The Empire Style - Germany & Austria

The Empire style followed Napoleon and his armies across Europe. David Roentgen, endeavouring to save something from the wreck which the French Revolution had made of his business, adopted a simplified and dignified version of second-phase Neoclassicism for the palaces of Berlin. At Wurzburg c.1808 - 1812, Johann Valentin Raab produced numerous pieces of handmade furniture in which swan shaped supports played a vital part. This feature was adopted with much enthusiasm in the Germanic countries, swans in triplicate forming the strands of circular tables resting on shaped plinths known as 'platform' bases, while swans in duplicate appear very frequently on the arms of armchairs and comfortably upholstered settees.

In Prussia, a distinctive version of the style was evolved by the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781 - 1841) who, after studying at the Berlin Academy, travelled in Italy and Austria, visiting Paris en route and returning to Berlin in 1805 to begin a career as a painter, but also as a designer of furniture and ultimately of buildings. The bedroom furniture he designed for the Charlottenburg Palace in 1809 succeeds in being original without sacrificing elegance to novelty - a trap into which so many designers of fitted and non fitted furniture have been prone to fall. The woods used were mainly beech and pear, carved to simulate the hanging folds of the bed linen. In 1817, he designed a set of chairs for Prince Friedrich of Prussia, in which the backs are composed of rounded pads connected to an outer frame with turned members. Many of his chairs are carefully thought out to provide maximum comfort and convenience. One model even includes a moveable reading stand for books, attached to the arm of the chair. In spite of this practicality, his work is imbued with the spirit of Romanticism which was, in the first decade of the 19th century, presenting Gothic Revival designs alongside the most pedantic of Neoclassical models. However, just as the first phase of Neoclassicism had borrowed heavily from the repertoire of antique ornament, without attempting to reproduce the shapes or forms of ancient furniture, so the early Romantic school was content to employ 'Gothic' motifs - pointed arches, crocketing and crenellated cornices - without trying to copy actual pieces of medieval furniture.

Typical pieces of furniture related to the Empire style in Germany are 'high-waisted' corner-cupboards (i.e. with the upper stage less than half the height of the whole); bookcases, their doors with glazing bars representing crossed arrows; bedside cupboards which splay outwards towards the base, like an obelisk with the top sawn off; the fall-front secretaire which often had a third deck of small drawers placed on top of the carcase, making it rather heavily architectural; a type of three-drawer commode, the top drawer projecting forwards a little and appearing to be supported by herms with sphinx heads, and either fitted with brass handles of octagonal, oval or round pattern, or with no handles at all - a sacrifice in the cause of purity in design making for considerable inconvenience if the key happens to get lost.

In Vienna, Johann Haertl adapted the lyre shape, already widely popular for chair backs, to carcase pieces, of which cabinets with fronts following a lyre-shaped profile are perhaps the most original. As often before, Austria found the secret of carrying a fashionable style to its logical conclusion in a way that should, according to all the laws of good design, have resulted in utter disaster, but instead proved charming if a little eccentric.

In 1804, Josef Danhauser opened a factory where furniture in the Empire style was made for such members of the nobility as the Duke Albert von Sachsen-Teschen and the Archduke Karl. Before his death in 1830, Danhauser had successfully developed large-scale production of a more functional, less costly range of post Empire furniture for the middle classes. Around 2,500 of his designs are preserved in the Osterreichisches Museum fur Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. The style was emotionally linked to a school of literature and drama known - at first derisively - as Biedermeier, bieder being the German word for 'upright' or 'honourable'.