One deep post per pottery — history, marks, glazes, dates, and identification.
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 the living link to the golden age of American tile, and its iridescent glazes have never been equalled. A chemist-artist and a kiln man Pewabic was founded…
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 high end, art tile. The finest of that tile came from the Trent Tile Company, whose embossed relief and remarkable range set a nineteenth-century standard. Harris to…
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 fine relief art along the way. If AETCo was the giant, Cambridge was the survivor. A family business in Covington The company grew out of the Busse…
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 of those people did not stay put. A handful of gifted modelers and chemists moved from shop to shop across the American tile boom, carrying their hands…
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 modeler Herman Carl Mueller founded the Mosaic Tile Company just across Zanesville — and built, out of their own expertise, a second giant of the American tile…
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 more American architectural tile than any other, and it turns up, still, in fireplaces and vestibules and demolition piles from coast to coast: the American Encaustic Tiling…
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, almost wall to wall, from salvaged American art tile, three makers and three states meeting in one room. The red field — Nabisco Mansion, St. Louis The…
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, and the whole small ceremony has survived a century in brown-and-cream glaze — complete, and still attached to its original hearth. The procession Read it like a…
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 meet as orphans. You see those children all the time, sold one at a time, stripped of context. What you rarely see is the whole surround they…
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 natural fate of a hundred-year-old surround. Which is exactly why a complete surround — all of it together, the way it left the kiln and went onto…