It is fitting that the most prominent German furniture historian of the past half century, Georg Himmelheber (Fig.1), who died on 1st September aged ninety-five, should have been the scion of a cabinet-making dynasty. In 1768 his direct ancestor Johannes Himmelheber set up a cabinet-making workshop in Karlsruhe. The firm thrived and developed into a furniture factory, Gebrüder Himmelheber, Möbelfabrikanten, which was active until 1958, although its premises and most of its records perished in a fire in 1942. Georg’s father, Bernhard, was an interior architect and collected drawings, as did an uncle, Philipp Hermann, who was an artist and picture restorer. The anthropologist Hans Himmelheber was another uncle, as was Max Himmelheber, inventor of chipboard and an acolyte of Shintoism and Animism. After training as a cabinet-maker Georg studied art history at Kiel, Munich and Freiburg; his Freiburg doctoral thesis (1954) was eventually published as Der Ostchor des Augsburger Doms (1963). From 1956 to 1959 he worked for the Landesamt für Denkmalpflege in Stuttgart, working on his Die Kunstdenkmäler des ehemaligen Oberamts Künzelsau (1962, reprinted 1983). His next post was as a curator at the Badisches Landesmuseum in his native Karlsruhe (already in 1955 he had been involved in its tricentenary celebration of the Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm of Baden, ‘Türkenlouis’). 

Georg’s curatorial responsibilities in Karlsruhe extended to Schlösser throughout Baden and there was ample opportunity for discoveries and research. This led in 1964 to the first of many publications on the Roentgen dynasty of cabinet-makers, Abraham and his eldest son, David. Also in 1964 he became a founder member of the Furniture History Society. Fifty years later he recalled the subscription as one guinea, which seemed to him so ‘chic’ as to be irresistible. By 1965 his reputation as a furniture historian was fully established and he was appointed the curator of the great collection of the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich, where he became deputy director in 1974 and whence he retired in 1991. Throughout this long career Georg advised and assisted museums throughout Germany. The work which it gave him the most pleasure to secure for the Bayerisches Museum was perhaps the ‘Stroganov’ desk (Fig.2) made by David Roentgen, a miraculous abstract combination of burr birch and gilt bronze. It was deposited on permanent loan in 1975. 

A ground-breaking event for German furniture history was the publication in 1967 of Von den Anfängen bis zum Hochbarock, the first volume of Heinrich Kreisel’s monumental Die Kunst des deutschen Möbels; it was rapidly succeeded in 1970 by the second volume, Spätbarock und Rokoko. In the foreword to the latter Kreisel stated that he had entrusted the third volume, Klassizismus, Historismus, Jugendstil to Georg, and this duly appeared in 1973. This was on the same heroic scale as its predecessors, and after Kreisel’s death in 1975 Georg went on to produce a revised third edition of the first volume (1981), and revised editions of the second and third (his own) volumes (both 1983). ‘Kreisel / Himmelheber’ is universally recognised as foundational for the study of German furniture. A further basic tool followed in 1988, Deutsche Möbelvorlagen 1800–1900, a systematic configuration of nearly four thousand designs, inspired by the Pictorial Dictionary of British 19th Century Furniture Design (1977). 

In 1974 came Biedermeier Furniture, the first modern treatment of this subject, commissioned by Peter Thornton of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, for the Faber Monographs on Furniture series. A German edition followed in 1978, and an enlarged version in 1987; thanks to Georg’s friendship with the leading Hungarian furniture historian Hedwig Szabolcsì, a Budapest edition had already appeared in 1982. In 1987 Georg’s account of Biedermeier was questioned by Hans Ottomeyer and Christian Witt-Dörring respectively in two major exhibitions, Biedermeiers Glück und Ende in the Munich Stadtmuseum and Bürgersinn und Aufbegehren in the Vienna Historisches Museum; both had the date range of 1815 to 1848 in their subtitles. Georg responded in 1988 with a splendid display at the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich under the defiant title Kunst des Biedermeier 1815–1835. The ripples of this controversy have subsided but there can be no doubt that Georg would not be browbeaten and ‘gave as good as he got’. 

Throughout his official career and beyond Georg produced a constant stream of publications. A tiny sample might include: Kabinettschränke (1977), a booklet for the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum; Kleine Möbel (1979), a catalogue of an exhibition there, later echoed by that of a private collection, Grosse Wunder Kleine Möbel (2005), in Iphofen, a small town in Franconia; ‘Die Münchner Christkindwiege’ (1984), an article in which he unmasked a celebrated cradle in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum as a nineteenth-century confection incorporating genuine fourteenth-century panels; ‘Die Möbel des Johann Daniel Sommer’, a key contribution to Die Künstlerfamilie Sommer (1988); Cast-Iron Furniture (1996), an international history; and ‘Der Trierer Erzbischof und seine Möbelankäufe’ (1998), a fundamental archival study of the furniture acquired from Abraham Roentgen by Graf Johann Philipp von Walderdorff, archbishop of Trier. Major entries in the Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte on linenfold, veneer and panelling also deserve mention. An act of personal piety was his privately printed tribute (with a full bibliography) Hans Huth, 1892–1977 (1977). Huth was the pioneer of Roentgen studies and when in 2008 Georg magisterially surveyed the many 2007 exhibitions commemorating the bicentenary of David Roentgen’s death in Kunstchronik he recalled Huth’s ‘erzwungene Emigration’. Georg’s eightieth birthday was celebrated in 2010 with a two-day conference at the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin, titled – inevitably – ‘Die Kunst des Deutschen Möbels’, when he was justly hailed by Burkhardt Göres as the ‘Nestor of his field’. In the same year his Der Mailänder Kabinettschrank greeted the Liechtenstein Museum’s acquisition of a spectacular Augsburg cabinet of c.1565, which he attributed to Lienhart Stromair. A swansong followed in a small but densely documented book, Die Berchtesgadener Holzhandwerker und Bildhauer im Barock (2012), which revealed this tiny ecclesiastical state as the source of many delightful Kunstkammer displays of virtuoso craftsmanship in wood. 

Georg is survived by his wife since 1955, Irmtraud Jo, a jewellery historian who supported and assisted him in all his projects. She has made a speciality of extracting revealing quotations from Biedermeier memoirs and letters, originally for the 1988 Munich show. Some were published in the catalogue of the exhibition Der feine Unterschied. Biedermeiermöbel Europas 1815–1835 at the Museum für Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt, in 2007, but more extensive coverage, using no fewer than 177 sources, is in her Leben im Biedermeier (2019).