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 Lotus 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.

William Turner’s designs for GP & J Baker in 1915 adopted a Chinese theme as the artist increasingly spent time studying collections at the British Museum. Nympheus is based upon a Ming dynasty painted silk scroll that had been acquired by the museum a couple years earlier. It is a genre picture of the Piling school that depicts a pair of kingfishers flying above an egret who shelters beneath drooping lotus leaves.

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.