Victorian Furniture - The Biedermeier Style 1

The middle-class strength was perhaps the most important influence on handmade furniture design during the period, for they were less sure in their taste than the former aristocracy, and in great measure sought the comfort of the familiar in design. Thus, style became largely retrospective or imitative and indeed ended in direct reproduction. This lack of sureness of place and taste was not to end until the next generation was established in the last third of the period and the beginning of a truly innovatory design again appear.

Although there were outbursts of furnishing on a truly magnificent scale throughout the period which have some importance in the development of taste - such as the work undertaken for the Empress Eugenie or King Ludwig II of Bavaria - these are atypical, and it is among the bourgeoisie that the major influences are to be sought. Biedermeier, the name given to the styles found in Austria and Germany after the wars, is perhaps the best evidence of this.

The name Biedermeier derives from bieder, which is translated as plain or unpretentious, while 'Meier' is simply a common German surname. Academic argument has raged over the origins of the term Biedermeier but it was certainly in use with its present connotation by the 1890s. Loosely, the term approximates to the English 'Everyman', but a decidedly bourgeois Everyman. The style was a conscious revolt against the magnificence and ostentation of the Empire and its predecessors. Its beginnings lay in the Congress of Vienna, which created the Confederation of German States, and at which the citizens of Germany, exercising their new-found power, obtained for themselves rights that they had previously been denied. The formal end to the period is said to be in the years of revolution, 1848 - 1849; however, from 1830, and coinciding with a period of repression from the German princes, the style degenerated and it is argued that the true end of the style should be put at this earlier date. While there were many Biedermeier craftsmen, none of them gained the total pre-eminence of, say, Chippendale or Boulle. Not surprisingly, in view of the fact that the Austrian Empire was still the most powerful of the Germanic States, it is the Viennese whose names are best known, and of these, Josef Danhauser was the most important. Aside from the brilliance of his designs, he was also responsible for another significant strand in the history of fitted and non fitted furniture making: the beginning of factory techniques.