Condition: Excellent
Price: £195 (approx $344)
Stock number: 03264

Very tiny chip bottom left corner, a couple of minute edge chips, very slight discolouration in some crazing, few very tiny/light surface marks.

• Style/technique: Stylised floral lustre
• Manufacturer: Maw & Co
• Dimensions: 6" x 6"
• Date: circa 1890

 

A super bright silver lustre tile with floral design in the arts & crafts taste and showing a hint of gothic influence. featuring highly stylised floral decoration, the outline in a brown stain apparently painted through a stencil and hand coloured with silver lustre. The lustre is most colourful when caught in the light with greens, golds and purples. Possibly a Lewis Day design.

Maw & Co together with their near neighbours Craven Dunnill and the Welsh company J C Edwards produced the best quality lustre tiles in the more usual copper (red) and silver (gold). Consistently better than de Moirgan's who also did not 'rediscover' lustre as is widely reported for example Minton & Co were doing lustre wares preceding de Morgan in the 19thC.

The lustre process relying on a reaction between the atmosphere in the kiln and the painted stain results in a brilliant metallic sheen that is literally on the very surface and hence is often subject to marks like scratches and wear, this tile however has a near perfect surface with only very minor marks. The difficulty and unpredictability of the process also means that rather more less than perfect lustre tiles were acceptable. They were vastly more expensive than tiles decorated by other techniques, up to eight times more expensive than other handpainted tiles of the day.

Silver lustre is so-called because the element that makes the colour is silver, the effect however is of gold.

Verso is not named but carries distinctive marks identified as Maws who used dozens of often very different patterns of rails, grids and more.

The image is full size at 72 dpi (about 430 pixels wide) in maximum quality JPEG format. A larger 120 dpi image also in maximum quality JPEG format can be forwarded by email if required.

The image is a little oversize rather than cropped close to the edges so that the edges can easily be seen and any chips etc can be quickly spotted. Surface marks described are usually not visible at all when the tile is viewed straight as one normally sees it and can only be seen with a critical eye when the tile is tilted to catch imperfections in reflected light. For more details of how we describe marks see Condition.