The Apple Blossom: A Low Masterwork in Iridescent Glaze
Some tiles you sell. Some you keep. This apple-blossom surround from the Low Art Tile Works belongs to the second kind — a set good enough that parting with it never quite makes sense.
The design
Apple-blossom branches run across the surround in low relief — buds, open flowers, and leaves modeled with the ease of something drawn from life rather than copied from a pattern book. It is a spring subject rendered in clay and glaze, and it has the quiet confidence of the best work to come out of Chelsea: nothing overdone, every tile carrying its share of the branch so the whole reads as one continuous bough.
The glaze
What stops you is the surface. The glaze is the transparent, almost iridescent kind that made Low’s reputation — a color that doesn’t sit on top of the tile but sinks into the modeling, pooling deep in the hollows and thinning over the high points, so the whole panel shifts as you move past it and the light changes. Flat color on a flat tile can’t do this. It takes relief and a glaze that flows, and it is the single thing that separates a great Low tile from a good one.
How it was made
The hand you see is a sculptor’s. At Low, an artist first modeled the design in wet clay — the actual apple branch, cut and pressed and worked by hand into a master. From that master a mold was taken, and the production tiles were formed against it, so every tile carries the sculptor’s modeling transferred faithfully into its face. Then came the glaze and the fire. It is a process that married a single artist’s hand to a set that could be made more than once — which is exactly why Low tiles look modeled rather than stamped, and why the relief is deep enough for the glaze to do its work.
Made to be shown
A set this fully realized has the feel of a showpiece. Low exhibited and won medals on both sides of the Atlantic through the 1880s, and pieces of this caliber were the kind a firm put forward to be seen. Whether or not this exact surround stood in an exhibition hall, it was made to that standard — and it is held here in the Relic Asylum private collection, alongside the Low fire stove, as one of the pieces that simply will not be parted with.
For the pottery behind it, see J. & J.G. Low Art Tile Works; for a companion piece in the same collection, see The Apple Blossom Fire Stove.
Relic Asylum — Tiles with past lives.