Edward Hald

Edward Hald (1883–1980), was born in Stockholm, was a Swedish visual artist and glass artist. He studied at Leipzig Business School, at the School of the Artists’ Association, with Lennart Rodhe in Copenhagen and for a while with Henri Matisse in Paris. In the 1910s, Hald used landscapes in a modern spirit in both oil and wood carvings. Hald was later associated with the porcelain factory Rörstrand and the porcelain factory Karlskrona, for which he designed crockery. Hald participated in the home exhibition at Liljevalchs in Stockholm in 1917, the same year he was associated with Orrefors glass, for which he designed art glass and utility glass. Together with colleagues Simon Gate and Knut Bergqvist, he experimented with a coverslip that made the so-called tombstone itself known. The international breakthrough came in 1925 at the World’s Fair in Paris, where the idea of “Swedish grace” prevailed. One of Hald’s examples is “The Globe of Heaven”, a glass sphere with engraved constellations.