Arts and Crafts Tiles. (Design Notes).(Henry Chapman Mercer collection)(Brief Article)

A passionate collector, archaeologist, and builder, Henry Chapman Mercer (1856-1930) was among the early pioneers who discovered and appreciated colonial American artifacts in the late nineteenth century. He was raised during the height of the industrial age when, for example, mechanical wonders such as the Corliss steam engine was the most popular display in Philadelphia at the Centennial Exposition of 1876. Like others of his generation in both England and the United States, Mercer feared that inexpensive mass-produced objects and the convenience they brought to everyday life would have a negative impact on more expensive handmade objects. He became fascinated with hand tools and implements used in colonial America and eventually housed his huge collection of thirty thousand such objects in a fireproof concrete museum building he erected on his large estate in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Another passion was pottery, particularly redwares made in eastern Pennsylvania in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mercer was concerned that these handmade objects also might disappear in favor of modern table-wares. This prompted him to establish the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works in 1898, which even at the height of production had only sixteen employees. While molds were used to fashion the tiles, each was decorated by hand, ensuring that no two tiles would be identical--the hallmark of handcraftsmanship. The sources for the decorations were prints, stove plates, and antique tiles in private and museum collections, among them the British Museum in London, the National Germanic Museum in Nuremberg, the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, and the Basilica of Saint Apollinaris in Ravenna, Italy.

Mercer founded the pottery at an auspicious moment for the use of tiles in domestic and civic ...