German

Germany was not one country until 1871, and its furniture records that. The eighteenth century is a set of separate courts — Dresden, Munich, Berlin — each with its own cabinetmakers, its own imported French taste, and its own porcelain factory. Dresden's is the most conspicuous: porcelain became an instrument of state, and furniture was made to sit beside it.

The nineteenth century produces the opposite instinct. Biedermeier is deliberately domestic, plain and local after the grand courts, and it is the German contribution to European furniture that everyone else has copied since. The same sobriety, industrialised, becomes the Werkbund and then the Bauhaus — the argument that machine production could be good if it were designed well.

Read German work by asking which of those two it belongs to: the court that wanted to impress, or the movement that wanted to be honest. The twentieth century is almost entirely the second, which is why German modernism is the country's best-known export and its Baroque the least.

The court period (1690–1800) is Dresden Baroque and its porcelain, plus the French-trained workshops of the other capitals.

Biedermeier (1815–1848) is the domestic answer: pale local woods, classical motifs cut small, and a confidence that leaves the material alone.

From 1900 the line runs Werkbund to Bauhaus to postwar standardisation — design as a public argument rather than a court taste.