This bowl was part of an exhibition of Swedish industrial art in London in 1931.The designer, Edward Hald, trained as an architect and painter. He studied for a time with the artist Henri Matisse in Paris, where he also met many other influential artists. During this period he also developed a sharp eye for fashionable taste. Hald and Simon Gate were the first of the artist-designers employed by the Swedish glassworks Orrefors to create a new line of art glass. Their designs for engraved glass were stylish, elegant, technically superb and enormously influential. The English critic Morton Shand dubbed them 'Swedish Grace'.