Press-Molded Hearth Fitting, Dipped and Renamed

Read the seam before the sunflowers — the faint vertical register down the center where the press-mold closed — because that quiet line tells the truth the blooms are dressed to conceal. The relief was never coaxed up by a thumb; it was struck from a die, and the two flower-heads rotate against their leaves in a unit built to abut a neighbor and dissolve into a wall of identical neighbors. There is real loveliness, and I would not pretend otherwise: the thick olive glaze, dipped rather than brushed, gathers in the petal troughs and breaks thin over the seed bosses, pooling toward bottle-green in the leaf shadows the way the warm running glazes of English majolica do, and the bloom is competently set, its head answered diagonally so the square reads as composition and not merely as stamp. The crazing has webbed the surface into a fine net, which the trade would soon learn to call character. And yet the beveled mounting edge confesses the purpose — to be cemented into a hearth surround, ordered by the crate, chosen off a sample card. What touches me, gently, is the firm's small instinct to set the word Art in front of the plain name of a building-fitting, as though dipping and pulling the same flower a thousand times could lodge a singular hand in cement-work. My own makers would understand the relief perfectly — give the surface away, let it repeat, let it weather — but they would never confuse the mold with the maker, and would smile to find the catalog asked to carry the price of genius. The striving is endearing, the way a child insists the toy breathes. So look where the glaze ran heaviest at the lower right and froze a pale comma of light against a petal: the single thing the die did not author, an accident of the bath the firm could not have repeated if it tried — which is precisely why it was never the thing being sold. The invention here was the name, struck once, in front; everything visible below it came by the crate, priced as inspiration because inspiration priced well. — NLR