Serving History

A stack of blue-and-white patterned everyday plates

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Sjöberg, an art historian and former curator at the National Museum of Antiquities in Stockholm, is one of Sweden’s leading authorities on Gustavian decorative arts, the Rococo and Baroque styles associated with the Enlightenment-era reign of King Gustav III. To create an archive of Swedish craftsmanship and taste during what’s known as his country’s “age of greatness,” he buys 200- to 300-year-old homes and furnishes them as veritable time capsules.

He currently has nine houses. Some, such as his estates at Sorby, Odenslunda and Salaholm, scattered throughout the Swedish countryside, are manor houses built by noble families, merchants and even farmers who wanted to bring princely styles to the provinces. Others, such as the palatial Ekensberg—on the shores of Lake Malaren, west of Stockholm—are modeled on Italian villas.

Owning the houses allows Sjöberg to re-create the interiors of the Gustavian period, from the hand-painted linen wallpaper, ceramic-tiled stoves, imported English ladder-back chairs, glittering chandeliers and gilded moldings right down to the dinner plates and teapots. That desire to construct an authentic historical ambience led him to one collecting specialty in particular: Chinese export porcelain shipped from Canton to Sweden during the 18th century to satisfy a market passionate for Asian goods.

“Porcelain is a way to explain Sweden in the 18th century,” Sjöberg tells me during a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Stockholm to Regnaholm, a three-story Rococo manor situated on an island in a lake surrounded by farmland, where most of his porcelain is currently housed. “The whole of Swedish society was very much changed by the contact with China, not just decorative ideas but also political and philosophical ones. Everyone wanted to have Chinese figures and Chinese linens printed after Chinese fabrics. The Swedes took China very much to their hearts.”

Sjöberg, who is 66, can’t remember what his first acquisition was but guesses it might have been the punch bowls he purchased around 1966, the year he bought Regnaholm. “While I was searching for furniture, I would find these porcelain items too—so fantastically cheap for such beautiful things.”

Today, Regnaholm, in the lake district of Ostergotland north of Stockholm, contains at least a thousand Chinese export pieces, from the blue-and-white everyday plates arrayed on two walls in the kitchen to the custom-made set displayed on a marble-topped table upstairs, embossed with a coat of arms painted in gold enamel. The set was once owned by Count Carl Gyllenborg, a former prime minister of Sweden, who lived in the house at Odenslunda.

With his gray hair and pale blue eyes, and wearing a frayed corduroy jacket and chinos that billow about his legs, Sjöberg is the classic rumpled professor. A compact five feet four inches tall, he is always in motion—fixing a broken door latch, moving furniture in and out of his well-traveled blue 1986 Volvo station wagon, plucking pears off trees in the orchard. The toes of his leather shoes look as though mice had gnawed them, and the seams have come apart at the back. His hands are thick and callused from yard work and house maintenance, all of which he does himself. He and his wife, Ursula, also an art historian and curator, spend most of their time at Odenslunda, in Uppland. They summer at Regnaholm but frequently travel among their various houses, transporting furniture and objects from one to another.

The grandson of a furniture maker and son of a teacher of wood and metal crafting, Sjöberg wanted to be an artist as a child, but his family encouraged an academic path. He studied art and art history at Stockholm University and furniture restoration at the Royal Academy of Fine Art, then landed a job as curator of 18th-century furniture at the National Museum, a post he held for 36 years. For a while, he worked as a consultant to IKEA, helping the furniture company create replicas of historical designs. He has also published at least 13 books in Swedish and 2 in English. Among his best-known titles are Swedish House (Monacelli Press) and The Swedish Room (Frances Lincoln Ltd.), which he co-authored with his wife.

Sjöberg feels some regret about not following his original vocation. But acquiring and preserving 18th-century residences, he says, “is my way of expressing what I wasn’t able to do when I didn’t become an artist or architect.”

His homes are, in fact, meticulously constructed aesthetic experiences, each interior stripped of overt ornamentation and presented in a placid state of weathered beauty. Walking through the manor at Regnaholm, one gets the sense of being backstage at a theater that hasn’t seen a production in months. Furniture and objets d’art fill unused rooms and hallways. Sjöberg hasn’t installed any modern conveniences, such as electricity or plumbing, to make the manor more habitable. “I have lived so much for making the books and the photographs for them that I’ve hardly started to live my own life at all,” he admits. “I should say I’m not very normal.”

Although he never opens his residences to the public, Sjoberg’s students visit to help him with the preservation work. Mostly the houses are for his family’s enjoyment, but Sjoberg explains that he thinks of them as backdrops for the photographs that illustrate the books he writes so prolifically rather than as places in which to live. For the past five years, he’s been completing a volume about Chinese porcelain with the English working title China in Sweden During the 18th Century, co-authored by historian Cecilia Bengtsson. His writing projects have also motivated his acquisitions. “It’s easier for me to buy things than to try to get museums to give me the rights to the images,” he says.

Sjöberg is not as passionate about actually purchasing pieces as about finding the precisely right ones with the most historical resonance. He admits, though, that his buying has gotten out of hand. In the antechamber to Regnaholm’s kitchen, there are perhaps 400 tureens, bowls, vases and platters, plus a rare porcelain garden seat from Canton that Sjoberg found broken at an antiques fair. “I passed all limits a long time ago,” he says. “You could call it obsession. When you’re really doing something, you want to do it the best way, and for me that means forgetting everything else.”

Swedish handmade furniture and crafts experienced a golden age in the 18th century, but the country did not establish its own ceramics factory, Rorstrand, until 1726. The company started by making faience (glazed earthenware pottery)—“china,” as porcelain was called even then, is more difficult to manufacture because it must be fired at very high temperatures to form an end product that is harder than other ceramics but still lightweight and translucent. Not surprisingly then, even after domestic production began, porcelain from Asia was far more coveted. The Swedish East India Company imported about 50 million pieces from China between its founding, in 1731, and its final trip, around 1813.

Unlike the multicolored plates and platters that were popular in other parts of Europe, the porcelain that was exported to Sweden tended to be underglaze blue on a white body, and the period furniture picked up that color scheme. Table settings with simple bird or flower motifs were relatively inexpensive and easy to come by. Those who could afford a little more luxury would often order sets decorated with family crests.

“People wanted the best and most expensive things. It was very much a matter of social prestige,” Sjoberg explains. That pride of ownership is what he hopes to recapture through his own collecting. “Many people go into collecting to buy something for a little and sell it for a lot. I prefer to buy something for more than it’s worth and get the right thing.”

Sjöberg couldn’t care less about resale value. “It’s only snobs who want perfect things,” he says. “I like the imperfect, the broken things, especially mended things. They’re cheaper, and often they tell the story better. I like to see how people mended these plates with little metal staples and continued to use them in the 19th century. That tells you how valuable these pieces were to people, how much they used them.”

A holy grail for Sjöberg has been to find porcelain that belonged to the Gyllenkroks, the original residents of Regnaholm. He recalls meeting a direct descendant of the family decades ago, an elderly woman who described for him the family pattern: a carnation surrounded by insects and a butterfly. He then searched for pieces in antiques shops, discovering the carnation plates and plenty of similar items. At Antik West, in the southern Swedish city of Göteborg, he also found three different services featuring the Gyllenkrok family crest.

Now that he’s almost finished with his book, Sjöberg has stopped collecting Chinese porcelain. “I’m done with that now,” he says, explaining that his mania for it had become too costly. A few moments later, though, he adds, “On the other hand, if you eat less and don’t take taxis or expensive vacations, you could buy more mended Chinese porcelain.” 

"Serving History" originally appeared in the January 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's January 2008 Table of Contents.