Svenskt Tenn’s founder Estrid Ericson travelled a lot to different places around the world. She always looked for beautiful items and textiles that she could take home and sell in the store on Strandvägen in Stockholm. The Toucans textile is from the English textile company GP & J Baker, whose designs were often based on traditional historical prints. Estrid Ericson began buying textiles from them as early as the 1930s.
Toucans was designed by William Turner in 1922 and is one of five hand-block patterns that he produced for GP & J Baker that year. Turner loved Oriental painting, and the basic elements of this design are adapted from a Chinese wallpaper in the company archive. The birds are certainly not toucans, joking misnomers being a feature of many patterns’ names assigned by the studio. The bird looking down in the motif may be a painted snipe, and the one on the rock is possibly a juvenile cormorant.
GP & J Baker is a family-run company founded in 1884 by brothers George Percival and James Baker. Together with their father they travelled around the Far East and Asia purchasing designs, textiles, sketches and thousands of pattern books that are today in the Baker’s sizeable textile archives. Svenskt Tenn became one of Baker’s first customers in Sweden when Josef Frank, inspired by Baker’s designs, introduced the company to Estrid Ericson in the 1930s.