William de Morgan

William Gaunt and M.D.E. Clayton-Stamm, William de Morgan, London, 1971.
Roger Pinkham, Catalogue of Pottery by William de Morgan, (Victoria & Albert Museum), London, 1973.
Jon Catleugh, William de Morgan Tiles, London, 1983.

Martin Greenwood, The Designs of William de Morgan, Shepton Beauchamp, 1989.

Tiles had long been a mainstay of the de Morgan pottery's production. From 1877 - 1881, de Morgan worked on Lord Leighton's exotic Leighton House in London, embellishing the staircase hall with brilliant blue tiles, and augmenting Leighton's own collection with Isnik-pattern designs in the Arab Hall.   A commission to design tile panels for Tsar Alexander II's yacht, the Lividia, followed.

The scale, subject and quality of the present panel suggest that it may be linked to a large commission for decorative panels, initially for six vessels, which de Morgan received in 1882 from the Peninsula and Orient Steam Navigation Company (P & O).  The invitation gave de Morgan free reign to indulge his passion for the sea.  He had already taken to overwintering in Florence for the sake of his health and his preference was to journey by sea rather than overland.  Indeed, in her 1922 biography William de Morgan and His Wife, Mrs A.M.W. Stirling (Evelyn de Morgan's sister) quoted de Morgan as requesting `I should like to be buried at sea during a glorious sunrise off the Islands of Majorca and Minorca'.   

Ships, sea serpents and waves are recurrent themes on single tiles and smaller tile panels,  but on this large scale they become freer and more vibrant.  Surviving drawings for the P & O panels, now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, depict scenes inspired by the lands to be visited by the ships ( cf Greenwood, p. 174, pl. 1507).  It is thought that all the original panels perished when the ships were either sunk or scrapped although some duplicate panels are thought to survive.

The financial rewards expected from the P & O commission were not immediately forthcoming.  Tiles were supplied for a total of twelve ships, double the number originally imagined, from 1882-1900. If they had expected an easing of their perilous financial state (the Leighton House project, although high profile, left the pottery with a shortfall of £500), de Morgan and his partner, the architect Halsey Ricardo, were to be disappointed.   Despite Ricardo's insistence that 'we must strain every nerve over the P & O business for at present we scarcely seem to have any other',  de Morgan himself commented '....I suppose as soon as the ship tiles are well out to sea we can ask for soomat (sic) on acccount.'