Biedermeier Style

Biedermeier Style, a furniture and interior design style popular in Germany and Austria between 1815 and 1860. Characterized by a cheerful, homely bulk, Biedermeier is an adaptation of the luxurious, neoclassical French Empire and Directoire styles to inexpensive materials and comfortable, sometimes vulgar, bourgeois tastes. The term, derived from “Papa Biedermeier,” a comic figure in satiric poetry published in the German periodical Fliegende Blätter (Flying Papers), is sometimes applied to the music, painting, sculpture, and literature of the same period and region.