A star is Bjorn Why collectors are looking to Scandinavia
Extremely rare Wiinblad Rosenthal vase decorated with a design from the Scheherazade 1001 Nights series, gilded with 24ct gold. 1970s.
The Queen of Sheba elephant candleholder made for a friend’s birthday and believed to be unique and among Wiinblad’s last pieces.
The “Eva” jardinière from the Wiinblad studio from the early 1980s.
figurines with distinctive almond-shaped eyes in the trendsetting Bonniers department store in fashionable Madison Avenue in New York, which specialised in Scandinavian design.
Wiinblad was awarded a silver medal at the first international ceramics festival in Cannes in 1955, just four years after opening his own workshop.
However, a turning point came in 1960 when Simon Rosenthal, founder of the famous eponymous Bavarian porcelain factory, invited him to become his artistic director.
The position brought Wiinblad international fame – and wealth, earning a reported 40 million krone (£4.6million) annually in the royalties Rosenthal paid for his designs. With homes in Selb, near the Rosenthal factory in Southern Germany and in Geneva, he was living the high life.
Unlike in his youth, however, he became a workaholic and earned every penny. In addition to toiling in his own workshop and for Rosenthal, he produced designs for the Hilton
Bjørn Wiinblad:
Hotel in London among others and stage designs for the Royal Danish Opera and the Tivoli Concert Hall in Copenhagen, winning international design awards into the bargain.
In 1961, he staged a major exhibition at a department store in Copenhagen that had undergone a massive refurbishment. In the first 90 minutes, 8,000 people were said to have descended on the place, eager to see and buy the ceramics, glass, porcelain, papier maché figures, sculptures and furniture, all of which he had designed.
One of his tour de forces was the exclusive and expensive porcelain Magic Flute dinner service, designed in 1969, each piece decorated with scenes from the Mozart opera and bearing parts from the libretto on the reverse.
So technically difficult was it to produce that Rosenthal’s potters and painters took several years to complete the job. In 1971, it was seen by the wife of the Shah of Persia, who asked Wiinblad to design a service specifically for a festival to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian empire.
Among the guests at one of the most lavish celebrations of the 20th Century – it was said to have cost more than £30 million – were King Frederik IX and Queen Ingrid of Denmark, who ate their dinner off it.
In response to criticism for working with the oppressive Iranian regime, Wiinblad designed giant tapestries based on the Arabian Nights woven in a workshop in Portugal.
They were completed in 1973 and exhibited in Dallas, Texas, prompting the American press to describe him as the “Hans Christian Andersen of our time”.
In 1984, he was named Man of the Year by the Danish American Society, at a time when he was busy designing everything from lamps, puzzles, bed linen, textiles, posters, stamps, Christmas plaques, copper sculptures, to large furnishing projects for international hotels and luxurious cruise ships.
He died in 2006.
Vast wealth is not required to collect Wiinblad’s ceramics today. His calendar plaques telling the story of a young, courting couple, produced by Nymølle from the 1950s until the 1990s, are priced at under a tenner.
Highly decorative Four Seasons plates can be had for £40-£60, while Rosenthal Christmas plates designed by Wiinblad cost between £100-£600. As with most of Wiinblad’s designs, earlier examples from the 1970s are the most sought after.
Top of the tree, starting at £200 upwards, are the hand-painted elegant ladies and fanciful figures or heads that act as candlesticks, jugs or bowls, the larger the better and more valuable at £1,000 and above.