Fireplace Tiles, 1911 (glazed earthenware)

Made in collaboration with the Art Academy of the American Woman's League University City, Missouri, 1909–1911. In this set of fireplace tiles a panoramic landscape combines a graphic clarity and matte-textured glaze palette that embody Arts and Crafts design. The landscape frieze of flowing line and glowing color is surrounded by nearly two hundred blue-glazed tiles, making the fireplace the focal point in the St. Louis, Missouri house for which it was made. Frederick Hurten Rhead was trained in England, but in 1902 he emigrated to the United States, where he enjoyed a celebrated career as a ceramist, educator, and designer. In 1910 and 1911 Rhead joined the internationally renowned ceramic faculty of the Art Academy of the American Woman's League in University City, Missouri. There Rhead, sometimes working with his wife Agnes, also a trained potter, made vases and tiles decorated by incising designs in the damp clay and filling the areas with colorful matte glazes. This technique could produce bold compositions of simplified shapes and was ideally suited to rendering landscape, one of Rhead's favorite subjects for ceramic decoration.