Ernest Batchelder

Ernlest A. Batchelder (1875~1957) was one of the strongest design personalities in American art-tile production. Born in New Hampshire and educated in Massachusetts, he also trained at the Birmingham School of Arts and Crafts in Britain. He became associated with various American crafts schools, eventually setting up his own school of arts and crafts in Pasadena, California, in 1909. Although he was a writer and potter, he is best known as a tile designer, one very much influenced by the Gothic Revival and the English Arts and Crafts Movement. Among his distinctive cast-ceramic tiles were images of medievalized lions, Art Nouveau peacocks, leaping hares and deer, and Japoniste trees and landscapes. Although very much akin in spirit and subject matter to the painted tiles of William De Morgan, the relief tiles of Batchelder are very much American, with their strong, moulded-relief designs. By 1930, the fashion for the art tile in the United States had diminished to the point where such tiles were regarded as merely utilitarian objects. The Depression forced many commercial firms to close, with art potters turning to university teaching to ensure their financial survival. Indeed, some American tile-producing potteries are still open -- and studio potters still create lovely tiles -- but there is nothing like the popular demand and consequent mass- production that existed in the six decades encompassing 1870 and 1930. However, the significance of American tiles in the history of tile-making has been recognized and interest in them has grown considerably in the last decade, as several museum exhibitions and commercial publications have shown.