DELFT - SEA CREATURES
English and Dutch tiles of the seventeenth century
featured stories and legends brought home by sailors from their travels
around the world. Designs were also based on creatures from mythical
and classical stories. Our collection of Sea Creatures is mostly based
on Homer's Odyssey and the imagery
portrayed reflects what was generally known about the Odyssey in the seventeenth
century, rather than what we know today.
This range is a perfect choice
for the bathroom or a house by the sea.
Poseidon
Delft tiles depicting fantastic sea creatures began appearing in Holland at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Extensive sea travel gave rise to stories about mermaids and sea serpents and these provided ideal source material for artists constantly looking for new subjects to paint.
Greek mythology offered a wealth of images for illustration and many of the characters and stories were related to the sea.
Poseidon, Zeus, Europa and Thetis, regularly appeared on blue and white tiles. This new opportunity provided a very different image to paint in the form of the sea, and gave tile painters a different way to lay out the design of a tile. Previously, most designs had been centre decorations with decorative corners but this new subject gave the opportunity to paint across the tile and to use the image of the sea in a stylised manner.
Our collection of Sea Creatures is based on Greek mythological characters. The twelve tiles in our standard collection reflect these figures but we also decorate our delft tiles with fish, shells and other sea images. We offer themed border and corner tiles to complement and we have included a simple sea tile in this collection to enable sea creatures to be placed at intervals in a long horizontal frieze.
A typical sea tile installation created recently, was for a wood burning stove surround on board a classic boat. The images were of a variety of sea vessels, both ancient and modern and also included mermaids, deep-sea divers and a variety of sea creatures and fishes.
We can create new tiles in this style, to suit a customer's requirements.