Page 92 - Bulletin 9 2005

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more than 100 tile and relief panels, excluding work done for private houses.

The individual tile designs from the earlier public commissions were still being offered as

part of the studio's standard range of patterns some two decades later, appearing in a hand-
painted catalogue produced during the Linnware period. These tiles were popular for

decorating bathrooms, kitchens, nurseries, verandas, window-sills, entrance halls and
fireplaces in private houses, and were also used in hotels, banks and other buildings. The

catalogue reveals that during this period the studio was offering a range of at least 25

different series, some of which contained up to 28 individual subjects. The series shown in
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the catalogue include those designed for the Johannesburg railway station as well as the
circus and nursery rhyme tiles created for Groote Schuur Hospital.

Although individual tiles and panels comprised the studio’s main output of architectural

ceramics, it also made a variety of Della Robbia work and sculptural items for hospitals,
cinemas, schools and private houses. For a period it collaborated closely with the Durban

sculptor Mary Stainbank, producing modelled work from plaster moulds supplied by
Stainbank. Other architectural products included glazed decorative air bricks, light fittings,

wall fountains, and door furniture.

Whereas the studio's decorative styles and ceramic techniques were derived from European

sources, the pictorial content of most of the individual tiles and panels was explicitly South
African. As mentioned before, considerable research was done to ensure accuracy of content,

and this sometimes involved extended field trips to far-flung parts of the country to sketch the
required subjects. Thelma Currie notes, for example, that she visited isolated villages in the

eastern Orange Free State to obtain accurate references for the Sotho architecture and dress

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depicted in the Fouriesburg post office panels. Stylistically the studio's designs were
influenced not only by historical sources such as delftware and the Moorish tiles in Spain, but

also by contemporary design trends overseas. This is particularly apparent in Thelma Currie

and Audrey Frank’s nursery and circus tiles, which are very similar to the work done in the
1920s by Dora Batty for Carter, Stabler and Adams. The tile designs created at

Olifantsfontein are also informed to a large extent by the historical and political forces of the
time. The public commissions, in particular, reflect many of the iconographic preoccupations

of the country’s ruling minority (such as the European colonization of the sub-continent and
the Great Trek) - a factor that will make it increasingly difficult in South Africa’s changed