Jackfield, Shropshire

Green men…and other colours

As autumn approaches and the country houses and other attractions that many of my readers like to visit get ready to close their doors for the winter and cover the furniture in dust sheets, what else is there to get us out and about, and stimulate the optic nerve? Plenty of museums stay open all winter, and one of my favourites is the Jackfield Tile Museum, a rich collection of architectural ceramics near Ironbridge (it’s one of the cluster of Ironbridge Museums).* This is not just a Mecca for the tile aficionado. There’s plenty to interest anyone who’s interested in how British design has developed in the 19th and 20th centuries – Gothic revival, art nouveau, modernist, mid-century modern – all the expected movements are here, exemplified in colourful ceramics, many of them so lovingly decorated that they repay a really good look. Not only that, the museum does a good job of explaining how tiles are made and decorated, with video sequences showing encaustic tile making, tube lining, and so on, and, better still, the working Craven Dunill factory is next door, and open to visitors at certain times.

I’ve posted before a couple of my favourite exhibits from Jackfield, some panels from W H Smith shopfronts of the interwar period. Now here’s another winner: a group of silk-screen printed tiles designed by John Piper and made by the Fulham Pottery in 1983. They depict the four seasons but, as the museum’s caption puts it, ‘There is some debate as to which tile depicts which season.’ §

People who like Piper will know that the artist had a fascination with the image of what he called the foliate head – a figure derived from the green man, though Piper’s versions are sometimes female, with foliage emerging from the mouth. This of course is an ancient idea: you can find green men in medieval churches everywhere and the figure of Jack in the Green, who turns up with some Morris sides, their dances marking the turning of the seasons, is clearly a member of the same family. Piper liked such ancient traditions,† applying to them his 20th-century technique which here comprises a combination of bold splashes of colour and flowing, painterly lines. I like this interplay between patches of colour and lines, and I like too the way Piper draws the different mouths of the four heads. I keep thinking of Matisse when I look at these tiles – both the cut-outs, so effectively shown at Tate Modern not long ago, and also the earlier fauvist paintings with their mix of strong colour and bold lines. But whereas Matisse worked on a big scale, Piper has managed to use this sort of boldness on tiles just a few inches across. His designs work well at this size. They’re a little more homely than the French master’s work, true. But looking at the mouth of the final tile, bottom right, Piper has not quite tamed the wild beast.

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*Details and opening times of the museum can be found here.

§I have my own ideas about this, but I’ll let readers decide for themselves how they want to interpret the images.

†’Foliate heads’ also appear on Piper designs for wallpaper and lampshades, and the artist also produced foliate head prints.

Jackfield, Shropshire

Guides to a better world. . . 

I’ve noticed that some of my most popular posts (finding many readers and numerous comments by email and in person) are those I’ve done about the tiled decorations once used by W H Smith on their shop fronts. Few of these now survive in the shops where they started out. I’ve reported before on a glorious duo of examples, one on either side of the W H Smith shop window in Malvern, showcasing postcards and maps, and a single panel on a shop in Bath (this one no longer occupied by Smith’s), depicting Nature Books.

The excellent Jackfield Tile Museum on the site of the Craven Dunnill factory at Jackfield near Ironbridge has a few more of these wonderful panels. Today I’m sharing two of these, both, like the others, produced by Carter and Co of Poole in the late-1920s, to designs by an unknown artist. One is a further, rather different panel advertising guidebooks. This one is less dramatic than the Malvern Postcards panel (which has a looming castle tower and stunning night-time colours). Instead it has a more restrained, perhaps faded, palette, and shows a couple looking across a stylised landscape of hills and trees. There’s enough detail on the woman’s dress to suggest elegance; her male companion is delineated in a few simple touches of brown. They look out over blue and green hills, as if they’ve found their way using one of Smith’s guidebooks and are now drinking in the view. The overall effect is like a faded Brian Cook book jacket: redolent of England between the World Wars and full of topographical promise.

My second example from Jackfield, Ladies' Papers, is another epitome of narrow-waisted poise. The turned head, the waving arm, the hand lifting the dress just enough to show the heel stepping out across the grass, the point of the other shoe just visible – there’s plenty to catch the eye. Once more, the setting is very sketchily drawn, but the pale colours set off the figure well.

As you can probably tell, I like these panels a great deal. Combined with Smith’s classical lettering (by Eric Gill), they project a sort of accessible sophistication that must have been right up Smith’s street. W H Smith’s were then, as now, more than just newspaper merchants. They sold books and maps, and their range of magazines was a large one. They hoped to remind potential customers that you could buy more than your Daily Express and a packet of cigarettes at their counters. There was self-improvement on sale here, and books that could guide you on a route to history or literature, or could tell you about the most interesting places to visit. Their shops could be windows into a better world.