From all the furniture needs, the chair may be the primary one. While the majority of other pieces (save the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair should be said here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to complex chairs including the bench and sofa, which should be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly distinuishable.

The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support and/or an aesthetic piece of art; it can also be a symbol of social standing. In the old royal courts there were significant signifiers between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, and having to use a stool. In the recent century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been iconic of superior dignity, and in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on an elevated level.

As a furniture construction, the chair can be used for a range of different forms. There are chairs structured to suit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since past times there were chairs for births (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We design 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 for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Our contemporary lifestyle has demanded new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair forms has been adapted to suit to different human uses. From its significant connection with man, the chair appears to its full importance only when used. Though 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 best and regarded best by a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter need one another. Thus the individual parts of a chair were labeled corresponding to the parts of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the primary function of your chair is to support a human body, its credit is tested principally by how fully it does fulfill this practical role. In the construction of the chair, the carpenter is restricted within some static regulation and principal measurements. Inside these boundaries, however, the chair builder has awesome freedom.

The history of the chair extended over dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of societies that had made iconic chair shapes, as seen of the principal craft in the spheres of technique and aesthetics. From these peoples, individual 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.

Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of skilled scheme, are today known from tomb findings. The first of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair had four legs structured akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this design a strong triangular construction was obtained. There was to all appearances no particular difference between the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary citizens. The main difference was in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the choice of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was developed to be an easily portable seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool that type stayed around til much later points. But the stool then also was created as the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical function as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can now be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the form of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats are formed of wood. The simplistic construction of the folding stool, made of two frames that turn on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, came up at some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of those is the folding stool, from ashwood, which can now be found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not as any ancient object still in form but as in a variety of pictorial objects. The most well known is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which are shown. These strange legs were most likely to have been manufactured from bent wood and were as such needed to bear extreme pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore extremely strong and were clearly drawn.

The Romans embued the Greek design; existing casts of seated Romans show chairs of a more heavyset and are a slightly more crudely crafted klismos. Both styles, the light or heavy, were brought back during the Classicist era. The klismos chair can be seen in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some special brands of marked individuality around Denmark and Sweden from 1800.

China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be charted as well as chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed collection of sketches and works of art was kept, showing the inside and outside of Chinese households and the designs of furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are some chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that show an amazing likeness to designs of ancient chairs.

Just like in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair designs in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair can be designed both with or without arms though always having its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to support the back. In one type, though, the stiles could be slightly curved over the arms to conform correctly to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the back). Together, all three parts had been mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Although the innovation of the Chinese back splat then had an inspiration for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that would merely to a restricted extent reinforce corner joints (as well as being loose additionally) indicate an element exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which stops about the rounded staves. All members are round in section or have rounded edges—a left over as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; if too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs most likely were reserved only for senior family members, for they were respected greatly.

The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It is akin so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is prettily affixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of both of these furniture designs is stylized. The manufacture and decoration elements are combined in a style that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the manner that the individual members do not appear to have been fixed together by means of either glue or screws, but were mortised onto one another and locked into its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Artworks display a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to show up a pattern of small 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 a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same era, possessed the dignity 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 rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this type 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 style actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable numbers, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up against a wall. The style asserts itself by its harmonious proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.

France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that is to say, as created in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The chair owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat suits to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of fairly thick dimensions; but all the members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and more expensive examples might be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used instead of upholstery.

English chairs in the 18th century were more open in design 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 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 reknowned 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 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.

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