Gustavian or Karl Johan? The Difference Between the Styles

The difference between Gustavian and Karl Johan furniture is the difference between the light and the heavy. Gustavian furniture, roughly 1770–1810, is slender, often painted pale grey, and has straight, fluted legs and small antique ornaments. Karl Johan furniture, roughly 1810–1850, is the Swedish Empire style: large smooth surfaces of glossy mahogany or birch, sturdy forms, sabre legs or lion’s paws and gilt mounts.

Facts

The same antiquity, two interpretations

Both styles are based on antiquity, which is why they are often confused. The Gustavian style took its models from the light, elegant interiors that the Romans were believed to have had, by way of Louis XVI’s France. It is decorative on a small scale: beading, laurel wreaths, small rosettes and flutes, as on the Gustavian mantel clock and the candlesticks.

The Karl Johan style is the Swedish form of the Empire style, Napoleon’s imperial style, which took its forms from Roman temples and Egyptian monuments. It is monumental: large, smooth and glossy surfaces, heavy profiles, columns and few but clear ornaments. The style was named after Karl XIV Johan, the French marshal Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, who was elected crown prince in 1810 and became king in 1818. The Swedish period is presented in the Karl Johan era.

The surface: painted or veneered

The first thing you see is the surface. Gustavian chairs, sofas and tables were most often painted pale grey, pearl grey or white with linseed-oil paint, sometimes with gilding in the finest rooms. The finest chests of drawers, such as Georg Haupt’s, were veneered with marquetry in light and dark woods, but even then the whole is light and fine in its details.

A Karl Johan chest of drawers is veneered in large, glossy surfaces where the wood’s own figure becomes the decoration. The mahogany was cut so that the grain forms flames and mirror patterns. In Sweden birch or pine was often veneered with mahogany, or pale, flame-figured birch and elm were used, and towards the end of the period pale birch became common. Black and gilt details give contrast. The glossy surface was polished with shellac, which is why a well-preserved Karl Johan piece gleams in quite a different way from a Gustavian one.

Legs, backs and ornament

The legs tell the styles apart clearly. The Gustavian chair has straight, tapering legs with flutes and a block with a rosette at the apron. Karl Johan chairs often have sabre legs, which curve outwards in a soft arc like a cavalry sabre, after the ancient klismos chair, and tables and chests of drawers stand on short, sturdy feet, a plinth or lion’s paws.

The backs follow the same pattern. Gustavian chairs have oval medallions, lyres or straight bars; the back of the Karl Johan chair is often a broad, curved crest rail with a crossbar or a lyre in dark wood. The ornaments differ in scale: small beading and garlands against large gilt mounts with lion heads, wreaths, swans and palmettes. The daybed, such as Madame Récamier’s in Paris, shows the Empire’s pure, antique silhouette.

Where do the styles show in Sweden?

You can see the Gustavian style best in Gustav III’s settings, such as Gustav III’s Pavilion at Haga, with interiors by Louis Masreliez. The Karl Johan style shows in Rosendal Palace on Djurgården, Karl XIV Johan’s summer palace, which was built in the 1820s and retains much of its Empire interior.

Between them lies a period around the turn of the 19th century known as late Gustavian. The forms became stricter and heavier, mahogany more common and the ornament sparser, and then it can be hard to draw the line. Look at the whole: if the piece is still slender and light it is Gustavian; if it is heavy, closed and glossy it has taken the step to Karl Johan. After Karl Johan came a softer, bourgeois variant of the same forms, called Biedermeier in Germany and Austria, with the Biedermeier chair as the typical example.

The models and the spread

Both styles came from Paris, but in different ways. The Gustavian style followed the Louis XVI style, which Gustav III himself had encountered at the court of Versailles, and came to Stockholm with drawings, purchases and craftsmen who had studied abroad. The Karl Johan style was based on the French Empire style, which Napoleon’s architects Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine shaped into an imperial language of power in dark mahogany, gilt bronze mounts, swans and lion’s feet.

In Sweden both styles soon became popular. Gustavian chairs were made by chairmakers in towns and in the countryside for decades, and Karl Johan furniture was made by joiners all over the country, often in birch stained dark to resemble mahogany. The style had the same name in Norway, which from 1814 was in union with Sweden under the same king. For a piece in either style the question is therefore seldom whether it is Gustavian or Karl Johan in style, but when and where it was made, and there the guide to Biedermeier helps with the next step in the timeline and the page on furniture with the detailed drawings for each period.

When style is not enough

Both styles have been copied since they were new. Gustavian chairs were made in the provinces well into the 19th century and have been reproduced on a large scale since the early 20th century, and Karl Johan furniture was made in simpler versions long after 1850. The veneer, the saw marks, the screws and the mounts say more about age than the style does. See the guide to dating an antique chest of drawers and the chest-of-drawers diagram below, where you can switch between the styles.

If you want to read more about each style separately there are the guides to the Gustavian style and the Karl Johan style, and the change of style before the Gustavian is covered in Rococo or Gustavian. The whole timeline is in furniture styles in chronological order.

How to recognise it

Exercise

A chest of drawers has large smooth surfaces of flame-figured mahogany, columns at the corners and gilt mounts with lion heads. Which style is it?