The Tile Club

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2000 by Ronald G. Pisano

Barely a year after the Tile Club came into being its two English founders left the United States. No tiles by Wimbridge have yet been discovered and only one by Paris is known to have survived (pl. I). Of all the extant tiles made by club members it is closest in design and conception to its English precedents. About the same time, Abbey left for England on an illustrating assignment and returned to the United States only intermittently thereafter. However, before leaving Abbey helped plan the second summer sketching trip for the club. Again the group selected a region rich in English colonial history, this time in upstate New York, and again the trip was sponsored by Scribner's Monthly in exchange for an illustrated account. This was published in the March 1880 issue under the title "The Tile Club Aflot." [15] The club traveled on a barge sumptuously decorated with trappings borrowed from the studios of two recent inductees. William Merritt Chase and Napoleon Sarony (1821-1896). They reached their destinat ion, Lake Champlain, via the Hudson River and the Northern Canal (now the Champlain Canal), visiting forts and battlegrounds of the American Revolution along the way, including one where they witnessed a reenactment of the attack of the British General John Burgoyne on the American revolutionaries in July 1777. Once, while moored to the riverbank, the club members traced the decorative pattern of shadows cast by a willow tree on the awning of the barge, creating an effect they declared to be "superior to anything designed by William Morris." [16] But the Anglo-American bond was beginning to loosen with the advent of new members who had neither strong connections to England nor any particular interest in English decorative wares. In fact, of the thirty-nine illustrations in the March 1880 article about the trip, none major reference to the member painting tiles appeared in an article published in Harper's Weekly in January 1880. [17] In the accompanying illustration by Reinhart (Fig. 2) the club members are shown at work in Sarony's studio during one of their weekly meetings (center pancel) surrounded by a border made up of painted tiles (see PL II ) and plates (a new addition to their repertory).

The club's third summer outing took place in 1880, when the members traveled to the North Shore of Long Island to set up camp in an abandoned shipwreck. The trip proved to be uninspiring and was aborted after a vicious attack by mosquitoes. The following year they postponed their summer trip to await the arrival from London of Abbey, his friend Alfred Parson (who was made an honorary member), and Francis David Millet (see Fig. 3), a recently elected member. [18] Perhaps in deference to the London contingent, the group selected the eighteenth-century English shipbuilding settlement of Port Jefferson, Long Island, as its destination. The weather was appropriately British, with man, but the traveling artists found ample subject matter in the old port, where even the fences were made from parts of old ships. On rainy evenings the group gathered by the fire in their inn to be regaled with stories by Abbey, Parsons, and Miller about recent developments in the arts in England, including the progress of the irascib le James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), and their friend and fellow club member George Henry Boughton (1833-1905).