Blue and White Delft Tiles

 

 

Two of my Delft tiles, one shows a leaping boar; the other
a river fisherman with a splendid hat.

I have eight blue and white Delft tiles, almost certainly Delft as I bought them in Brugge, one place among many in the globe where these tiles are admired, and the rarer ones, coveted. I absolutely love mine despite cracks and chips and in one case, a missing one third of the original tile [though the image remains intact!]  The wounded tile, as it were, was donated to me by a Dutchman which somehow seems to make it even more authentic! The rule of thumb for the size of Delft tiles, to which my tiles conform, is the consistent measurement of 5.1 inches square, and the side view of the tile also informs; the thicker the tile, the older it is.

My first tile bought for me one August day during
the annual Bruges Early Music Festival. My husband
could not understand why I preferred the one early tile
to the two later ones costing the same amount of £60.

 Had I remained living longer in Bruges, my collecting would have probably developed into more of an obsession. These tiles are incredibly aesthetically pleasing but they have the added intellectual advantage of the historical background and associations. Taken as a group, as an artistic sub-set, they recount almost a national narrative. Writing this as I look up Delft tiles for sale online, my passion for these charming and quite primitive painted people and scenes is being quickly reignited. One can easily find on EBay for example, or on specialist websites, old Delftware for sale. I had read that the average price for one old tile normally would be around £200 but annoyingly, when I checked this morning, the three most gorgeous seventeenth  century tiles for sale were all priced at £395. How maddening is that?                                                                                                        I do remember when I was living in                                                                                                    Bruges, perhaps a decade ago, seeing a Delft                                                                                                tile for sale at 390 euros and simply not                                                                                                        believing it!                        

Vermeer's The Milkmaid. 1657/8
Note the line of Delft tiles along the skirting

Part of one design, enlarged to decipher detail.
Are the two animals (right) rabbits or huge snails?

Cupid on a Dolphin 1560

The heyday when these tiles, now known as Dutch faience or Delftware, were made and decorated, was from 1660 -c1720 [though their production began around 1570 and did not taper off until c1900]. The peak occurred when Europe began to imitate expensive Chinese porcelain imports  renowned for their stunning whiteness. The correct formula and clay needed to perfect production of these imitation Chinese tiles, were not identified until 1708 in Meissen, so before that discovery, European craftsmen added tin to a white glaze to try to imitate the Chinese wares. The very pleasing result was known as ‘faience’ in France and ‘maiolica’ in Italy and the fashion gradually spread through Britain and the Netherlands where the production settled and grew in Delft. Eventually, that town’s famous blue and white tiles were exported across the world, far beyond Europe. In Britain, tin-glazed earthenware with its distinctive blue decoration, made in Britain both before and after, the original Delft heyday, was known as English delftware [always with the small ‘d’ capital letter] Its popularity in England can be measured by the extraordinary number of around 50 delftware makers active in London between the mid sixteenth and mid eighteenth centuries.

A somewhat flamboyant example of both wall and floor
tiling in Delft!

In Holland, in old canal houses for instance, one can find expanses of Delftware on chimney breasts or in designs on kitchen walls, but early architects and designers did not limit themselves to the traditional. There are delightful lines of tiles used as skirting boards or framing the bottom of staircases suggesting that zealous Dutch housewives did not want to damage or dirty their white-washed walls and so used the familiar tiles to act as buffers between passing traffic and their spotless kitchen walls! 

Johannes Vermeer was born in Delft in 1632 and lived there most of his life with his family. In his painting, The Milkmaid, one can just see part of the line of Delft tiles used as described above, as protective skirting.

Coronelli 1706
View of Delft

Why Delft? Delft is a relatively small town now, but in the seventeenth century, at the height of the Dutch Golden Age, it was really important, sandwiched as it was between the port of Rotterdam and the coastal city of The Hague and as a base for William of Orange, the hero of Dutch resistance to Catholic Spain. The Netherlands was reaching its power zenith, dominating European trade, setting up an outpost in Japan, founding universities and fighting to become a Protestant state against the force of Catholic Spain.  

Map of Delft 1558
from Civitates Orbis Terrarum
Georg Braun & Joris Hoefnagel