Maw & Co Arts & Crafts Blue and White Tile
Style/technique: Arts & Crafts hand decorated Manufacturer: Maw & Co. Designer: C H Temple Dimensions: 6" x 6" Date: circa 1895   Incredible hand decorated Arts & Crafts movement tiles in an excellent rich cobalt blue and with a highly brilliant glaze. The design is full of life and movement, fills the entire tile, a repeating pattern that is excellent as a standalone tile yet works superbly as a repeat in any orientation. Inspired design and brilliant execution, a real arts & crafts, designed by Charles Temple. More......
Condition: Near perfect Price: £190 (approx $390) Ref: #02583I Tiny chip top right corner, very tiny brown mark nearby is an underglaze flaw. Very tiny stun chip near the bottom edge and half a dozen exceedingly minor surface marks. Richly glazed and with very high brilliance. UK Special Delivery £198 US and World Airsure £205 Delivery & order information Contact us Currency Converter
Condition: Near perfect Price: £190 (approx $390) Ref: #02583J Very tiny chip bottom right corner, very tiny stun chip near the left edge, mark near the middle of the left edge is an underglaze flaw, one short light scratch from the bottom edge and half a dozen exceedingly minor surface marks. Richly glazed and with very high brilliance. UK Special Delivery £198 US and World Airsure £205 Delivery & order information Contact us Currency Converter
The details of the decorating process are uncertain, Maws were the masters of tile decoration using almost every known technique and inventing others too. Handpainted or certainly involving a considerably amount of hand decoration, the only reasons I think that possibly some other process may have been involved are that Maws were incredibly skilled decorators and painting in negative is very difficult. They may have been sketched in outline in charcoal, which would have burned away completely in the firing Alternatively possibly a process unique to Maw & Co one of which involved a print made from the negative of the final image using a sticky material on a paper backing. This was then rubbed down onto the tile to deposit the sticky substance in the pattern of the image, ceramic colour as dust was then sprinkled over the surface which adhered to the sticky surface so that the image was created on the surface of the tile which was then glazed and fired. Of course Maw & Co were not the only company to experiment with decorating techniques to boost quality and lower costs, not all de Morgan's are freehand painted, nor W B Simpson (actually quite few), even the reputed 'arts & crafts' companies sought other means to enhance hand decoration and so to improve their products.   Maw & Co were the greatest of all the Victorian tile makers, not only mass producers, the largest company in the world for a decade or more, but also producing fine artistic works of such quality not normally associated with large companies. Not only did their mass production techniques exceed the quality of all the better known names such as Mintons and Pilkington but they also used more techniques than any other company. In the 19thC there are just a few small niches in which other companies surpassed Maws excellence, Craven Dunnill and de Morgan in multicolour lustres, for a time W B Simpson with their brilliant underglaze colours (they were London agents for Maw & Co), Mintons China Works in Reynolds Patent multicolour printing, Marsden for stencilled slip and Sherwin & Cotton for their émaux ombrants (mostly 20thC really). No tile printer was as good at fine printing, or glazing, or moulding, or as versatile, they produced more patterns than all the Minton companies combined, it was only when art nouveau came along in the twentieth century and George and Arthur were no longer involved that the company lost their preeminence.
The image is full size at 72 dpi (about 560 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.

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