Remarkable pieces that passed through Relic Asylum and went on to new homes.

Kept here for their stories — and as a reference for anyone identifying or hunting a set of their own. These are not for sale; they are remembered. Each links to its full story.

• Pewabic Pottery: Detroit’s Living Iridescence
  Nearly every great American art-tile works closed with the Depression. One did not — and it is still firing today. Pewabic Pottery of Detroit, founded in 1903, remains…
• Trent Tile Company: Trenton’s Sculptor and the Embossed Standard
  Trenton, New Jersey called itself the Staffordshire of America, and for good reason — the pottery capital of the country turned out dinnerware, sanitary ware, and, at the…
• Cambridge Tile: Covington’s Enduring Art Tile Works
  Across the river from Cincinnati, in Covington, Kentucky, one of America’s longest-lived tile works quietly turned out a century of fireplace and floor tile — and some genuinely…
• The Modelers: The Artists Who Moved from Shop to Shop
  The companies get the credit — the marks on the back read Low, or AETCo, or Mosaic — but the tiles were made by people, and the best…
• From Encaustic to Art Tile: How American Tile Was Made
  Every tile in the collection is a record of how it was made. Run your thumb across a Victorian floor and you feel one method; hold a Low…
• Mosaic Tile Company: Langenbeck, Mueller, and the Second Zanesville Giant
  When the two men most responsible for American Encaustic’s finest work walked out the door, they did not go far. In 1894, the chemist Karl Langenbeck and the…
• American Encaustic Tiling Company: The Giant of Zanesville
  For a generation, the largest tile works in the world sat in a small Ohio city on the Muskingum River. Its name is stamped on the back of…
• From Salvage to Storybook: A Kitchen Built from American Art Tile
  This one is personal. After a long haul, the kitchen is nearly finished — and it turned out weird, beautiful, and completely full of history. It is built,…
• The Frog’s Wedding: A Hand-Painted Marsh in Tile
  It is exactly what it sounds like: a frog’s wedding, told across a panel of tile. A procession of frogs winds through a marsh in their best attitudes,…
• USETCO Cherry-Blossom Surround with Children
  A complete fireplace surround by the United States Encaustic Tile Company — cherry blossoms across the field, and the two children at the corners that collectors almost always…
• Why a Complete Surround Is Everything
  Most antique tile reaches us in pieces — a border here, a single figural block there, pried from a wall and sold on its own. It is the…
• Rare Egyptian-Revival Surround — American Encaustic Tiling Co.
  A rarely-seen Egyptian-revival surround by the American Encaustic Tiling Company — figures and fruit in the distinctive Egyptian idiom, a design you can go years without seeing once,…