More than 600 pieces of nineteenth century Biedermeier furniture, including cabinets, bureaus, wardrobes, secretaries, sofas, chairs, and tables. Provides extensive information on shapes, materials, ornamental features, evaluation and pricing, care and restoration tips, and market trends. Illustrated glossary and current values included.

''The World of Biedermeier'' celebrates every one of its elements - the furniture, decorative ornamentation, paintings, porcelain, crystal, fabrics - as no other recent book on furniture and design. The hundreds of brilliant colour photographs by Lois Lammerhuber set a new standard for design and furniture photography. A chapter on current uses of Biedermeier illustrates its timeless quality, from full traditional settings to the way that Biedermeier furniture is elegantly integrated in contemporary spaces, and the illustrated reference section can prove a guide to anyone interested in this rich homage to Middle European culture.

How you can identify, date and authenticate antique furniture. Comprehensive survey of the development of styles, guide to recognizing woods. English, European and New World furniture.

This book sets out to investigate the wealth of the artistic production that developed in Central Europe (Austria and Bohemia in particular) in the first half of the 19th century, when Biedermeier appeared as an original attempt to give rise to a "universal" stylistic expression. Its simplicity of line, rigorous and simple although not lacking in elegance and refinement, the appearance of the first craft productions based on standard models and its unquestionable modernity all make Biedermeier the first example of design, the undisputed point of breakdown between Classicism and Modernism. Indeed, it is considered on the most fascinating genres of the 19th century. The volume offers a 360° view of Central European production using more than 300 objects of extraordinary originality, quality and workmanship from the National Gallery and Museum of Decorative and Applied Arts of Prague and from major Bohemian museums. Paintings, furnishings, sculptures, drawings, graphic works, artistic craftsmanship, jewels, ceramics and glassware that decorated the homes of gentry and bourgeois, miniatures, daguerreotypes... Remarkable pieces such as the refined lady's desk, designed and constructed in the workshop of the most important creator of Biedermeier furniture, the Viennese Josef Danhauser (1780- 1829), and a beautiful lyre- shaped secrétaire with walnut veneer and musical motif carvings that overcome the ostentation of Empire style.

Biedermeier ISBN 3-7757-1796-X / 978-3-7757-1796-0 Clothbound, 10 x 13 in. / 336 pgs / 365 color. / U.S. $65.00 CDN $78.00 September / Design Biedermeier arts and crafts are orderly, frugal and simplistic, just like the fictional German papa for which they are named.

Soon after her arrival in Russia in 1744 the future Catherine the Great lamented the pitiful scarcity of furniture in the Imperial palaces. Within less than a hundred years those palaces, and the grandiose apartments which sprang up alongside them in the burst of building activity that gripped Russia at the end of the eighteenth century, were filled with magnificent furniture, as befitted their sumptuous decor. This remarkable period and the flamboyant style it engendered have only recently excited interest in the West; literature on this subject is not only scarce, but also largely written in Russian. Russian Furniture is therefore valuable as a comprehensive study in English of the development and evolution of Russian furniture styles during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.