• Style/technique: Botanical floral Barbotine
• Manufacturer: Sherwin & Cotton
• Pattern number: RMB 232
• Dimensions: 6" x 6"
• Date: Circa 1886
• Colours: 7

 

Early barbotine tile made from buff coloured plastic clay, very unusual with it's moulded patterned background and with a good range of colours. Interesting is the factory fault bottom right corner where the clay has been squashed while still damp. The muted natural colours as typical for this manufacturing process display very well on hardwood furniture.

Verso has the usual Sherwin & Cotton Staffordshire Knot mark with the incised pattern number RMB 232.

Barbotine is a process whereby moulded tiles may be hand made, the relief being built up by painting on the designs in coloured slip. It is not generally recognised how innovative barbotine tiles were, they didn't compete with typical moulded majolica tiles they predated them. Prior to their advent there were essentially only three types of tiles available, printed and painted flat tiles and 'original majolica' in opaque glazes, when these hit the market around 1885 they were totally new and startlingly different to all other offerings at the time. Other manufacturers tried to copy them using mechanical processes, ie moulded 'modern majolica' but it took a few years of pretty poor efforts before reasonable quality and a range of colours equal to barbotine was achieved. Colours for the barbotine process were limited too, partly because clay fires at a higher temperatues than glaze so less stable colours burn off, nevertheless what appears to us today to be a limited range of colours wasn't so in 1885. It is presumed that the vast majority of barbotine tiles were made in the period 1885 - 1890 by which time many of the technological hinderances to the production of dust pressed 'modern majolica' tiles had been overcome.

 

Condition: Excellent
Price: £95 (approx $185)
Ref: 02049

Medium glaze chip on the bottom edge, one very small chip top left corner, another very tiny edge chip on the left, one small surface chip near the bottom edge. Superb glaze brilliance, surface is near perfect.

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. Other 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.

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