Poetic table art Svenskt Tenn

Poetic table art

“The pleasures of the table are the first and last delights of all ages and all classes of society. We sit down at the table more than a thousand times every year of our lives, and so important is our mealtime to the happiness of our lives that we must exert ourselves to make a pleasant event of it. We must take every possible opportunity of investing it with poetry and pleasure.”

– Estrid Ericson

Simple, uncluttered, warm and cosy. This autumn table setting is inspired by timeless table creations from the 1940s and 1950s, poetically composed by Estrid Ericson, photographed, and preserved in Svenskt Tenn's archive.

Poetic table art Svenskt Tenn

In her table settings, Svenskt Tenn's founder Estrid Ericson removed everything unnecessary. She concentrated on timeless simplicity and quality by emphasising everyday objects, decorating the table sparsely with simple porcelain, glasses, and cutlery. Textile placemats or tablecloths were often used as a basis.

See Table Cloth Chrysantemum
Poetic table art Svenskt Tenn

“Every table was a poem…everything the result of an imaginative, witty capacity for combinations which, half playfully and with the exuberance of a still-life painter, discovers new material effects, new harmonies or contrasts between shades in wood, fabric, pottery, glass and floral decorations, in fact even between different kinds of bread and vegetables.”

– Gustaf Näsström – Journalist, writer, and cultural historian about Estrid Ericson's table settings.

Poetic table art Svenskt Tenn

Estrid Ericson's friend, designer, and artist Tyra Lundgren, described her table settings in 1940: “… The red wine is drunk from Venini’s loveliest leaf-thin yellow-brown glass and the port wine from small ruby-red Bohemian glasses...”

In this modern interpretation, the wine is instead served in the elegant Crystal Flora glass, designed by Ingegerd Råman for Svenskt Tenn in 2014. If you want to add red, orange, and yellow tones, you can combine them with glasses from the Bris collection, or the Murano glasses from the the NasonMoretti Glassworks in Venice.

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