The Marsden Tile Company

 

Excellent design and execution especially in majolica and patent impressed, fine quality in ways most other manufacturers missed, rarely is an ordinary design from Marsden to be found.

 

Read about George Marsden and the Marsden Tile Company.

 

 

George Marsden's early career was at Josiah Wedgwood & Sons where he was a noted decorator of fine pottery specialising in sgraffito work, creating relief decoration through hand carving slip wares. Carving is perhaps a rather grand word to use, sgrafitto means scratched in Italian although that word gives a rather too crude impression of the technique for like any hand technique it could be executed with finesse or naivety. The base clay would be of one colour and it be coated in a thin layer of slip of another colour, once this had been allowed to dry it was scratched away to reveal the base clay thus producing two colour wares with relief decoration. Marsden was always interested in the technology of decoration and he devised a method of speeding up the sgraffito process and introducing colours by applying slip through stencils to create unique wares.

His method, which he patented and is widely known as 'Marsden's Patent', had the unique quality of producing relief decorated wares with sharp, crisp edges to the pattern and more than the two colours of sgraffito. It was also an alternative to sprigging much used by Wedgwood particularly in their earlier Jasperware, whilst producing a less detailed representation it was considerably easier to produce and much less costly in the set up of the design origination requiring stencils rather than moulds. It was rather more suited to flat surfaces and as so it was best use was to decorate tiles, it was so easy and cheap to produce new designs that Wedgwood tiles produced far more tile designs in the 'Patent Impressed' range than in their transfer printed range.

Marsden's interest in decorating technology was not limited to modelling techniques he was most interested in colours too. Colours in clay as used in slip decoration were limited by the very high firing temperatures and he developed an interest in the modern majolica lead glazes which enabled both brilliance and colour never before seen. This was the 1880s when tiles were the hot product in ceramics, the market was rapidly expanding and extending from floors and institutional usage to decorative and domestic environments and when tile technology was moving forward at the fastest pace. The new technology of three dimensional dust-pressed moulded designs decorated in majolica glazes was truly new and fantastic yet the best that he could do at Wedgwood was persuade them to make a few fairly non-descript moulded patterns and apply majolica glazes to transfer printed designs, a compromise that few other companies bothered to make because they were pursuing moulded majolica tiles however Marsden himself continued to make them along with moulded majolica and regular transfer prints plain and hand coloured.

His first efforts of patent impressed tiles for Wedgwood received a lacklustre response, the technique was highly praised but the designs criticised. Lewis day, the noted designer of wall coverings and fabrics was commissioned to design tiles for the process and these achieved both acclaim and success in the marketplace. The lesson appears to have been learned by Marsden, that it is not just technology that matters but it is the way that it relates to humans, the customers. George clearly came to understand that both design and technology were intrinsic to making a good product and this combination lifted his efforts far above those of most of his contemporaries, the only two other names that are in the same vein are George Cartlidge with Sherwin & Cotton and Charles Temple with Maw & Co.

By the late 19thC Josiah Wedgwood & Sons was an institution in itself, the founder and prime innovator long passed away the company was under the control of the shareholders and the bankers. Wedgwood had been involved in tile making since the 18thC but tableware was their main business, tiles even though they were a new and exciting development were secondary to such a pottery behemoth. It seems that the final straw came for George Mardsen when Thomas Allen was appointed art director, no doubt Marsden competed for the position and was disappointed when he lost. Allen was wedded to two dimensional art as best suited for dinner plates, furthermore he was a copyist rather than an originator, Marsden saw the attraction, the art and science, of the new tile industry and the opportunities that it offered and that Wedgwoods under Allen would be its bureaucratic, staid best. Marsden left Wedgwood and set up his own tileworks, an event that we should all be grateful for.

George Marsden learned much at Wedgwood, more so than most of their ex-employees who found fame elsewhere, he learned the importance of technology and technique, the importance of design, and the importance of partnerships including subcontracting and licensing. Combining these attributes the outstanding achievement of Marsden was to produce brilliant and evocative designs and products that people actually wanted to buy and put in to their homes for challenging design is usually reserved for the catwalk or exhibition stand. The modelling, the design and the colours of Marsden's work simply stand out, the Marsden touch can take colours that are ordinary by normal standards, combine them with designs that reach in to the soul, and produce outstanding products.

Scour the established literature for tiles by Marsden and barely a few paltry examples are found, even Blanchett's venerable tomes for the most part underestimate and at times denigrate Marsden yet his company produced a good proportion of the finest art nouveau designs often in the most fabulous of colours and with the most brilliant glazes. Not in the quantities of of the Corn Brothers (later under the name of The Henry Richard Tile Co) or T & R Boote Ltd but they made a good few and the proportion of outstanding designs and colours compared to the bulk of production is the highest of all, only Sherwin & Cotton, a better known name but also often underestimated, are within the same frame of outstanding vs ordinary design. The lack of recognition for Marsden is in great part because he didn't seek it, rather than making a name for himself he sought to make great products and let them stand up in their own right. In the heyday of the Marsden Tile Co very few of their tiles bore any branding at all and at most just the bare, ambiguous company initials. Latterly the reputation being established the famous and excellent The Malkin Tile Works Co who eventually took over Marsden Tiles made use of the Marsden brand, in the 1920s and 30s some of their tiles bear the Marsden brand particularly the more artistic designs.

And so tile collectors are most familiar with the names of Minton, Pilkington, Boote, Wedgwood and so on who produced very few in the realm of majolica tiles that Marsden did. As his tile backs usually bear no identification and often are indistinctive just being generic bars or rails it is unsurprising that nowadays the lack of reference to Marsden in the established publications has led to a lack of appreciation of his wares.

Without wishing to denigrate the clearly outstanding effort that Chris Blanchett has put in to his valuable work '20th Century Decorative Tiles' I am obliged to redress some of the comments therein. Marsden Tile Co didn't suffer from being "not able to employ skilled designers" as suggested on page 346 rather the contrary is true. Marsden was if anything rather too enamoured with design and failed to recognise the importance of plain tiles, the mass production thereof, and the associated cost savings and market power that followed therefrom. Fortunately he was belatedly savvy enough to realise this and partnered with The Malkin Tile Works Co and avoided the fate that befell the William de Morgan Tile Co, Sherwin & Cotton and other artistic tile makers. The verso shown top right on page 354 suggested to be second hand acquired by Marsden from Barratt I have never seen with a Barratt design.

But as no doubt George himself would have wished judge a product by its qualities, how it appeals to your senses and not what I or other people say.

 

Brief aside: The late 19thC tile industry is often defined in terms of the three 'M's, Minton, Morris and (de) Morgan, I suggest that tile aficionados consider the three Georges, George Maw, George Marsden and George Cartlidge. The 'M's as late 19thC tile makers were rarely very comfortable with modernity rather more harking back to medieval designs and techniques, compare with the Georges who pursued innovative decorative techniques and pushed the boundaries of design and technology forward.

The Pilkington Tile Company

Late entrants in to the victorian tile market commencing production in 1893 at a time of boom in mass tiling projects, for their more prestigious projects and exhibitions they acquired the services of noted designers like Lewis Day, C F A Voysey, Walter Crane.