c. 1815–1848

Biedermeier

Between the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the revolutions of 1848, the middle classes of Central Europe withdrew into private life. Their art shows parlours, families, gardens and landscapes, closely observed and often with gentle humour. Behind the cosiness lies an age of censorship and political disappointment.

An umbrella under the roof

Beneath the sloping roof of an attic, a poet lies in bed. He wears a nightcap and has wrapped himself in blankets, for the stove is cold. Above him an open umbrella hangs from the rafters; the roof leaks. He holds his quill crosswise in his mouth, and with the fingers of his right hand he may be counting the syllables of a verse, or crushing a flea. He has scrawled a metre on the wall. In front of the stove lies a bundle of written pages, ready to be burned.

Carl Spitzweg painted Der arme Poet (The Poor Poet) in 1839. The small picture from the Neue Pinakothek, on view in Munich’s Sammlung Schack while the museum is renovated, is now one of the best-known paintings in Germany. A second version was stolen from Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin in 1989 and has never been found. Spitzweg, a trained pharmacist who taught himself to paint, laughs at his poet, but without malice. That tone, affectionate, precise and a little ironic, is typical of Biedermeier art.

A nickname

No artist was ever called Biedermeier. The name comes from an invented character: from 1855 the lawyer Ludwig Eichrodt and the physician Adolf Kussmaul published, in the Munich magazine Fliegende Blätter, poems by a supposed Swabian village schoolmaster named Gottlieb Biedermaier, a guileless, narrow-minded philistine. Only later was the name applied to the art and domestic culture of the years before 1848, at first disparagingly. Around 1900 collectors and exhibitions rediscovered the period, and the jibe became a style label.

Retreat into private life

After the Napoleonic Wars the Congress of Vienna redrew the map of Europe in 1815. Many citizens’ hopes for a German nation-state, a constitution and a free press came to nothing. The Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 brought censorship and surveillance. Those who did not want to court danger kept out of politics and sought happiness in family and friends, in music at home, reading and Sunday outings.

Art reflects this. It shows nurseries and drawing rooms, birthdays and farewells, portraits of prosperous families and bunches of flowers at the window. Its patrons were no longer mainly princes and the Church, but merchants, civil servants and master craftsmen. Furniture became plain, light and comfortable, in cherry or pear wood, without the pomp of the Empire style. Its clear forms still impress designers today.

Vienna: light and nature

The centre of the Biedermeier was Vienna. Here Friedrich von Amerling painted elegant portraits, Josef Danhauser scenes from bourgeois homes and Peter Fendi small, touching everyday moments. Rudolf von Alt recorded the city in hundreds of watercolours.

The most important painter, though, was Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller. He insisted on studying nature itself rather than painting from models and rules, and painted landscapes in the Salzkammergut in a bright, clear light that was ahead of its time. This stance brought him into conflict with the Vienna Academy, where he taught, and his career there ended early. The artists of the Vienna Secession later saw him as a forerunner. Late pictures such as Am Fronleichnamsmorgen (On Corpus Christi Morning) of 1857 combine everyday life and sunlight.

Berlin: the city as picture

In Berlin Franz Krüger painted parades with hundreds of carefully portrayed onlookers, among them writers, actors and officials whom contemporaries could recognise. Eduard Gaertner showed the city with Schinkel’s new buildings in clear light, in 1834 even as a large panorama from the roof of the Friedrichswerder Church. In 1831 Johann Erdmann Hummel painted the huge granite bowl in the Lustgarten, its polished surface reflecting the people around it, a picture about technology, pride and seeing all at once.

More than idyll

For a long time the Biedermeier was considered harmless and well-behaved. That is only partly true. Many pictures are quiet but not naive; they also show poverty, illness and parting. The poor poet is freezing, and Waldmüller’s children are often poor. Nor was politics shut out: in literary history the same years are known as the Vormärz, the time before the revolution of March 1848, when writers such as Heinrich Heine and Georg Büchner wrote openly against the state of things. The revolution ended the Biedermeier, and in painting Realism began.

Why it still matters

Much of what Germans mean by Gemütlichkeit comes from the Biedermeier: the living room as the centre of life, the Christmas tree in the middle-class home, the family round the table. Biedermeier furniture is still collected and copied. And Spitzweg’s eccentrics, the poet, the bookworm, the old bachelor, have become figures that need no art history to be understood.