Edward Hald

Edward Hald
Okänd fotograf, bilden finns hos Kulturparken Småland AB / Smålands museum, Public domain

The artist of Orrefors.

Edward Hald was a painter and a pupil of Matisse before becoming a glass artist at Orrefors, where he created the Swedish Grace of engraved glass.

Edward Hald was born in Stockholm in 1883. He first trained in commerce but chose art instead and studied painting in Dresden and Copenhagen. Around 1909–12 he was a pupil at Henri Matisse's painting school in Paris, and Matisse's free lines and clear colours came to influence him.

In 1917 he was employed, like the painter Simon Gate the year before, at the Orrefors glassworks in Småland. The works wanted to renew its production by letting artists design. Hald had no experience of glass, but working with skilled glassblowers and engravers he developed a new formal language. He also worked for the porcelain factories Rörstrand and Karlskrona.

Hald became especially known for his engraved glass with playful, elegant figures: dancing girls, fireworks and city scenes. The so-called Fireworks Bowl from the early 1920s is one of his best-known works. At the 1925 World's Fair in Paris Orrefors attracted great attention, and a British critic coined the phrase Swedish Grace for the Neoclassical elegance of Swedish design. Hald also developed the Graal technique, in which coloured patterns are encased within the glass. His Fish Graal of 1937, with swimming fish and water plants, became a classic.

For a period in the 1930s and 1940s Hald was director of Orrefors. He continued to design glass well into old age while also working as a painter. He died in 1980. His works are in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and in museums abroad. He is counted among those who made Swedish glass art world-famous.