Emma Fürstenhoff

Who was Emma Fürstenhoff?

Emma Fürstenhoff, née Emilia Lindegren, was a Swedish artist, internationally known for her manufacturing and arrangements of artificial flowers of vax, which were a novelty in contemporary Europe.

Emma Fürstenhoff was the daughter of the poet and royal secretary Carl Johan Lindegren and the noble Sofia Silfverskiöld. Both she and her mother was the subject of her father's poems. Her father later became an alcoholic and was ruined, her parents divorced, and she moved to the capital with her mother. She displayed an early interest in flowers, and when she left her father's property with her mother, it is said that she asked her mother to bring all the flowers with them. In Stockholm, she became the fosterchild of a mamsell Forslöf, lady in waiting to Princess Sophie Albertine of Sweden. She was described as brilliant and passionate. Around the age of twenty, she married for love to A. Fürstenhoff, a clerk at Gustafsberg's porcelain factory, with whom she had a son, Johan.

After her marriage, Emma Fürstenhoff manufactured ornaments for sale, and eventually learned to manufacture artificial flowers. She displayed her flowers at several successful art exhibitions in Stockholm. Her work was then displayed in art exhibitions in London, Saint Petersburg and finally in Paris. In Saint Petersburg, she stayed for two years and became an artistic celebrity in the cultural salons, where she was celebrated by diplomats and aristocrats. In an exhibition at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, she was a great success, and her flowers were considered better than the real ones.