An excellent art nouveau tile style
tile in the arts & crafts manner hand
decorated on a distressed durable buff clay
body. Not previously seen by me, most stylish,
finely tubelined and finished in high brilliance
glazes. Stylistically in the manner of George
Cartlidge an excellent tile designer and maker
though perhaps better known for his Morris Ware
pottery.
Sherwin & Cotton was the leading art tile
specialist traversing the intersection of art
and technology and the most obvious example of
the latter being its brilliant, translucent and
yet intensely coloured glazes that enable the
creation of its émaux ombrants tiles.
Distressing of the clay body or decoration is
seen by many companies but Sherwin &
Cotton's is unique for it appears to be
mechanically applied yet random for the
distressing appear to go in one direction, left
to right. I'm sure I could devise a method of
doing similar but I have the benefit of 120
years of invention and innovation to draw upon,
no other company of the time seems to have
matched it.
Mass produced wares, especially decorated
wares, were criticised by the arts and crafts
advocates and manufacturers for being too
uniform yet there is a certain sameness that is
required for sets of things to work and that is
very expensive to achieve by hand. It is amply
demonstrated by arts & crafts pottery, one
sees vases and chargers, a few jugs and not a
lot else. The main business in pottery is
tableware, fifty, one hundred, two hundred
pieces all which have to look as if they belong
in the set, arts & crafts simply couldn't do
it.
William de Morgan didn't really do it in
tiles, most being painted to outlines the
outlines being created in various ways. We know
some were painted on tracing paper in Italy and
shipped to London for applying to tiles, it
certainly wouldn't surprise me if he used a
printed outline that would burn away in the
kiln, carbon printing had already been invented.
Some companies employed good artists to paint
not to any form of outline but from the drawing
in the pattern book, we see fabulous freehand
painted tiles from Craven Dunnill, quite amazing
work from the Decorative Art Tile Company,
William Yale etc yet all manner of companies
produced some properly painted works. That de
Morgan used hand made clay bodies was simply
marketing, dust pressed clay made better
products, but it gives his companies output more
credibiltiy as 'arts & crafts'.
So the innovative tile companies tried to
produce mass produced goods with a degree of
randomness that makes every piece unique in a
similar way to the slight variations that occur
with stencilling, Marsden certainly tried and
had a couple of printing patents that seem to
have been aimed at introducing some variety, I
am pretty sure that Maw did. Patent Niello was
another such method from Sherwin & Cotton
that contained the managed unpredictability
admired by the arts & crafts movement.
Sherwin & Cotton was truly at the
intersection of art and technology and should
occupy a foremost if not the foremost position
amongst ceramic and especially tile arts &
crafts factories yet few devotees of arts &
crafts wares will have even heard of them let
alone consider them acceptable. Yet they accept
William Morris tiles as being arts & crafts
even those imported from Holland made by the
same stale process that had been in use for
centuries and decorated with reproductions of
earlier designs!
Versos thin layer of latex adhesive, embossed
Sherwin's Patent and trademark, written pattern
number.
