!!!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.

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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.

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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 
18%%sup th/%  and 19%%sup th/%  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.

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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.


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