No one collects anything without reason, without a catalyst. My introduction to Dutch tin-glazed maritime tiles came by way of a powder horn decorated by a British soldier stationed in Jamaica. An amateur naturalist, he had engraved the horn with the various creatures he saw there, among them a manatee, which he took to be a mermaid (fig. 1). That led me to Columbus’s log and his mermaid sightings, and thence into the deep waters of Poseidon-related mythology.
The pleasures of collecting are driven by perception, in my case by a quirky way of looking at sea-related delftware tiles. Some may see them as attractive (or maybe peculiar) wall decoration, but to me each one is a picture from the past, painted by someone who transferred his thoughts and talents to a square of whitened clay. I reach out to him, trying to imagine whether he was hot or cold as he worked, whether he was well or ill fed, and how he got along with his wife. Indeed, was he even a he? Such musings, though perhaps not typical of most academically trained curators, add a dimension to each tile.
Using tiles for flooring material is as old as using clay slabs in roofing. But it was not until the Middle Ages in Europe that tiles became elements of paving decoration, at which time they were small, thick, and decorated by means of incuse ornamental stamps whose impressions were filled with white clay before being lead glazed. Being subjected to heavy traffic, these tiles would have quickly lost their decoration had it been painted on the surface of the clay. Besides, the white clay (later used in tobacco-pipe making) was expensive. By the fourteenth century the white clay was spread over the surface of the stamp and impressed onto the tile in the manner of block printing. One such printed tile was impressed with the figure of a mermaid and survives in a library floor in England’s Litchfield Cathedral (fig. 2). It is, however, a rare exception, as the majority of medieval tiles are heraldic in style.
The art of decorating ceramic tiles with oxide of tin over a white engobe spread across Europe in the early sixteenth century as a result of trade with the Ottoman Empire. Ambassadors and traders saw newly built mosques and palaces decorated with gleaming tiles painted under the glaze in blue (and later with red and green) that were vastly superior to the Byzantine-inspired floor mosaics of European churches and abbeys. However, the Ottoman (Iznik) tiles covered walls, ceilings, domes—indeed, anything above the floor. Contemporary European tile makers were eager to learn the mystery of what eventually would be known as delftware, but were content to make their tin-glazed tiles for use on floors.[1] Thus, the first potters in England to make the new tin-glazed ware were reported in 1567 to have “followed their Trade, making Gally Paving Tiles,” which were thick but not very durable.[2]
Potters Jasper Andries and Jacob Janson were Protestant Flemings who fled to Norwich from Antwerp to escape Spanish-Catholic persecution. It was inevitable, therefore, that their products would emulate those they had been making in the Netherlands. Being intended as floor mosaics the tiles came in units of four to create repeating designs, commonly featuring pomegranates and grapes (both fruits being biblically associated with the seeds of fecundity) and Dutch tulips (fig. 3). Whether the potters who made the tiles or the people who walked on them were aware of the iconography is anybody’s guess. It is, however, a fact that the decoration was used on both sides of the North Sea from about 1570 to 1620. By the latter date the Dutch and Flemish potters were emulating their Ottoman confreres and looking upward from the floor to walls, stoves, and fireplaces.
These tiles, having become purely decorative, could be made with less clay and their painted surfaces lent themselves to more imaginative designs, thereby opening up a huge industry that lasted through the eighteenth century. But not so in England, where production of decorative paving tiles came to an end about 1625 and did not reemerge as wall tiling until late in the 1670s. Documentary records show that even then the English manufacturers were having trouble producing tiles capable of competing with the burgeoning Dutch industry.[3] When eventually they were successful, contemporary taste called for a uniformity of biblical or landscape designs contained within two concentric circles. The common corners of early Dutch and, later, English tiles are classified by collectors as “oxhead” and “spider,” though neither name really describes those often slapdash devices which when four tiles were placed together continued to create repeating patterns.[4] The large panel illustrated in figure 4 demonstrates how, even when tiles painted with differing subjects were mounted together, their corners provided a uniformity of design.
It is not my purpose, however, to pursue the evolving design elements and processes that are already well known to collectors of English tiles. Suffice it to say that merpeople are absent from English tile designs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In America the market preference is reflected in a New York dealer’s 1764 advertisement for “A Few very neat Scripture and Landskip Chimney Tiles.”[5] Even ships are few and far between, probably because the vast majority of the population had no contact with the sea. The Dutch, on the other hand, had difficulty keeping away from it. As their livelihoods depended on deep-sea fishing and an international carrying trade, it made sense that ships were a popular subject for tile painters.
Indeed, they continued to be so well into the nineteenth century, both for individual tiles and as elements in eight- and ten-tile panels.[6] The depictions were sometimes very carefully done, enabling the buyer to identify a wide range of sailing vessels, from galleons and coast-hugging ketches to rowboats (figs. 5, 6).[7] The ships, which can be identified by their national flags or pennants, are invariably Dutch. For seafaring collectors, ship tiles can be a category unto themselves. For me, however, what might lurk beneath the waves has been my primary fascination.
Ever since we humans grouped ourselves into tribal units aspiring to a degree of civilization we have embraced the notion that there were gods to watch over our houses, our crops, and our children, and to take the blame when things did not work out the way we expected. We believed that these gods had to look like us—or at least partially like us. Thus, Poseidon, the god of the ocean, had a human head and torso (fig. 7), whereas the rest of him could be, but not always was, fish. It goes without saying that his wife, Amphitrite, was similarly constructed, her piscatory parts sometimes kept demurely below the surface of the sea. They had numerous progeny, the best known being Triton, whose nether parts were shaped like the tail of a dolphin and whose principal activity was blowing into a twisted seashell—violently, to summon storms, or gently, to calm the waves (fig. 8). Thus wrote the Roman poet Ovid:
Already Triton at his call appears
Above the waves; a Tyrian robe he wears,
And in his hand a crooked trumpet bears;
The sovereign bids him peaceful sounds inspire,
And give the waves the signal to retire;
His writhen shell he takes, whose narrow vent
Grows by degrees into a large extent.[8]
Over time there came to be many second-string gods named Triton, some of them possessing the forelegs of a horse. (Among his many other attributes, Poseidon was the god who smote a rock with his trident and thereby gave birth to creatures half horse and half human.)[9]
The deital ideas of the Greeks were repackaged by the Romans, who passed them off as their own. Thus, Poseidon became Neptune and Amphitrite became Salacia, goddess of salt water. Her name became synonymous with salaciousness and explains why supporters of Queen Elizabeth I drew cartoons of Mary Queen of Scots as a whoring mermaid. Also of Greek ancestry was Aphrodite (fig. 9)—Venus, to the Romans—who was one of an abundance of sea-dwelling daughters of god and goddess Nereus and Doris. These sisters came to be known as Nereids, nubile maidens given to cavorting amid the waves and helping sailors in perilous waters, but that is deeper than we need dive into remote mythology. My point is that between them the Greeks and Romans created an undersea world recognizable to Dutch tile painters and, presumably, to the good citizens of Holland who mounted them on their walls.
Being a practical people, the Dutch tile makers assumed that human relationships in the undersea (or on-the-sea) world behaved as they did in burghers’ bedrooms (fig. 10). The Victoria and Albert Museum has examples of these tiles, but keeps them discreetly hidden in a drawer![10] The Dutch evidently did not consider them prurient, but simply the natural precursor to my next examples (fig. 11), which show what might be Salacia suckling her infant and Father Neptune holding up his Triton pup in a failing attempt at house-training. It can be difficult to distinguish between Neptune and his sons, who were prone to fighting amongst themselves (fig. 12) or behaving as classical prototypes for jet ski hooligans (fig. 13).
Depictions of godly vehicles are relatively common. They usually take the form of seashells drawn by sea stags, sea horses, and turtles, or by the dolphins mythologically associated with Poseidon—he being a powerful, sometimes warlike figure, and his dolphins the embodiment of serenity at sea. Now and then the beasts had the benefit of wheels (fig. 14, right).
Unlike the more common terrestrial tile designs, recognizable biblical sources are few. The only such motif known to me is that of Jonah and the Whale (fig. 15), and only once have I seen a merperson carrying a Christian cross (fig. 16). Later, however, the story of Noah and the biblical flood would be used as one among the many circle-enclosed scriptural subjects. On the left in figure 17 is the English version and on the right the Dutch—a demonstration of how difficult it can be to tell one from the other.[11] Both date between about 1720 and 1800 and do not really fit within my classification of maritime tiles, very few of which date any later than the end of the seventeenth century.
Dating within the seventeenth century is difficult once we get past the thick paving tiles, which, as I have noted, were over by about 1620. As none of the wall tiles bears a date, one has to rely on previous pundits, who might have been wrong. There are, however, distinct stylistic differences, particularly in the treatment of water, varying from narrow bars to flowing chevrons and individual waves. The painters’ differing treatment of the waves can be clues to dating associations, as can their methods of depicting merpeople’s piscine scales, although it is doubtful that they represent an evolutionary sequence. On the contrary, they are more likely the product of several designers and painters in different factories. Although corner motifs got smaller the more they got away from four-unit paving tile compositions, the ubiquitous oxheads continued on through the eighteenth century, as did the so-called spider elements. Thickness, however, is a relatively reliable guide—the later they dated the thinner they were made. Chamfered edges are often encountered from about 1630 through the nineteenth century, the beveling designed to enable the faces of the tiles to fit snugly together while allowing maximum space for mortaring the back edges.[12] However, these details are also more likely to represent products of different factories than of date.
Very rarely were tiles marked or painted on their backs, although exceptions occur in all periods when numbers were applied to identify each tile’s placement within large panels, an important assistance when each tile represented, say, two letters in a trader’s advertisement or no more than a tree branch in a landscape constructed of a hundred or more tiles.[13] In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pattern and batch numbers were sometimes applied, and now and then bored painters doodled on the backs. Figure 18 is a rare early exception, on which the apparently religiously motivated artist drew a cross and the Christian IHS in retrograde—along with much else that now makes no sense. Another, perhaps unique, Dutch tile of about 1635 is inscribed “WIT SONDER QAERT,” meaning without kwaart.[14]
The words provide a convenient segue to saying more about tile manufacturing. Kwaart in Dutch means to cover, in this case a covering of silver sand and lead oxide applied after painting to give the surface a bright, transparent lead glaze. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, the makers had discovered that by adding lead silicate to the underlying tin-enriched engobe, the second step could be avoided—hence the back notation “WIT SONDER QAERT.” Experiments with different clays continued, but by the end of the century the early red-firing brick clays had been abandoned in favor of denser, yellow-firing clay. This thinner, first-fired (1,020°C) biscuit stage was then coated with the white engobe on which the decorator painted. That done, the tiles were refired standing on edge and back-to-back in a glost oven at a temperature of about 900°C. In theory the finished tile would emerge with both glaze and decoration bonded into the biscuit. But failures were frequent. Glost firing at too high a temperature causes the glaze to bubble and sag, distorting the painted design in the process. The image illustrated on page 253 of this volume (Beverly A. Straube, “A ‘Wretched Tile’ from Jamestown,” fig. 1) demonstrates that misfires that should have been discarded as wasters reached Jamestown, Virginia, as scarcely acceptable seconds.
The first step in tile manufacturing called for flat sheets of the prepared clay to be air-dried to the leather-hard stage, at which time a square board edged with iron was laid on the clay as a sizing template. To prevent slipping on the still damp clay, small nails were driven through the corners of the template, creating tiny holes still visible in the corners of the finished tiles. Dutch authorities have stated that four securing nails set well in from the tiles’ corners were the norm from about 1550 to 1650. The number of nails was later reduced to three or two and set closer to the edges. In the never-ending quest for dating criteria, one is prone to take the nail (or pin) hole feature as holy writ. Wrong again. When the holes were shallow, they could be obscured by the engobe. Three-hole examples occur in the second half of the seventeenth century, and two-hole ones on and off through the eighteenth. Some seventeenth-century tiles exhibit no holes at all. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that, in general, four holes in from the corners indicate an earlier date than fewer closer to the edges.
Seventeenth-century wall tiles usually measure about 5 by 5 inches, but some of the earliest, particularly those on red-firing clay, are slightly larger (5 1/8 by 5 1/8 inches). To achieve those dimensions there had to have been two stages of shrinkage, the first driving out 20 percent of the moisture from the leather-hard unfired clay, and the second during glost firing, together amounting to an 8 percent reduction. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tiles became appreciably larger, averaging 6 by 6 inches (fig. 19).[15] The thickness was reduced from an average of .39 inches in the seventeenth century to .27 inches in the eighteenth.[16] The difference is a fairly reliable means of distinguishing between early and late—with emphasis on fairly.
From first to last the tiles’ decorative designs were applied with the aid of stencils that enabled specks of charcoal to provide outlines. The painters then connected the dots and subsequently filled in the details by hand. However, I believe that an experienced tile painter could, and did, create the simpler mermaids and fish solely by eye. To my knowledge no pattern books from the seventeenth century survive, and it is uncertain who drew the designs that then became stencils. Some inspirations almost certainly came from ornamented sea charts, some from contemporary engravings, others from fish sold in the markets or salvaged from the memories of bibulous sailors. But more challenging are the multitude of figures holding incongruous objects, such as the old man brandishing two flaming torches (fig. 20). Is he, perhaps, Hephaestus, the Greek god of fire whose mother, Hera, threw him into the ocean? Or is he a brother who was said to have scared off assailants by waving firebrands? Who, too, is the person with the curious hat and hairstyle who appears to be squirting milk from his/her breasts (fig. 21)?[17] Then again, the dark-visaged and horned character wielding a club may be a sea devil or simply Neptune in a black and stormy mood (fig. 22).
There is, however, one classical figure about whom there can be no doubt. Although Aphrodite is remembered as the goddess of love—some of it sublime and some venal—she was born in the sea and stepped out of it onto the island of Cyprus. As goddess of the wind—and thereby of sailors—she is depicted standing on a pearl or a seashell with a sail billowing behind her (see fig. 9). Aphrodite is one of the few standard tile figures to occur on delftware plates (fig. 23). Mermaids, on the other hand, are more common, albeit divorced from any classical, mythological context (fig. 24). The illustrated tile dates from about 1720, by which time the mirror-holding mermaid has settled into a conventional pose to be flanked by the kinds of distant sailing vessels frequently seen on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sea- and landscape tiles (fig. 25).[18]Another demonstrates how it was possible for a mermaid to spin flax, with and without the help of feet to grip the distaff (figs. 26, 27).
As common as depictions of merpeople are those of aquatic mammals and fish—some of them are readily recognizable, such as eels, cod, swordfish, and militant stingrays (fig. 28), but more speak to the mythological idea that Poseidon/Neptune’s underwater kingdom included every form of terrestrial life, among them giraffes, horses, unicorns, and an elephantine dragon (fig. 29).
And then there are those that steadfastly defy identification. This collector has no idea what to make of a bird dangling from a celestial string above a surprised mermaid responding to a drowning person wearing water wings and a black bra (fig. 30). But, as I suggested at the outset, trying to figure out what each painter had in mind is the warp if not the weft of maritime tile collecting. Figure 31 suggests that its painter had tired of drawing standard monsters and so built his own, multi-propellant form—with fish body, semihuman head, bird wings, animal legs and feet, and a description-defying tail.
It is unfortunate that few tile-lined or tile-framed fireplaces survive in American homes, most having been stripped out when smaller stoves and grates were installed. There is, however, a splendid example of the use of maritime tiles surrounding a fireplace in the Warner House in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (fig. 32). The house was built in 1716–1718; if the tiles were new when installed they can provide a unique dating guide for the wide range of merpeople and creatures used there. One has to be reminded, however, that antique Dutch tiles are still traded and used by collectors; a couple in Pennsylvania, for example, has used them to good effect in their “Dutch” sitting room (fig. 33). Others, such as myself, have had them reproduced to provide a satisfyingly aquatic theme for a bathroom (fig. 34) and a summer fire screen. Although the reuse of antique tiles would have pleased their seventeenth-century makers, modern antiquarian purists may be less enthusiastic. Indeed, there is much to be said for seeing the tiles as legitimate works of folk art, to be framed and enjoyed individually. Although few of us have the means to acquire a genre painting on canvas by David Teniers or a harbor scene by Willem van de Velde, a ship in full sail or a portrait of an amorous mermaid painted on clay can be ours for a relatively short song.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to express my thanks to tile authority Jan Holtkamp in the Netherlands, who kindly reviewed my captions. In some instances his dating is more precise than mine, and what follows are those wherein we differ: fig. 3 (right), 1600–1630; fig. 5 (left), ca. 1650; fig. 8, 1650–1700; fig. 11 (left), ca. 1650; fig. 11 (center), 1650–1660; fig. 11 (right), ca. 1650–1700; fig. 12, ca. 1650; fig. 13, ca. 1650; fig. 14 (left), 1650–1660; fig. 14 (center), ca. 1650; fig. 15, 1680–1700; fig. 16, 1670–1690; fig. 17 (left), ca. 1800; fig. 17 (right), 1680–1700; fig. 21, 1660–1680; fig. 22, 1660–1680; fig. 26 (left), 1660–1680; fig. 30, 1680–1700.
