Bauernmöbel#
Rustic Furniture (German: Bauernmoebel), common name designating furniture used in rural areas in pre-industrial times. Rustic furniture is neither attributed to peasant amateur art, nor is its use restricted to the peasant milieu.
The earliest objects, which from the technical point of view are for
the greatest part carpenter's work, date back to the late Middle Ages.
They are mostly pieces of furniture used for storage (e.g. trunks
Almer). It was only when techniques were found to heat rooms without
creating smoke inside, i.e. when the Stube (rural type of parlour) was
introduced, and therefore home furnishing became more differentiated,
that more sophisticated joinery work (with carvings and sparingly used
colouring) could be used in domestic buildings.
Reliance on elements typical of period furniture is evidenced by the
fact that furniture types were taken over from high culture, such as
wardrobes, sideboards, canopied beds and easy chairs. The dependence
on high culture becomes even clearer in the use of ornamentation,
which frequently served as a basis for regional styles. If the region
was blessed with economic prosperity, such styles tended to remain
popular for a long time and thus acquire "traditional" status. There
is evidence that these styles were closely connected with individual
ateliers and their traditions, especially in the provinces of Upper
Austria and Tirol (e.g. the styles of the Alpbach and Zillertal
valleys), and in the Pinzgau region. Painted furniture was crafted in
the Baroque, Rococo and Empire traditions especially in the
18th and 19th centuries, e.g. 2-door wardrobes where
each door was horizontally partitioned into 2 sections, beds with tall
headboards. Proprietors' names and dates on such pieces of furniture
indicate that they were made for a special purpose, namely as part of
a bride's dowry. Intensive colouring and the combination of different
style and motive traditions in rustic furniture, as in the Tirolean
Lower Inn Valley and the lands along the Danube, are design features
and forms typical of the end of an era when folk art ( Popular Art )
was still based on the lifestyle of the peasantry.
The most significant Austrian collections of rustic furniture can be
found at the Tirolean Folk Art Museum in Innsbruck, in the Upper
Austrian provincial museum in Linz, in the Austrian Folklore Museum
(Oesterreichisches Museum fuer Volkskunde) in Vienna and its branch in
Schlossmuseum Gobelsburg (province of Lower Austria, Weinviertel
region).
Literature#
K. Beitl, Landmoebel, 1976; B. Deneke, B. Ein Handbuch fuer Sammler und Liebhaber, 1969; F. Lipp, Oberoesterreichische Bauernmoebel, 1986; O. Moser, Kaerntn. Bauernmoebel (= Carinthia I, vol. 134-140), 1949; L. Schmidt, Bauernmoebel aus Sued-Deutschland, Oesterreich und der Schweiz, 1977.