Two hundred years ago, in Höganäs, situated in the North ...



Ann-Charlotte & Torsten Weimarck

The Pottery of Höganäs Company 1832-1926

Stockholm: Raster förlag 2005

English summary

Two hundred years ago, Höganäs, a town situated in the north-west part of the county of Skåne, about 20 km north of the city of Helsingborg, had no local pottery traditions. Höganäs was then a tiny fishing village that even lacked a harbour. Coal had now and then been quarried from an opencast mine and the local inhabitants had collected it from the beach at low tide for their personal needs. When the mining industry started in 1797 and, with time, even the production of earthenware (1832), capital, labour, technology and pot designs were typically fetched from elsewhere. As well as the customers. Nothing of this was to be found in Höganäs.

The capital came from parties interested in the mining, earthenware and brick industries. Here, in particular, Erik Ruuth, the Minister of Finance in Gustav III’s parliament, was engaged. In 1786 he had bought the privileges for mining coal in north-west Skåne, and at the same time established the earthenware factory, Ulfsunda, outside Stockholm where clay from the mining in Skåne was used. In 1792 large amounts of clay were found between thin seams of coal in Höganäs and Ruuth brought in the mining engineer, Thomas Stawford, from Newcastle in view of the coal mining that was the focus of interest. Stawford brought with him not only mining technology to Höganäs from his native country but also something that resembled a town plan, including prototypes for workers’ dwellings.

Coal mining in Höganäs was not a successful venture; the coal was difficult to mine and of poor quality and in the end attempts were made to save the enterprise by starting to use the clay for the production of bricks and roofing tiles as well – and from 1832 even earthenware. The kilns were fired with coal from the mines.

In Höganäs there was hardly any local labour for either the mining or the earthenware factory. Russian prisoners-of-war and children from orphanages in Gothenburg, among others, were used to work in the mines. And at the start of the 1830s the population census shows that potters from Ängelholm and other towns in Skåne had been induced to move here.

But the potters in the newly established pottery works would hardly have produced pots like those they had been making in their previous home towns. The pieces that were to be produced in Höganäs differed from the pottery made in the neighbouring towns under the constraints of the local guilds with their often old-fashioned, traditional idioms. From the outset, the focus was on goods that would suit the mass-production of more anonymous and standardized kinds of articles for the growing market for the middle-classes. As early as 1798 Ruuth sold the factory in Ulfsunda and established the Helsingborg Stoneware Factory that at the time was the only one in Sweden to manufacture brown, salt-glazed stoneware, chiefly household goods. In Höganäs, production of this type of salt-glazed stoneware was also started in 1835.

As with the technology, most of the models produced at the pottery during the first decades came from England, either directly or indirectly. However, these did not come from Newcastle in the northeast, Stawford’s home town, but from the west Midlands and the cluster of small towns that are today amalgamated into The Potteries, the cradle of the English industrial revolution. Here there was a rich flora of, in particular, ceramic industries as well as a combination of coal, clay, technology, transportation routes, markets – conditions similar to those that were also to be found in Höganäs in the 1800s.

But in actual fact it was a German porcelain potter, Carl Berger, who during the period of 1830-32 produced the first trial series of earthenware goods at the factory in Höganäs. Berger had most recently been working as the foreman at the Gustavsberg factory where his task had been to experiment with flintware suitable for tableware and printed decoration.

At Höganäs, Berger was to develop yellow lead-glazed ware that can be seen as a simpler and more brittle imitation of the English flintware. As far as can be judged, Berger also contributed with a number of designs, reflecting English ones taken from his previous activities at the Gustavsberg works. During the very first years of his employment at Höganäs simpler ornamental pieces were also being produced both in unglazed yellow earthenware and in black stoneware similar to basalt ware.

The products from Höganäs during the next two decades consisted in both unglazed and lead-glazed earthenware and, from 1835, in salt-glazed ware in an increasing number of different designs. The earliest printed catalogues (1835) cover a wide array of articles: drinking mugs, pots with and without lips, jam jars, apothecary pots, mustard pots, serving dishes, milk bowls, soup terrines, cooking pots, flower pots, bowls, basins, toilet sets, food basins, chamber pots, plates, saucers, butter dishes, tea and coffee pots, cream jugs, jelly moulds, soap dishes, pipe bowls, inkpots, sand boxes, small plates, salad bowls, deep dishes, coffee cups (with or without ears), writing sets, flour sieves, colanders, candlesticks, lamps, salt cellars, pepper pots, dolls, water carafes, oil flasks, mustard jars, bidets, medicine spoons, sauce boats, sugar bowls… The list ends with a number of “toys” (i.e. miniatures). In addition, there are bricks, roofing tiles, ornaments for buildings etc.

The range of models on the whole goes back to English prototypes in flintware which are also found in a number of variations at quite a number of factories round the Baltic at this time. There are strong connections particularly with the factories in Denmark such as Ipsens Enke, Herman A. Kähler as well as the Spietz and the Søholm works on the Danish island of Bornholm out in the Baltic Sea. Moreover, many of the models bear the stamp of the German architect, Georg Friedrich Hetsch, whose historicizing idiom, together with Bertel Thorvaldsen’s sculpture had a considerable impact on Denmark during the first half of the 1800s. All this is reflected in the production of the 1800s in Höganäs.

In 1840, Johan Joachim Sjöcrona took over the management of the mining and earthenware production at the Höganäs factory, which time and again had been threatened with closure. He introduced a number of important social and financial reforms (schools, hospitals, pharmacies, housing for the workers, temperance movements, libraries, meeting-halls etc.). It was also he who, in 1856, employed a young Danish artist, Ferdinand Ring, at the pottery.

Ring was employed not as a potter, but as a sculptor and designer to produce prototypes for mass production of, above all, various kinds of decorative objects, ornaments and architectural decorations – rather typical tasks at that time for a pottery that was aiming at meeting competition on a market larger than the one in Skåne. It was also probably Ring who lay behind the splendidly illustrated price catalogue over the 1859 production from the pottery. This was the era for trade exhibitions with all they implied for internationalization and a growing importance for the visual form and marketing of the goods. The earthenware factory in Höganäs often participated successfully here, judging from the attention given by the press, but at the same time the financial gain was very small: the threat of closure loomed again in the minutes of the company board. Ferdinand Ring stayed on until 1869 and production continued, however, on a small scale.

In 1889 Åke Nordenfelt entered the scene as manager of the Höganäs company. His private interest was one of contemporary ceramic art, in particular the polychrome majolica ware which, in a number of ways, was typical of the time. From his business trips to England he brought back on his own initiative samples of ceramics that specially reflected the reformed creative design that is associated with Christopher Dresser and other designers, notably within the Arts & Crafts Movement. Such pieces, together with those associated with the contemporary development of artistic ceramics in Denmark (Bindesbøll, Kähler and others), came to be copied, on instruction from Nordenfelt, in a multitude of variations at the Höganäs pottery. At the beginning of the 1890s these goods caught the attention of people in the Swedish arts & crafts circles who were interested in modern design, partly because they were mass-produced, simple and cheap but were also now endowed with a new and energetic form, painted with colourful, running or spattered lead glazes. These articles were regarded as a fruitful, artistically valuable alternative to the traditional, historicizing and often overloaded ornaments of that time. The production in Höganäs was more or less unparalleled in Sweden.

In order to modernize the old-fashioned pottery’s rudimentary technical equipment and work routines, Gudmund Dahl was employed as works foreman in 1893. He introduced a number of innovations. For instance, he developed the polychrome glaze on a white background instead of the previous one which was built on a transparent lead glaze on yellow clay. He also installed pyrometers in the kilns to register the temperature more exactly and started a routine where each design was given a number which was stamped onto the goods and which could be found in a designs book that was continuously updated when new designs were introduced. Dahl also trained the future designer, Albin Hamberg (born 1875) and the future glazing master, Sigfrid Johansson (born 1879).

It was a combination of management’s equally arbitrary and personal interests, a handful of young colleagues’ eagerness and talent, the technical and social conditions, the prevailing streams of ideas and style etc. that made possible this, in many ways, remarkable production.

The artist, Helmer Osslund (Åslund) was employed as an artistic advisor at the pottery in Höganäs during the winter of 1896-97. He had previously worked as an artistic decorator at Gustavsberg, and studied art under Paul Gauguin and J.F. Willumsen in Paris. He had even for a shorter period been in Copenhagen. Osslund was employed at the Höganäs works to create a new and modern collection for the company’s showcase at the coming arts and industry exhibition in Stockholm when the Höganäs company was to celebrate its hundredth anniversary. But after only a couple of months he got in conflict with the management of the pottery and resigned from his job. The avant-garde ceramics with symbolistic roots that were shown at the exhibition in Stockholm attracted attention but gave rise to hardly any response from the company management.

However, he inspired Albin Hamberg to train at the Technical College in Stockholm (the present the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design) where he spent three years, 1897-1900. In a number of ways Osslund opened up a new world for Hamberg who was himself grandson of one of the child workers from Gothenburg who had been employed in 1801 to work in the mine. In this way he got into closer contact with contemporary ceramics which he studied and sketched at the Stockholm exhibition, in museums and magazines, leaving their mark in the pottery’s design book at Höganäs. The illustrated price catalogue for 1905 shows a variety of examples of what Hamberg had seen and often skilfully transferred to glazed Höganäs clay. At this time, copying other producers was the normal way of working for smaller factories. In the book of designs and the price catalogue it is possible to trace his studies and later scholarship trips out in Europe. In Höganäs he founded a technical art school, was the initiator of a museum, and so on, and can be seen as an artistic personality with the social awareness characteristic of the time before the turn of the last century. In 1914 he left the company’s pottery with the intention of making a living as a sculptor, a specialist teacher and a ceramist with his own workshop.

Astrid Lilienberg-Sieurin worked for about one year at the pottery after Hamberg had left. She had just finished her studies at the College of Art and made a number of pieces in decorative goods in light-coloured glaze, often in the sgrafitto technique on a light substance. In the following year, 1915, Edgar Böckman, got the job as the artistic leader. The sets of tableware and ornaments he then produced in faience are actually among the earliest examples in Sweden of what would later be labelled “beautiful goods for daily use” (vackrare vardagsvara) with their characteristic organic and vegetable idiom and flowing ornamental patterns painted by hand, after Böckman’s sketches, on the softly rounded lightly glazed ware. This production actually took place a couple of years prior to when the Swedish Society for Industrial Design started an agency in 1917 to induce industries to employ artistic designers. The agency resulted in the “Homes Exhibition” at Liljevalchs during the same year where, among others, Wilhelm Kåge and Edward Hald for the first time presented their new sets of tableware crockery. Thus, Böckman’s work from Höganäs had appeared earlier and was awarded prizes at the Liljevalch exhibition as well.

Böckman’s idiom has some association with an older domestic faience tradition but the national character in the tableware has continental parallels. Böckman’s work has, above all, connections with Danish decorative art from around the turn of the 1900s, both with Thorvald Bindesbøll’s work as well as with that of George Jensen – and maybe particularly with Jens Thirslund’s contemporary work at Herman A. Kähler’s factory in Næstved.

Moreover, Böckman developed a series of ornaments decorated with the lustre technique, garden urns in terracotta in the classic style of the 20s, and a more experimental series of ornaments with East Asian stoneware designs made in salt-glazed stoneware decorated with lustre glazes which blackened at the high firing temperature in the salt-glazing kiln.

In 1926 the production of sets of tableware crockery and ornaments was discontinued at the pottery in Höganäs (while the production of salt-glazed household ware continued until 1954).

Translated by Gillian Sjödahl

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