page_title: Swedish carpets and rugs
section_title: Textile art of Scania
hierarchical_section_title: Swedish carpets and rugs / History / Textile art of Scania
caption_attribution_description: English: Carriage Cushion Cover (Two Lions in Floral Roundels), Sweden, Scania, Bara district, late 18th century. From the Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Swedish textiles.
context_page_description: Carpets and rugs have been handmade in Sweden for centuries, taking on many different forms and functions over the course of time. Rugs woven in the traditional Oriental manner, especially in the Ottoman Empire and points east, were originally brought to Sweden over trade routes as early as the early Middle Ages. In the centuries that followed, Swedish rug-makers often infused their works with themes and motifs traditionally found in Oriental rugs. Eventually, Swedish rug-makers would begin to use Oriental rug-making techniques, but themes and motifs more consistent with the artistic and cultural heritage of Sweden. By the early modern periods, rugs had long been an important avenue of art – especially folk art – in Swedish culture. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the craft was seen as being an important artistic and cultural practice throughout Sweden, and designers began to make rugs that had a broad international appeal. Swedish rugs from the mid-twentieth century remain among the most desirable and sought after in the rug world.
context_section_description: Handwoven textile art flourished in Scania from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Employment in Scania was mainly in farming, and the early eighteenth century was a time of relative peace and prosperity for farmers, with far fewer epidemics than previously. The women of land-owning families, with the skills for making clothes and furnishings, thus had the leisure time and materials to make textiles with a focus on beauty rather than for use as covering. These textiles would usually be kept in a wooden chest, only brought out for special occasions or for airing. Wealthy farms would often have a dedicated chamber for these chests.
  The textiles use variations of a set of design motifs, including hunt scenes, stars, and geometrical shapes. Despite this, each textile is different; they achieve variety by colour, size, positioning and combination of the motifs. Designs show a lot of similarity across the different techniques, apart from dove-tail tapestry, whose designs are more realistic and naturalistic. Whereas stylised animals within octagons are a common motif for the other textiles, dove-tail tapestries more often have a naturalistic animal or bird within a circle. A textile creator would rarely venture beyond her own village, so her imagery would have been drawn from nature and from local superstition and religion. Another influence was textile art from other cultures. For thousands of years, textiles had been traded across Europe and Asia, and pictorial designs from the Near East are known to have been imported to Sweden by the fourteenth or fifteenth century.
  The creators of these works were exclusively women: farmers' wives, other female members of the family, or occasionally maids. Some works bear initials, but the identity of the creators is unknown. The creation of a dowry was an important tradition, and for each wedding the bride would demonstrate her skill by creating unique textiles with symbolic decorations. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the collections were mostly sold off and put to everyday use, subjecting them to wear. Only a few thousand works from this period survive intact to the present day.
  Only one professional textile artist in Scania is known from this period: Bengta Oredsdotter, also known as Bengta Årman. She was active from the late 1820s to the late 1850s. Her style, characterised by small, detailed motifs, was known and imitated by subsequent generations of Swedish textile artists.
caption: Carriage cushion cover, Scania, Bara district, late 18th century. From the Khalili Collection of Swedish textiles
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