A PAIR OF BIEDERMEIER AMARANTH-INLAID AND KARELIAN BIRCH CHAIRS

Christian Witt-Doring, the leading Biedermeier scholar, has suggested a Russian attribution for these chairs based upon the use of Karelian birch, the most favoured of all Russian cabinet-woods, and the recording of a related armchair in a 1924 photograph at Tsarskoe Selo.
During the early 19th century, Joseph Danhauser (1780-1829) was one of the most innovative cabinet-makers in Vienna. His designs can be construed as modernist even to this day and this radical innovation in design so typical of Vienna in the early 19th century sets these pieces apart from their more conventional Biedermeier contemporaries. An almost identical design of chair, model Nr. 21, is in Laxenburg Castle, Vienna, (See Parnass, Sonderheft Möbel, Wien 1998, p. 45.).