ArtistSwedish
Nils Emil Lundström
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Born on 24 January 1865 in Åbyn, a small locality in Byske parish in Västerbotten, Nils Emil Lundström grew up in northern Sweden before embarking on an unusually rigorous artistic education for his era. After completing his matriculation in Uppsala in 1884, he spent four years studying at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf (1885-1889), one of the most sought-after destinations for Scandinavian painters of the late nineteenth century. He then returned to Sweden to study at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm from 1889 to 1892, followed by further independent studies in Berlin from 1892 to 1894.
In 1896, Lundström joined Rörstrand, Sweden's oldest and most internationally recognised porcelain factory, as a pattern designer. The timing was auspicious: Rörstrand was entering its most celebrated phase, producing some of the finest Art Nouveau ceramics in Europe. Working alongside modellers and glaze chemists, Lundström developed a distinctive visual language for the factory's vases - pale greens, cool pinks, and sculptural relief work with calla lilies, organic tendrils, and softly graduated grounds. His pieces from this period were exhibited at Rörstrand's Stockholm exhibition in 1897, at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900, and at the Baltic Exhibition in Malmö in 1914.
Over a four-decade tenure at Rörstrand - moving with the factory from Stockholm to Gothenburg when it relocated in 1926, and remaining active there until 1935 - Lundström proved himself among the most adaptable designers in the factory's history. Beyond Art Nouveau vases, he designed textiles, furniture, and tableware patterns. His most consequential contribution came near the end of his time at Rörstrand: the Ostindia pattern, introduced in 1932. Drawing on East Asian blue-and-white motifs and European delft traditions, the service with its cobalt floral sprays on a white ground became one of the most widely sold Swedish tableware patterns of the twentieth century. Rörstrand has continued to produce it for over ninety years.
Beyond his industrial work, Lundström was also a painter in his own right, producing landscapes and portraits in oil and later in gouache. He is represented in the collections of Nationalmuseum, the Hallwyl Museum, and Rohss Museum in Sweden, as well as internationally at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He died on 19 February 1960 in Stockholm, aged 95.
At auction, Lundström's work appears regularly through Swedish regional houses. On the Auctionist platform, all 12 recorded lots are his ceramics and tableware: primarily Ostindia service pieces and Art Nouveau Rörstrand vases. The highest sale in our database reached 7,600 SEK for an 84-piece Ostindia service, while individual Art Nouveau vases have brought between 1,500 and 7,600 SEK. His pieces are handled by houses including Stockholms Auktionsverk, Formstad Auktioner, and Laholms Auktionskammare.