Emma Fürstenhoff
Encyclopedia
Emma Fürstenhoff, née
NEE
NEE is a political protest group whose goal was to provide an alternative for voters who are unhappy with all political parties at hand in Belgium, where voting is compulsory.The NEE party was founded in 2005 in Antwerp...

 Emilia Lindegren (Stockholm
Stockholm
Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...

 1802 - Paris, March 1871), was a Swedish artist (florist), internationally known for her manufacturing and arrangements of artificial flowers of vax
VAX
VAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs...

, which were a novelty in contemporary Europe.

Emma Fürstenhoff was the daughter of the poet and royal secretary Carl Johan Lindegren (d. 1815) 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
Mamsell
Mamsell was a historical Swedish honorific used for unmarried women from about the mid 18th-century until 1866. The title was primarily used for middle class women and women in the cities.- History :...

 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
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...

 and finally in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

. 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
Jardin des Plantes
The Jardin des Plantes is the main botanical garden in France. It is one of seven departments of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle. It is situated in the 5ème arrondissement, Paris, on the left bank of the river Seine and covers 28 hectares .- Garden plan :The grounds of the Jardin des...

 in Paris, she was a great success, and her flowers were considered better than the real ones.

She separated from her husband and moved permanently to Paris, where she founded a studio for manufacturing artificial flowers. Most of her employees were female, among them the superviser Thilda Österberg who was also from Sweden. Fürstenhoff was a successful artist, who made a fortune on her work. One of her customers was Harriet Howard
Harriet Howard
Harriet Howard, born Elizabeth Ann Haryett was a mistress and financial backer of Louis Napoleon, later Napoleon III of France.-London:...

. In 1864, she was referred to as an artist fashionable in Europe for decades.

During the Franco-Prussian War
Franco-Prussian War
The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...

, she volunteered as a nurse and tendered to the wounded soldiers. By doing so, she fell sick herself, and died during the establishment of the Paris Commune
Paris Commune
The Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and Marxists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution...

in March 1871.
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