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From all the furniture objects, the chair could be the most imperative. While many other items (apart from the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair was said here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to complex pieces like a bench and sofa, which may be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously distinuishable.

The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or an aesthetic creation; it is also a signifier of social standing. At the past royal courts there were social differences between sitting on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to sit on a stool. Since the recent century, the director’s and manager’s chair has been seen as iconic of superior status, as well as in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a raised level.

As its furniture form, the chair encompasses a variety of variations. There are chairs manufactured to match man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical times there were chairs for births (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (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 make chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Modern day living has developed new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair kinds have been changed to match to differing human requirements. Due to its particular relationship with man, the chair comes to its full importance only when in use. Though it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is understood best and judged best with a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter require the other. Thus the individual elements of the chair are named as the names of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the primary purpose of a chair is to support your body, its value is evaluated primarily from how well it fulfills this practical purpose. In the manufacture of a chair, the builder is restricted within certain static regulations and principal measurements. Inside these rules, however, the chair maker has large freedom.

The history of the chair extended over a period of several thousand years. There were civilizations that had made individual chair types, as expressions of the leading object in the areas of craft and art. Among such peoples, 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.

Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the objects of masterful craft, are now a finding from tomb findings. One of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs crafted similar to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this design a solid triangular form was obtained. There was apparently no significant difference between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common non-royals. The real variation exists in the complexity of ornamentation, in the choice of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was designed for an easily portable seat for officers. As a camp stool the stool continued for much later days. But the stool then also was designed for the task of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical function as a folding stool ignored or 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 work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the form of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats were created with wood. The plain structure of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, is seen at some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of those is the folding stool, from ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is known not with any ancient fossil still in form but found in a variety of pictorial items. The significant kind is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place by Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which were seen. These unusual legs were likely to have been crafted out of bent wood and were likely to have been put under a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore super strong and were clearly indicated.

The Romans borrowed from the Greek chair; a number of models of seated Romans show chairs of a heavier and in appearance rather crudely built klismos. Both styles, the light or the heavy, were brought back in the Classicist epoch. The klismos design can be evidenced in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some kinds of marked originality in Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.

China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as far as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken collection of images and works of art has been protected, detailing the interior and exteriors of Chinese households and their furniture. Also preserved of the 16th century are a trove of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that display an interesting likeness to pictures of older chairs.

Same as in Egypt, there were two standard chair designs in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair has been seen both with or without arms but never missing its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one design, it has been seen, the stiles were slightly curved over the arms for the purpose of suit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of its back). All three parts had been mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Though the innovation of this back splat had an influence on English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that merely to a limited limit support corner joints (as well as being loose into the bargain) represent a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops upon the rounded staves. Members are round in section or have rounded edges—a left over perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and occasionally had a plaited form. These chairs required the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; if too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs presumably were only for older persons in the family, for they were esteemed greatly.

The Chinese folding stool is believed to have taken to China from the West. It is not dissimilar that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is prettily joined to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is usually possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the overall effect of these two furniture items is stylized. The construction and decoration parts are combined in a way that is all at once naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual parts do not seem to have been joined together by means of either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and fixed in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Works of art show a design 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 from the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture for traveling which, at the same era, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is displayed in engravings of the interior 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 may also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not held that the innovation actually began in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in considerable amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of these chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of 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 styles—that was, to say, as created in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes the popularity to a combination of leisure and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and allows 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 achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike principles even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of fairly thick density; but all the members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been sanded away, and more upmarket items may be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used in place of upholstery.

English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in style than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and found favour 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 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.

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