Studio: international art (17.1899)

William De Morgan

DADO PANEL DESIGNED BY W. DE MORGAN

facture goes on as formerly, and any one who
desires to make acquaintance with the technique
of this delightful pottery should find his way to
De Morgan Road.

The technique, in so far as it concerns , the
under-glaze tiles, is in all respects original. The
design is painted, not on the ware itself, but on
a transparent material which, when the painting is
finished, is attached with its face to the prepared
surface of a tile, and then glazed. In the kiln it
burns away, leaving its painted design fixed under
the glaze. “ This process,” says Mr. De Morgan,
“ was devised to encourage freedom of touch in the

use of vitreous pigments. When painting with these
colours on opaque surfaces, the great difficulty is
to give the necessary degree of thickness to each
one; and there can be no doubt that this difficulty
is lessened by working on a transparent material,
since the thickness of the pigment is more per-
ceptible on such materials than it is on opaque sur-
faces.” And to Mr. De Morgan himself, since 1891,
the process has been advantageous in another way.
“In that year,” he says, “my health failed again,
and I was advised that if I tried to pass another
winter in London I should not do much more
work of any sort. So I went to spend the winter
in Florence. I soon found that merely sending
designs and advice to London was but a feeble
way of contributing to the success of the factory,
and for this reason I engaged Italian painters for
the tile-work, sending the transparencies home by
weekly instalments. This is what I do every
winter; and if, from a business point of view, my
residence in Florence has its disadvantages, it
certainly benefits the tile department and finds
employmant for several good Italian artists.”

Some persons think that there is no difference
between block-printing and Mr. De Morgan’s way
of decorating tiles with vitreous colours. Yet a
painting remains a painting, and a print remains
a print, whether or no it be subsequently attached
to a tile. The difference between a painting and
a print consists in this: the one is done by a
brush, while the other is produced by the colour
which, when caught up and held temporarily on a
typed surface, may be rapidly impressed on the
objects to be decorated. Now, Mr. De Morgan’s
transparencies are all painted by hand, one by one,
and what is painted does not cease to be brush-
work when transferred either to a tile’s prepared
surface, or to another canvas, as in the case of any
re-lined picture—e.g., the Madonna di San Sisto.
It is true that the tiles of one pattern are all alike,
as things which have to be painted alike are alike;
and the reasons why the Fulham tiles have to be
painted so are all of a commercial kind which
cannot be avoided. The public delights in uni-
formity, and he who lives to please must please to
live.

That is the main point, and I wish to lay stress
upon it. Writers on art do more harm than good
when they forget that the necessary and useful
thing is to accept with gratitude the best work that
can be produced by craftsmen in an age of strenu-
ous commercial competition. The conditions
under which the applied arts rose to greatness long
ago vanished with the types of society that fostered

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