Karl Johan style – Swedish Empire

The Karl Johan style is the Swedish form of the Empire style, roughly 1810–1850, named after Karl XIV Johan. The furniture is heavy and symmetrical, often veneered with mahogany or birch, and decorated with brass or gilt-bronze mounts, columns, lion's paws, swans and laurel wreaths.

Facts

A French marshal on the Swedish throne

In 1810 the French marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte was elected Swedish crown prince. He took the name Karl Johan and became king in 1818 as Karl XIV Johan. With him came a strong connection to Napoleon's France, where the Empire style had been developed by the architects Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine.

Empire was Neoclassicism's most imperial form, with motifs from the Roman Empire and from Egypt, which had become fashionable after Napoleon's campaign there in 1798–1801. In Sweden the style was adapted and acquired a character of its own, somewhat simpler. Read more about the period under the Karl Johan period.

The furniture: heavy and glossy

Karl Johan furniture is large, symmetrical and closed, with glossy, smooth surfaces. Commodes and secretaires have straight fronts, often with columns at the sides, and rest on feet shaped like lion's paws or simple ball feet. The Karl Johan commode with its mahogany veneers and brass mounts is a typical example.

Chairs often have sabre legs, back legs that curve backwards like a sabre, after the ancient Greek klismos chair, and a broad, curved top rail. Tables often have a heavy central pedestal, and round drawing-room tables on a single column became one of the period's most typical pieces. Mahogany was the fine wood, but Swedish cabinet-makers also used flame birch and stained birch that imitated mahogany.

The ornament

Decoration is often applied as mounts of gilt bronze or brass on the dark surface: laurel wreaths, palmettes, swans, lyres, stars and mythological figures. Egyptian motifs such as sphinxes and lotus flowers also occur. The ornaments are symmetrically placed and clearly defined.

A particularly Swedish material was porphyry from Älvdalen in Dalarna, a hard, reddish stone that was polished into urns, tabletops and candlesticks. The king favoured the porphyry works, and the large porphyry urn in the park at Rosendal Palace is one of the best-known objects.

Rosendal and fashion

Rosendal Palace on Djurgården, built 1823–1827 as the king's pleasure palace, is the best-preserved Karl Johan interior in Sweden, with furniture, textiles and wall paintings from the period. The rooms have strong colours, draped fabrics and mahogany furniture with gilded mounts.

The same ideals appeared in fashion. The Empire dress had a high waist directly below the bust and a straight, falling skirt, inspired by ancient statues. It is often said that the porcini mushroom, in Swedish karljohanssvamp, was named after the king, who is supposed to have enjoyed it.

After Karl Johan

From around the 1830s forms became softer and more bourgeois, and the style merged into the German-Austrian Biedermeier, with lighter woods, rounded forms and a focus on domestic comfort. Compare with a Biedermeier chair.

Later in the 19th century Empire returned as one of many styles in Historicism. That is why there is much Karl Johan furniture made long after 1850. An early piece often has hand-sawn veneer that is thicker than the machine-cut veneer of later times, cast and hand-finished mounts and hand-cut dovetails in the drawers. Later copies have thinner veneer, pressed mounts and more even, machine-made joints. Do read the guide to the Gustavian style, the style that came before.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which style is the Karl Johan style a Swedish variant of?