Architect Arne Jacobsen’s love of textiles is not as well-known as his modernist furniture design and architecture. Nevertheless, he enjoyed creating botany- and geometry-inspired sketches, and experimented—especially in the 1940s—with transforming the drawings into patterns that could be printed on wallpaper or woven into textiles.

Arne Emil Jacobsen (1902–1971) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture in Copenhagen in 1927 and opened his own company just two years later. Some of his best-known architectural projects include Nationalbanken in Copenhagen, Aarhus City Hall, SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen and St Catherine’s College in Oxford – buildings that are as memorable as his furniture classics the Egg and the Swan chairs or the AJ lamp design.

During World War II, Arne Jacobsen fled to Sweden with Poul Henningsen among others, and it was reportedly during his time here that he developed a taste for both organic and geometric textile patterns. In 1944 he created an extensive textile collection for Nordiska Kompaniet with his wife Jonna Jacobsen, who was a textile printer.

The Georg Jensen Damask Arne Jacobsen collection was created in collaboration with Arne Jacobsen’s grandson, Tobias Jacobsen, and was launched as a tribute to the world-renowned architect in 2002 on the 100th anniversary of his birth. The unique and timeless design stems from an extensive collection of sketches that the architect left behind upon his death in 1971.

The Hyrdetaske pattern, based on a drawing of the wild herb that Arne Jacobsen would have most likely designed in Sweden, was added later.