Garden Sofa in Empire Style after a design by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, circa 1900

Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) was the Prussian who came to shape German classicism. As an architect, pattern designer, furniture designer, urban planner, and painter, he worked in Berlin during the first decades of the 19th century and imprinted his mark - Prussian classicism - on the city's architectural and aesthetic design. As the leading architect in royal Prussian service, he designed some of Berlin's most famous buildings.

Work in cast iron, in addition to urban planning and architecture, became Schinkel's hallmark. He embraced cast iron as a new artistic material, flexible and with an air of modernity, but also for its significance to the country's industry and the national connotations it carried; the iron industry grew strong and its use was encouraged. This particular model of garden bench was designed by Schinkel for the imperial palace parks in Berlin and Potsdam. The benches were cast by Königliche Eisengeisserei around 1824/26.