Chairs Everyone Should Know: from the Coronation Chair to Eames

The history of the chair can be told with a handful of classics: the Coronation Chair of 1297, the Windsor chair, Chippendale, Thonet No. 14, Mackintosh’s Hill House chair, Rietveld’s Red and Blue chair, Breuer’s Wassily, Mies’s Barcelona, Wegner’s Wishbone and the Eames plastic chair. Each chair shows a new idea of material, manufacture and the body.

Facts

From the throne to the Windsor chair

For centuries the chair was a mark of status. Only the master of the house or a king sat on a chair, while others sat on benches or stools. The Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey, commissioned by Edward I around 1297 to house the captured Stone of Scone, has been used at British coronations for over 700 years. It shows how the chair could become a symbol of power in itself. The Renaissance Savonarola chair is built of crossing slats and can be folded, a classic of sixteenth-century Italy.

The Windsor chair developed in England in the eighteenth century. The back spindles and the seat legs are driven into a solid wooden seat, turned by a chairmaker called a bodger. It was cheap, durable and comfortable and became one of the most copied chairs in the world, also in America. At the same time Thomas Chippendale made chairs in mahogany for the upper class; see the guide to the Chippendale chair.

Manufacture and Arts and Crafts

Thonet No. 14 of 1859 was the chair everyone could buy. Michael Thonet bent beech with steam and obtained a chair of six parts, ten screws and two nuts, which could be shipped in parts and assembled on site. Before 1930 over 50 million had been sold. It is often called the world’s first mass-produced designer chair; read more in the guide to the Thonet chair.

Against industry the Arts and Crafts movement set craft. William Morris’s Morris chair (the Morris chair, 1866) has an adjustable back, a model for reclining chairs. The Shakers built simple, pure chairs of ash, called the Shaker chair. The Hill House chair by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, 1903, has an extra-high, narrow back and became sculpture in black. Biedermeier gave simple forms: the Biedermeier chair, and the time of Gustav III the Gustavian chair.

Modernism’s chairs

In the 1920s the modernists rethought the chair. Gerrit Rietveld built the Red and Blue chair in 1918 of straight laths and planks, a pattern of De Stijl. Marcel Breuer made at the Bauhaus in 1925–1926 the Wassily chair of bent steel tubes, inspired by his bicycle. Mies van der Rohe made the Barcelona chair in 1929 of crossed steel bands and leather, for the Barcelona Pavilion. And Alvar Aalto used bent birch plywood in the Paimio chair. Read more about the school in the guide to the Bauhaus.

These chairs are seen in all modernist rooms, but they cannot be shown as pictures here because their designers died less than seventy years ago. You will find them in books and museums.

The post-war era and plastic

After the Second World War the chair became a sculpture and a product of new materials. Charles and Ray Eames made chairs of moulded plywood and fibreglass. Arne Jacobsen made the Ant in 1952 and the Series 7 in 1955, Hans J. Wegner the Wishbone chair in 1949. Verner Panton designed in 1960 a chair in a single piece of plastic, produced from 1967. Read about the period in the guide to mid-century modern.

When you want to recognise a chair, look first at the construction: how is the back fixed? What material? How many parts? Then at the style: are the legs curved or straight? Is the seat shaped? Use the guides to furniture styles in chronological order and furniture terms, and see the whole category furniture.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which chair is usually called the world’s first mass-produced designer chair?