ArtistSwedish
Lisbet Jobs
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Lisbet Jobs was born on 30 October 1909 in Falun, the fourth child of seven in a family that would become one of Sweden's most artistically productive households. Her father, Anders Jobs, was a music director, and her mother Elisabet Wisén-Jobs cultivated a domestic craft culture - embroidering silk and wool flowers directly onto cloth - that planted the seeds of Lisbet's lifelong preoccupation with nature as ornament.
She trained at the Högre konstindustriella skolan in Stockholm, graduating as a qualified ceramist in 1930. The following year, at twenty-one, she opened her own ceramic workshop in Stockholm and installed an electric firing kiln - making her the first woman in Sweden to operate such a facility independently. The work that emerged from that workshop was unmistakably hers: earthenware and faience decorated with dense, exuberant floral motifs, painted in a polychrome palette that mixed folk-art directness with a modernist confidence in pattern.
Her breakthrough came at Galerie Moderne in Stockholm in 1935, and from that point international attention followed. She and her younger sister Gocken, who had joined the workshop after her own ceramics training, showed at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris, the 1939 World's Fair in New York, and the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco the same year. American design press noted her as one of the strongest potters then working in Europe.
In 1942, wartime restrictions on glazing materials forced the Stockholm shop to close. The sisters relocated to Västanvik in Leksand, Dalarna, where a kiln was built on a property that would eventually become Jobs Handtryck - a workshop established by the siblings in 1943 and still operating today. The pivot from ceramics to textile printing was gradual but decisive. Lisbet designed around forty patterns for hand-printed metred fabric, including the dove motif that appeared in countless Swedish interiors and became one of the most reproduced images in mid-century Nordic design. Other patterns such as Fågelbon (Bird's Nest, 1949) and Lingonkrans (1960) show the same instinct: nature observed with precision and then translated into something warm and repeatable.
Lisbet Jobs died in Västanvik on 18 July 1961 from cancer, at fifty-one. At auction, her ceramics and textiles circulate regularly through Swedish houses. The highest recorded price in our database is 3,000 SEK for a signed earthenware dish dated 1942, with hand-painted floral decoration, sold at Crafoord Auktioner Stockholm. Her textile panels, particularly the Duvor (Doves) print, appear frequently at regional houses including Handelslagret Auktionsservice and Södersens Auktionshus Uppsala, typically realising between 450 and 1,100 SEK.