not dissimilar so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is delicately joined to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is usually possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resulting effect of these furniture designs is stylized. The structure and decoration issues are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual items do not appear to have been held together by either glue or screws, but were mortised onto one another and locked into place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.

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

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is found in engravings of 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. While this kind of chair is also found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not certain that the innovation actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in vast quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself by its harmonious proportions and delicate 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, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The model owes its popularity to a combination of leisure and charm. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically 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 disguise all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike practices despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of quite thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and more upmarket items would be further embellished with special delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used rather than upholstery.

English chairs of the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and found 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 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 products 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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