• Style/technique: Sealife lustre
• Manufacturer: Craven Dunnill
• Dimensions: 6" x 6"
• Date: circa 1890

 

A fabulous tile featuring one large and two smaller stylised fishes weaving amongst seaweed. In brilliant lustres, two reds and gold together with underglaze brown, green and yellow. As a collector friend said of Craven Dunnill when we were discussing lustre tiles, 'the masters of lustre'.

Craven Dunnill together with their near neighbours Maw & Co and the Welsh company J C Edwards produced the best quality lustre tiles in the more usual copper (red) and silver (gold). The 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. 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.

Despite the quality of lustre tiles in both design and execution by the Jackfield companies those by William de Morgan achieve higher prices for lesser items, if this was by de Morgan it would be 2 - 3 times the price. De Morgan is reported to have used Craven Dunnill blanks on occassion for his lustres, given the difficulty he had in making the business pay I would not be at all surprised to find that he subcontracted some manufacture to Craven Dunnill.

Copper lustre is so-called because the element that makes the colour is copper, the effect however is of brilliant red and lustre was the only way to achieve this colour in the 19thC. Silver lustre similarly produces gold colouring.

Verso quite clean with badge and name embossed.

Condition: Very fine
Price: £600 (approx $1165)
Ref: 02901

Very small chip top left corner, another just below top right corner, two other very tiny edge chips, a little rubbing to the lustre around the edges where the tile has rubbed against its frame, the main surface of the tile is 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. 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.