Sigvard Bernadotte was the second child of the Swedish Crown Prince Gustav Adolf (later King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden) and brother to Queen Ingrid of Denmark. From 1929 Sigvard Bernadotte studied at the Decorative School at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. He assisted in creating and installing the epoch-making Stockholm Exhibition introducing Functionalism in Scandinavia in 1930. This new approach to design and architecture - the concept of form being determined by function - had a profound effect on the young Bernadotte and influenced his future design career as one of the leading industrial designers in Scandinavia including being one of the prominent silver designers of the Danish company Georg Jensen. Sigvard Bernadotte was only 23 years old when he began designing silver for Georg Jensen and already at this young age it was evident that he had an original talent.
As one of the first modernist designers at Georg Jensen, Sigvard Bernadotte’s design ensured a renewing creative direction for the company. The stylistic development had been anticipated by another of Georg Jensen’s prominent artists, namely Harald Nielsen. With the stringent and geometrical silver design reflecting the functionalistic idiom Bernadotte’s style differed drastically from the more exuberant “Georg Jensen style” taking inspiration from nature’s flora and fauna.
Neoclassical airs can also be discerned in Sigvard Bernadotte’s design in the use of elements reminiscent of the stringent shapes and proportions of Antiquity. The decoration on his jewellery, flatware pattern and hollowware was highly restrained, only sophistically incised vertical lines or meshed diamond patterns imbue the taut, angular forms. The hammered texture so characteristic for the smithy was also substituted by a clean and smooth surface. Sigvard Bernadotte’s designs, however, are never strictly puritan as he built in a personal sensitivity which gives his work a timeless elegance.
Many of Sigvard Bernadotte’s silverworks look deceptively easy to execute, but in reality, the simplicity of his design requires perfect tools combined with an extremely high degree of accuracy of the experienced Georg Jensen silversmiths. Bernadotte’s ascetic candlesticks with no other decoration than the lines of the flutings are examples of his elegantly simplified but personal style. The sophisticated flatware pattern named Bernadotte from 1939 enhances the beauty of the utilitarian articles and possesses both a modern and a solid look. The stringent and aristocratic expression of its channelled handles epitomizes the characteristics of a Bernadotte’s refined sense of style and the design is still one of the Georg Jensen’s most popular flatware patterns.
In Sigvard Bernadotte’s design of Pitcher 856A from 1938 his has combined a surprisingly soft approach of its swelling form with his characteristic elegantly refined and taut form language. The last Sigvard Bernadotte design for Georg Jensen was a re-design of this silver pitcher. It was developed into a thermos possessing the original form. The thermos was introduced shortly after the death of Bernadotte and its great success further emphasizes the quality and timelessness of his many brilliant designs.