Biedermeier (1815–1848)

Biedermeier is the specifically German-speaking epoch of mourning jewellery. Where the Georgian sentimental tradition was shaped by English and French taste, and Victorian mourning jewellery was later dominated by England, Biedermeier is a Central European jewellery culture in its own right - with different materials, different forms and a different underlying disposition from the contemporaneous pieces made in London or Paris.

Period and political framework

The Biedermeier epoch is framed by two political events:

• The Congress of Vienna (1815) - the end of the Napoleonic wars, the restoration of monarchical order, and the beginning of a politically quiet but heavily censored period in the German states and Austria
• The revolution of 1848 - the outbreak of the bourgeois revolutionary movement in Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt and other cities; the end of the Restoration years

The thirty-three years between them are shaped politically by the Metternich system, and culturally by a retreat of the bourgeois middle class into the domestic, the familial, the inward. Biedermeier art - furniture, interiors, painting, jewellery - is the expression of that retreat. It is not representational and courtly but private and bourgeois; not sumptuous but restrained; not public but intimate.

Material and workshop

The Biedermeier palette of materials is characteristically different from the English Victorian one:

Hair is the central material of mourning and remembrance. It appears in four principal forms: as woven mosaic (patterned weaving from finely drawn strands), as plaitwork (braided bands, often as the wearing surface of a bracelet), as a lock in a hollow setting (the classic variant), and as pigment in sepia hair painting (a Georgian technique carried on through Biedermeier). See Hairwork.

Gold of middling fineness (usually 14 to 18 carat). The mounts are thinner and lighter than in the Georgian period before or the Victorian years after. Characteristic are delicate gold settings with oak-leaf, vine or forget-me-not ornament.

Berlin iron - the Prussian speciality. A finely cast, black-burnished iron from the Royal Prussian foundries in Berlin, Gleiwitz and Sayn. Originating in the Wars of Liberation of 1813 as a patriotic material of exchange (the Gold gab ich für Eisen campaign), Berlin iron becomes in Biedermeier an established form of mourning and memorial jewellery. See Berlin Iron and The Berlin Iron Manufactories.

Enamel in black and royal blue - as a facing over gold carriers, often with painted bouquets of forget-me-nots or with gilt inscriptional capitals.

Ivory - as a support for sepia hair painting and for miniature portraits. The Georgian tradition of the miniature portrait remains unbroken in Biedermeier (see Miniature Painting on Ivory).

Small pearls, garnets, turquoises - as decorative accents, above all as borders around hairwork or enamel surfaces. Garnet is a frequent mourning stone in these years, because its dark red glow connotes both love and remembrance.

Tortoiseshell, pinchbeck (a brass-gold alloy) and rolled gold - as inexpensive carrier materials for vernacular pieces.

Striking is the absence of Whitby jet and onyx - both play a marginal role in Biedermeier, because they were not systematically available on the German market and did not fit culturally with the Biedermeier language of sentiment.

Principal forms

The hairwork brooch. The most important Biedermeier form of mourning and memorial jewellery. A brooch with a gold mount and a central field of hairwork under rock crystal - usually a woven mosaic pattern, sometimes a lock under glass, sometimes a sepia hair painting. Usually 3 to 5 cm across. Worn on a dress or shawl, and often passed through a family as a changing heirloom across several generations.

The hair bracelet. A variant with a band of plaited hair and a gold clasp. Family bracelets combine plaited sections from several family members; mourning bracelets are dominated by the hair of the person remembered. A particularly widespread form in Biedermeier.

The forget-me-not pendant. A small pendant with a bouquet of forget-me-nots, painted or set in turquoise beads, on a gold or enamelled carrier. Sometimes inscribed Nicht vergessen ("do not forget") or Treue bis in den Tod ("faithful unto death"). A hybrid of mourning, love and friendship jewellery (see Forget-me-not).

The mourning locket. The Biedermeier variant of the mourning locket (see Mourning Locket) is usually smaller and finer than its Victorian counterpart - often with sepia hair painting or a miniature portrait inside, a forget-me-not border at the edge and engraved gold on the outer face.

The mourning ring with a motto inscription. A direct continuation of the posy ring tradition (see Posy Ring) - a plain gold ring engraved inside, frequently with a Latin motto (Memento mori, In aeternum) or a German phrase (Nicht vergessen, Bis zum Wiedersehen - "until we meet again").

Berlin iron jewellery. The specifically Prussian genre. Brooches, bracelets, chains and rings of finely cast iron, often with antique-style reliefs or Gothic tracery patterns. During the Wars of Liberation these carried the Gold gab ich für Eisen inscription; in Biedermeier they frequently appear as purely mourning pieces without political connotation.

Personalisation and symbolism

Biedermeier personalisation concentrates on two routes:

Hair. The most common form of personalisation. A lock or a mosaic made from the hair of the person remembered sits at the centre of the piece. Family pieces combine several people's hair - parents, children, siblings.

Sepia hair painting. A minute composition (often a weeping willow above an urn, sometimes a genius figure, sometimes a bouquet of forget-me-nots) on ivory, painted with chopped hair as pigment. A Georgian technique carried on in Biedermeier (see Sepia Hair Painting).

Inscription. Engraved in gold or applied as an enamel element. Frequent formulas: initials with a date of death, short mottoes (Nicht vergessen, In Liebe und Treue - "in love and faithfulness", Bis zum Wiedersehen), biblical verses, and quotations from Goethe and Schiller.

Pictorial symbolism. Forget-me-not (the standard symbol), weeping willow, urn, anchor, folded letter (as a symbol of a message). Biedermeier imagery is softer and more vegetal than the Victorian - less memento mori severity, more gentleness of remembrance.

Cultural setting: bourgeois sensibility

Biedermeier is the period in which bourgeois mourning and remembrance behaviour finds its definitive form. Unlike the aristocratic Georgian period before or the courtly Victorian years after, Biedermeier mourning is organised around the family - in the parlour, at the writing desk, in the friendship album, in the diary.

Three cultural practices are paradigmatic:

Friendship albums and Stammbücher. Small books, often leather-bound, in which friends, family members and acquaintances left handwritten entries, quotations, small watercolours, pressed flowers and forget-me-not verses. When someone died, their entries became central objects of remembrance.

Mourning letters and the culture of condolence. A highly codified written communication of grief, often on black-bordered paper with fixed forms of address and closing. Mourning letters were kept for years and filed in special boxes or portfolios.

Domestic spaces of remembrance. Bourgeois homes developed small memorial corners - a console with a miniature portrait of a dead mother, a glass shrine holding a lock of a dead child's hair, a still life inscribed with a date of death. Mourning jewellery is part of this broader domestic practice of remembrance.

In this context, Biedermeier mourning jewellery is not primarily a gesture of social visibility (as the Victorian was) but a link between bodily and domestic remembrance - a lock of hair from the household memorial shrine is set into a piece of jewellery and can thus be carried on the wearer's body.

Berlin iron as a Prussian special case

Berlin iron deserves a section of its own, being the iconographically most significant Biedermeier jewellery genre:

Origin: in 1813, during the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, Prussia called on women to surrender their gold jewellery to finance the war. In exchange the donors received jewellery of finely cast black iron, often inscribed Gold gab ich für Eisen ("I gave gold for iron") or Eisen statt Gold ("iron instead of gold").

Workshops: the Royal Prussian iron foundry in Berlin (the principal works), the Gleiwitz foundry in Upper Silesia, and the Sayn foundry in the Rhineland. Three main sites, whose mourning and memorial lines differ slightly in style.

Form: brooches, bracelets, necklaces, rings, pendants. The formal models come from antiquity (cameo profiles, Neoclassical borders), the Gothic (tracery rosettes) and the Renaissance (acanthus ornament). Characteristic is the fineness of the casting - individual filigree elements are less than a millimetre thick.

Use: in Biedermeier, Berlin iron leaves its patriotic context of origin and becomes an established genre of full and half mourning. It could serve both as deep mourning (as a black, matt material) and as a memorial piece (with inscription and imagery). Outside Prussia it was perceived as a Prussian speciality and copied occasionally (for instance in Bohemian iron foundries).

Transition to the Victorian

Politically, Biedermeier ends with the revolution of 1848. In terms of style, late Biedermeier overlaps with early Victorian mourning jewellery (1840–1860). In the German-speaking lands the hairwork tradition remains alive into the 1880s; Berlin iron continued to be produced until around 1870. Only with the Gründerzeit and the rise of Historicism did the Victorian range of Whitby jet and onyx displace Biedermeier materials from German-speaking workshops.

Today

Biedermeier mourning jewellery is now an established collecting field, above all in the German-speaking countries. Important collections are held by the Wien Museum, the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin, the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich, the Albertina in Vienna and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.

In the present memorial-jewellery market, references to Biedermeier occur chiefly in two areas:

• Revivals of hairwork - very rare commissions to specialised workshops, often as a deliberately historicising gesture; hair mosaic in a brooch or pendant
• Forget-me-not pendants in modern designs - the small blue flower as contemporary memorial jewellery, often as an enamelled detail or a micro-bouquet in turquoise

The greater legacy of Biedermeier lies in its concept: mourning jewellery as a familial, private, inwardly turned memorial object passed between generations. That conception lives on in modern memorial jewellery - as when a fingerprint pendant functions not as a code of social status but as a personal, often invisibly worn object of remembrance.