Tile panel with blue peacocks: C.1-1976

Titles

Tile panel with blue peacocks

Maker(s)

Maker: William De Morgan & Co.
Designer: De Morgan, William Frend

Entities

• Tile panel
• Tile picture

Categories

• Earthenware
• Art Pottery

Description

Panel of eight large central tiles surrounded by a border of twelve rectangular tiles and four corner tiles. Earthenware, slip-coated, trace-transfered in 'Persian' colours, and clear-glazed. The central panel, painted in blue, turquoise-blue, green, yellow,pale orange, and brown on a white ground, shows two facing peacocks amid foliage, bordered above and below by fish swimming in a deep blue sea. The borders consist of Islamic, Persian style arches with fleur-de-lis and swirls, in light blue, dark blue and manganese red.

Notes

History note: Purchased from Michael Whiteway, London W8

Legal notes

Given by the Friends of the Fitzwilliam Museum

Acquisition and important dates

Method of acquisition: Given (1976-01-29) by The Friends of the Fitzwilliam Museum

Dating

19th Century, Late
Circa 1888 CE - 1898 CE

Note

De Morgan produced tiles and lustre-ware in Chelsea from 1872, and at Merton Abbey (next door to Morris’s factory) from 1882-8. From 1888-98 he set up at Sands End, Fulham, in partnership with the architect Halsey Ricardo (1854-1928), continuing from 1898-1907 with his kiln-master Frank Iles and decorators Charles and Fred Passenger as his partners. De Morgan made many, many designs for tiles and tile panels – some 820 are in the V&A collection. There exists a near-identical, though differently coloured, peacock panel, made at Sands End (see Greenwood). The same fish design and a different peacock scene were used, c.1904-1907, for the winter garden at 8 Addison Road, West London, a house designed by Halsey Ricardo for the retailer Sir Ernest Debenham.

William Frend De Morgan (1839-1917), now widely regarded as the most important ceramicist of the Arts & Crafts movement, also worked in stained glass and became a successful novelist. The son of a non-conformist mathematics professor, he became a close friend of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones and married the Pre-Raphaelite painter Evelyn Pickering (1855-1919), in 1887. As a ceramicist, De Morgan was primarily a designer/decorator and chemist, working on bought-in blanks or pots thrown to his design. He experimented widely with techniques and glazes, re-discovering methods for making and applying lustres and the colours of Iznik and Persian pottery and using them for a range of complex fantasy designs featuring ships, birds, flora and animals.

School or Style

Arts and Crafts (movement)