E28: German Sitting Room of the Biedermeier Period, 1815–50

Narcissa Niblack Thorne, creator of the Thorne Rooms, combined a deep knowledge of design history with a vivid imaginative sensibility. In the 1930s, she assembled a team of skilled artisans in Chicago to construct a series of intricately detailed interiors at the scale of one inch to one foot (1:12).

Conceived as a visual history of interior design, the rooms are at once scholarly and inventive. Meticulously researched and carefully composed, they balance historical accuracy with artistic interpretation. Each atmospheric interior feels like a stage set awaiting its occupants—two parts fantasy, one part history, and entirely absorbing.

Entry from Fannia Weingartner, Miniature Rooms: The Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago, 2nd ed. (The Art Institute of Chicago, 2004):

28: German Sitting Room of the “Biedermier” Period, 1815–50
Between 1855 and 1857, a German writer named Ludwig Eichrodt published satiric verses about Papa Biedermeier, a fictitious character who expressed the foibles and ambivalences of the German middle class. Papa Biedermeier became symbolic of the common man, and his name was associated with the atmosphere and décor of an earlier period, the decades following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815.
The Napoleonic conquest had spread throughout the Continent the heady mixture of egalitarian principles proclaimed by the French Revolution and the grandiose pretensions of Napoleon’s short-lived empire. A postwar reaction against the grand character of the Empire style prompted the development of the Biedermeier style, which is above all functional, solid, and comfortable. “The simple and provincial character of [Biedermeier] furniture,” wrote Mrs. Thorne, “shows the protest of the German middle class against the sumptuousness of the Napoleonic era.”
Mrs. Thorne based this interior on a portfolio of twenty-four color plates, from which she chose two that seemed to her to “give a good idea of the spirit of Biedermeier.” The plain woodwork, painted and papered walls, and elaborate borders are characteristic of the style, as are the festooned and fringed draperies.
In keeping with furniture designs of the period, the pieces, for the most part, reflect the use of pale wood—pear, ash, mahogany, cherry, or birch—with strong accents of ebonized black. Early Biedermeier seating pieces tended to have curved legs and backs, a feature often repeated in other forms. Over time the relative restraint of the ornamentation, confined to pilasters and columns, yielded to greater embellishment.
This room was partially inspired by a watercolor of the living room of the Baroness Munch-Bellinghausen, reproduced in Joseph August Lux’s Empire und Biedermeier (1930). The tiled stove in the marbelized niche, the commode, floor, wallpaper border, type of chandelier, and arrangement of pictures in Mrs. Thorne’s model bear a strong resemblance to their counterparts in the illustration. This tends to confirm the suspicion that Mrs. Thorne’s interior was aristocratic after all, and would have been somewhat beyond the means of a Papa Biedermeier.
“My model of a Biedermeier room may seem overcrowded with furniture and ornaments,” wrote Mrs. Thorne, “and the walls may appear too cluttered with pictures. But truly, what seems overdecoration is hardly sufficient to represent the exuberant taste of this charming . . . style.”
This room measures 14 5/8 x 21 x 21 1/4 inches.