Tile Hunting at the Stella Pier Show Nov 17-18

Hunter Tile by Providential at BungalowBILL.com

 

 

It’s time for the hunt! Nov 17-18 is the Stella Pier Show and it’s always an event that is sure to please. Five hundred dealers selling everything vintage, including clothes, this is the best and busiest venue for antique hunting in NYC in the Fall. You can be sure to find unique items and unique people buying them. It takes place on Pier 94 on the West Side Highway at 55th Street. The hours are Saturday 9-5 and Sunday 10-4. You can find Bungalow Bill in booth 2238. Take the time to support local small businesses and get some holiday shopping done or just come say hello!

The antique tile featured this week is by the Providential Tile Company of Trenton New Jersey. In operation from 1886-1913, they produced a line of products similar to the rest of the local tile works but their glazing seemed to be just a cut above the rest. This tile is tall at eighteen inches. The image is crisp and tile is covered in a cream and brown glaze. A masculine piece suitable for a man’s office or den.
This tile can be found for sale at BungalowBILL.com

Harris Strong Table Lamp

Harris Strong Lamp

 

 

Harris Strong tiles are always popular. Some of my personal favorites are the ones from the early 1960’s that incorporate the expert woodworking of Bill Chaiken.

This walnut table lamp has panels of black leather inset to the front and back panels, as well as a slender strip down each side. Two inch square tiles, glazed in oranges and reds like the flames of a fire are held above the leather panels by slim pegs of walnut. Six tiles are on one side and three on the other.

Stay tuned for a matching panel to this lamp, a variation on the one already shown from the 1966 movie Muderer’s Row with Dean Martin as Matt Helm.

You can find this lamp for sale at BungalowBILLcom

Arts and Crafts Beehive Tile

Arts and Crafts Beehive Tile

 

Labor Day is over and it’s time to get back to work. This week’s antique tile is an image of the iconic beehive. Bees and the beehive are symbols of industriousness. Each individual bee works for the common good of all in the hive. They are the symbol of a prosperous community as well as wisdom. The symbol is often used in religion as well. In Christianity it is an emblem of Christ. The bee symbolizes the soul that flies away from the body in the Siberian, Central Asian, and South American Indian traditions. Napoleon even chose the bee as his personal emblem.

This is a large tile measuring 16.5 inches tall. It has deeply incised lines that would be filled with grout when installed to give the panel a mosaic look. The matte blue glaze curdles in places. The back is unmarked, but by the clay body and glazes I suspect this to be Owens Empire, or at least from the Ohio River Valley.

You can find this tile for sale at BungalowBILL.com

Harris Strong Tiles: Summer Sunflowers

Harris Strong Sunflowers

During the hot days of summer the decorating flower of choice is the sunflower. Standing tall in the landscape they give a great pop of color. These vintage tiles by Harris Strong come from the factory as NOS (new old stock) and were never mounted, allowing for a multitude of uses by the new owners.

The images on the tiles are outlined in a thick, rough textured fat lava glaze and are colored in rick, warm colors of browns, yellows and oranges. The panel is tall at 30 inches and makes an impressive focal point. Imagine these framed in an entrance hall as a happy greeting to your guests, installed in a kitchen or bath, or mounted and hung outside to give the garden even more color.

Find this vintage tile panel for sale at BungalowBILL.com

Vintage Flamingo Tile Panel by Mosaic Tile Company

Mid Century Flamingo Tile Panel by the Mosaic Tile Co

The Mosaic Tile Company of Zanesville Ohio made this vintage tile panel featuring a salmon pink flamingo. The first time I saw this design was at one of the first sales dedicated exclusively to tile at the Perrault Rago Gallery in Lambertville New Jersey in the 1990’s. I have never seen another until I acquired this. These panels were entirely hand decorated and each would vary a little from the way the factory artist would draw them at the factory. They would use full size cartoons as reference as they drew each tile. These panels were used to compliment and accent the plain field tiles Mosaic sold. You can see another larger panel by Mosaic here. They were generally marketed to be installed on the back wall of a shower or bathtub or around a pool. Their use today is only limited by your imagination.

Find this for sale at BungalowBILL.com

Mid Century Glass Mosaic Tiles

1950's Glass Mosaic made in Mexico by Genaro

One of the hot trends in tile collecting are glass mosaics. The regular people are buying their glass mosaics at the big box stores and putting them on their kitchen and bathroom walls to match their granite and stainless steel. The people with style are buying vintage Italian glass mosaic panels from the 1950’s and 60’s to decorate their living rooms. Some of these panels were home art projects, others were made by professional artists and studios like Evelyn Ackerman, David Holleman or Mexican studios like Teran, Genaro, and Romanos. Salvador Teran mixed the mosaics with brass to make teas sets, jewelery boxes and trays.

The panel featured this week was made in Mexico by Genaro. It’s an amazing construction of textured squares set in whorls at varying heights, smooth square tesserae of gradient tones set in horizontal lines, ground glass and sharp shards to make the dimensional flowers. This is all accented by gold tiles scattered in the background and placed in rays under the flower bowl that catch the light and makes the panel sparkle when the sun hits it just right. That’s right. These are not your big box glass mosaics.

You can find this for sale at BungalowBILL.com

Royal Delft Tiles

Tall Swan Tile by Royal Delft

 

Early in the 20th Century the Porceylene fles or Royal Delft Company produced some of the finest Arts and Crafts tiles. Based in the Netherlands, Royal Delft tiles were distributed by the Pardee Tile Company of New Jersey in the 1920’s. At this time Pardee was also selling the tiles of the defunct Grueby and Flint Tile companies.

These antique tiles were made in the cuenca process with prominent raised lines separating the distinctive frosty, crystalline matte glazes. The tiles were sold in two versions. The first were called “brick tiles” and were made to be installed onto a wall. The second had a molded brown frame with glazed sides around the image and incised holes at the top. This allowed the tiles to be hung as a piece of art. Because of this these framed tiles survived better are much more common on the antique market.

The tile shown is special in a few ways. It is a larger tile than most, made to be installed, and is an uncommon design. It shows a graceful swan with its wings spread protecting its two cygnets that swim at her breast. It’s a beautiful and graceful tile designed by L.E.F Bodart.

You can find this tile for sale at BungalowBILL.com

Antique Stove Tiles

Antique American Stove Tiles

 

Keeping the home warm in the late 1800’s was a full time job. If you were lucky you had coal delivered then spent hours shoveling it into your furnace. If you weren’t so lucky you had to cut down trees, split wood, let it season, and feed the iron stoves in each room that needed heat . The stove was the gathering spot and focal point in the home, always being cared for, keeping the family warm and fed with hot food.

Some stoves were decorated with tiles inset into cast iron frames. The ceramic nature of the tiles lent itself perfectly to the use in stoves. They could be colorful and remain durable, impervious to the intense heat to which they were exposed. Often the images on the tiles depicted portraits, some dressed in warm winter clothes. Other common images were people tending to fires or gathering kindling.

How can you tell the difference between an antique stove tile and other antique tiles? Stove tiles commonly have a small flattened rim surrounding tile. This acted as a flange to hold the tile into the frame. They also commonly have an arched cutout in this rim which most likely helped in setting tile.

You can find these tiles and more for sale at BungalowBILL.com

San Jose Pottery Cowboy Tiles

San Jose Pottery Cowboy Tiles

 

Even as an adult each Christmas I think back to the toys I had as a child. I remember fondly the suede cowboy jacket with the fringe I got from my aunt Helen when I was 5, or the numerous shiny cap guns and holsters. Yes, I still want to be a cowboy. Not a real cowboy. They work too hard. I want to be one of those singing dude ranch cowboys, dressed in fancy clean cowboy clothes and slowly riding a friendly horse. ( Yeah, I’m from New Jersey. That’s about as cowboy as I can get)

These vintage San Jose tiles remind me of those happy cowboy movies of the 1930’s – 40’s. Simplistic and colorful, the tiles give a romantic version of the West. The tiles are in their original custom made blonde wood frames. The glazing is spot on with no runs often seen in the larger 8 inch San Jose tiles. They make a perfect accent to a cowboy or cowgirl themed room, a ranch with Molesworth or Monterey furniture, or the advanced collector of San Jose.

You can find these tiles for sale at BungalowBILL.com

Johann von Schwarz Art Nouveau Tiles by Carl Luber

Johann von Schwarz Tile by Carl Luber

I first became aware of Johann von Schwarz tiles from a friend and antique tile collector from Germany, who later went on to write the book “Carl Sigmund Luber, His Life and Work as Artist for the Art Nouveau Ceramics of Johann von Schwarz 1896-1906”. Not only did Wolfgang Konig produce a book extensively filled with beautiful images of the tiles and how they were used, he also provided all the information in both German AND English.

The Pre-Raphaelite images of pretty young women are the most sought after items of the Art Nouveau wares produced by the Nuremberg company, and the technique used to produce these tiles and give them life was ingenious. The tiles were press molded by a machine in a cuenca fashion, allowing a speedier production, but the faces were left blank and were painstakingly painted by hand, bringing these beautiful women to life. As you can see, the “Smokey Eye” makeup was popular long before the girls on Jerseylicious made it famous.

You can purchase this tile at BungalowBILL.com