OntwerperSwedish
Estrid Ericson
2 actieve items
Estrid Maria Ericson was born on September 16, 1894 in Öregrund, a small coastal town north of Stockholm, though her family moved to Hjo by Lake Vättern within her first year. Her parents ran a hotel in Hjo, and after their deaths she and three of her sisters took over the business for a period. After graduating she moved to Stockholm to attend the arts and crafts school that would later become Konstfack, where she trained in pattern design.
Before starting her own venture she worked as a drawing teacher in Hjo, then took positions at Svensk Hemslöjd and the interior shop Vackrare Vardagsvara. Working as a consultant in home furnishing for her former teacher Elsa Gullberg, she met the pewter artist Nils Fougstedt, who would become her founding partner. In October 1924, at the age of thirty, Ericson opened Firma Svenskt Tenn on Smålandsgatan in Stockholm using a modest inheritance from her father. The name translates to Swedish Pewter, reflecting the shop's initial focus on finely crafted decorative pewter objects that Ericson designed herself and Fougstedt fabricated.
The venture made an immediate impression. At the 1925 Exposition internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, Svenskt Tenn received a gold medal. In 1927 the shop moved to its current address on Strandvägen, and in 1930 Ericson took an apartment in the same building, allowing work and life to overlap completely. The new location prompted an expansion beyond pewter into furniture, home decor, and textiles.
The partnership that would define Svenskt Tenn for decades began in 1934 when Ericson employed the Austrian-born architect and designer Josef Frank, who had left Vienna as the political climate darkened. Frank brought a sensibility shaped by Viennese modernism, but also by a love of botanical complexity, warm color, and what he called the accidental quality of a room that had been lived in rather than arranged. Together Ericson and Frank departed from the austere lines of Scandinavian functionalism toward something more layered and personal. The style they developed, sometimes called Accidentism, became the house aesthetic: vivid botanical prints, eclectic combinations of objects, furniture scaled for comfort rather than show.
Ericson was not merely a curator of other people's ideas. She designed mirrors, boxes, jewelry, and interior details throughout her career. Her pewter jewelry, developed partly in response to wartime material shortages during the 1940s, drew on her extensive travels, using castings of flowers, seeds, ropes, and found forms. The Etruscan necklace, inspired by a trip to Rome in the 1930s, remains in production today and is sold through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She had a talent for identifying promising designers and giving them room, and Svenskt Tenn functioned as much as a creative platform as a commercial shop.
Ericson ran the company until 1975, when she was eighty-one years old, at which point she sold it to the Kjell and Märta Beijer Foundation. She remained as artistic director for several years after the sale and died in Stockholm on December 1, 1981.
On the auction market, Ericson's objects appear most often at Stockholms Auktionsverk Magasin 5 and Auktionshuset Kolonn, reflecting a Swedish collector base with a taste for Scandinavian applied arts. The 64 items recorded in the Auctionist database span silver and metalwork, textiles, brooches, and necklaces, with 2 currently active. Top results include a brass and mirror-glass bordsplateau at 27,724 SEK and two seal stamps in pewter and silver, one set with a ruby, reaching 12,186 EUR and 11,950 EUR respectively. The jewelry and small decorative objects draw consistent interest, particularly pieces with a documented connection to Ericson's personal collection or the Svenskt Tenn workshop.