Svenskt Tenn celebrates Anna Petrus, Sweden’s trailblazing 20th-century metal designer

Nearly a century ago, Estrid Ericson recruited fellow Swedish designer Anna Petrus (1886-1949) to create a series of designs for her fledgling pewter business, Svenskt Tenn. The pewter and cast iron designs that emerged – including a table lamp, mirror, decorative box, candle holders and vases – were decorated with reliefs depicting bunches of grapes, female figures and a reclining lion among other things. A handful of the designs, such as the Lion sculpture have been in continuous production ever since, still manufactured in Sweden and still made using the same original casting moulds. This month, Petrus' pieces became the focus of an exhibition, Sequence of Spaces, at Svenskt Tenn’s Stockholm store.

To be a female designer in the early 20th century took a combination of guts, gumption, talent and undoubtedly some economically fortunate circumstances. Petrus, born in Uppsala, Sweden in 1886, had all in abundance. The daughter of Oskar Viktor Petersson, a professor of paediatrics, and Countess Maria Stackelberg, she studied at the Chelsea Polytechnic School in London before continuing her studies at Tekniska Skolan in Uppsala, Althin's School of Painting, and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. As an early indication of her character, in London, Petrus marched with the suffragettes and was engaged in the movement for women's rights, which continued as a lifelong commitment.

Her big break came in 1925 when she attended the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, where she exhibited a series of traditional cast iron works she designed and produced with Näfveqvarn, one of Sweden's oldest and most renowned design and foundry companies. The female industrial artists of the era tended to work in textiles and ceramics, so working in pewter and cast iron – materials considered 'masculine' – was unusual.

Exhibited in the Swedish pavilion and in the main building, the Grand Palais, the cast iron pieces were awarded a gold medal. Svenskt Tenn founder Estrid Ericson was also in attendance, exhibiting some of her company's first designs, for which she also received a gold medal. The Swedish neoclassical style that emerged from the exhibition – a refined and restrained reaction to ornate historical styles – was coined 'Swedish Grace' by British critic Philip Morton Shand, with Petrus becoming one of its figureheads. It was shortly after this that Ericson approached Petrus, marking the start of their brief but highly productive collaboration.

'Sequence of Spaces': Anna Petrus at Svenkst Tenn

In Sequence of Spaces, Svenskt Tenn presents a selection of Petrus’s designs in pewter and cast iron, drawn from its extensive design archive, alongside sculptures on loan from the Petrus family’s private collection. To mark the exhibition, Svenskt Tenn has reissued some of Petrus's lesser-known early designs for the company. These include the Lion table lamp – a pewter table lamp base featuring relief decorations of female figures and grape clusters, and a substantial mirror frame from 1929 that is crowned by a reclining lion – a motif that grew into Petrus's signature and is seen throughout much of her work.

Both of the reissues are manufactured by Humstorp Metall in Sweden, a long-time production partner to Svenskt Tenn. It continues to make some of the company's most complex pewter designs – the mirror, for example, is cast in seven separate parts using the original permanent moulds, which are then soldered together to form a whole. The process demands a high level of expertise – even the slightest impurity or miscalculation can lead to the piece being scrapped and the pewter – a very soft material – melted down and cast anew.

To accompany the exhibition, Svenkst Tenn commissioned Madrid-based artist Elvira Solana to create a series of paintings. Known for murals and trompe-l'œil interventions that explore perception of space, at Svenskt Tenn Solana conjured a three-dimensional scenography that serves as a backdrop for Petrus' designs.

Inspiration, the brand says, was taken from Anna Petrus's own 1916 exhibition, when the designer showcased her sculptures alongside murals by Swedish artist Greta Ruuth.

'As visitors enter the exhibition in the Svenskt Tenn store in Stockholm, they will move through a sequence of spaces that guides them from the more rigid, architectural landscapes at the beginning of the journey towards increasingly organic and liberated ones,' says Tora Grape, Marketing & Brand Communications Director at Svenskt Tenn.

'A succession of courtyards and gardens provides the backdrop for Petrus’ sculptures, while human figures gradually emerge before finally dancing alongside them. It is a celebration of dance and movement, as much as it is a tribute to the longevity of craft and of the meeting between Anna Petrus’s creative legacy and Elvira Solana’s work today.'

Two different trays, designed by Solana and based on the scenography, are also available for purchase.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Svenskt Tenn has also reissued an archival chessboard designed by Marie-Louise Idestam-Blomberg (1898-1988), another Swedish female design trailblazer. The surrealist set, made in in pewter and brass, was originally designed for the same Paris exhibition in 1925 that Ericson and Petrus attended. At the time, it was shown in ebony and ivory. Svenskt Tenn took over the production rights in the late 1920s and started manufacturing it in pewter, brass and gilded pewter, which has now been put back into production once again.

In the annals of 20th century design, Petrus' work has been generally overlooked in comparison to her male contemporaries. Grape hopes the show will help to remedy this. 'Anna Petrus' work has a boldness and playfulness that still feels remarkably contemporary,' she said. 'It is our hope that this exhibition will bring forward Anna Petrus' name to a new generation and give her the recognition she deserves.'

The exhibition Sequence of Spaces is on show at Svenskt Tenn, Strandvägen 5 in Stockholm, until 18 October 2026. Svenskt Tenn will celebrate 100 years at Strandvägen 5 in 2027; it remains the company’s only physical retail location