- Style/technique: Arts & crafts barbotine
- Manufacturer: Sherwin & Cotton
- Pattern number: RMB116
- Dimensions: 6" x 6"
- Date: circa 1885 - 90
- Colours: 7
A very pleasing barbotine design which near fills the
tile entirely handmade and decorated. Natural colours, a
colour textured background and brilliant glaze combine to
create a warm and friendly tile.
The body is of buff plastic
clay and a little thicker than usual, the use of
plastic clay indicating the tile was made before
materials technology improved sufficiently to reliably
make barbotine tiles on dust pressed bodies. Verso has a
standard Sherwin & Cotton Staffordshire Knot mark
with the incised pattern number B116.
Barbotine is a process whereby embossed tiles may be
hand made, the relief being created by painting the
designs in coloured slip. It is not generally recognised
how innovative barbotine tiles were, they didn't compete
with usual lead glaze majolica tiles they predated them.
Prior to their advent there were essentially only three
types of tiles available, printed and painted flat tiles
and 'original majolica' in opaque glazes, when these hit
the market around 1885 they were totally new and
startlingly different to all other offerings at the time.
Other manufacturers tried to copy them using mechanical
processes, ie moulded 'modern majolica' but it took a few
years of pretty poor efforts before reasonable quality
and a range of colours equal to barbotine was achieved.
Colours for the barbotine process were limited too,
partly because clay fires at a higher temperatues than
glaze so less stable colours burn off, nevertheless what
appears to us today to be a limited range of colours it
wasn't so in 1885. It is presumed that the vast majority
of barbotine tiles were made in the period 1885 - 1890 by
which time many of the technological hinderances to the
production of dust pressed 'modern majolica' tiles had
been overcome.
