Description:
Industrial made square tile, decorated in polychrome overglaze enamels, image depicted are two large mushrooms, with several smaller mushrooms below, on a grassy mound, the image is painted in brown, yellow, and gray enamel colors, the tile is signed "MGN." On the reverse of the tile, there is the cast marks, "MOSAIC" in an oval, "553" in a rectangle of four blocks, "B172" in a rectangle of four blocks, ""LC3" in a rectangle of four blocks, also "MADE IN U.S.A." There is also an inscription in black pencil which has a slight sheen or glaze over it, "NORMAN/CERAMICS/OLD DEERFIELD". The Mosaic Tile Company was started by Herman C. Mueller (1854-1941), a German-born artist and scuplture and chemist Karl Langenbeck who left the American Encaustic Tiling Company in 1894 in Zanesville, Ohio (later a second location in Matawan, New Jersey). Many types of plain and ornamental tiles were made until 1959; the company stopped production in 1967. This object was probably made by Marcia Gaylord Norman, the wife of Edward "Ted" Norman, who worked as potters at the Bloody Brook Tavern in Deerfield, Massachusetts, in the 1930s - 1950's. Marcia specialized in the production of tiles and eventually illlustrated many books on birds and wildlife of Cape Cod. These tiles were found in the Allen House and may have been purchased and used by the Flynts.
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2016.806.3 |
