Week Nineteen: Westraven Cloisonne Tile of the Madonna and Child

May 12, 2019

Week Nineteen: Westraven Cloisonne Tile of the Madonna and Child

This week's Marian-themed image for the month of May from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection is a modern variation on a traditional genre of decorative art from the Netherlands: ceramic wall tiles. During the 17th century Golden Age of Dutch culture, flat, double-glazed, clay plaques with religious themes decorated humble cottages and stately homes, often set into fireplaces where they were used to teach children the stories of the Bible. If didactic antique tiles had appeal for Calvinist Protestants, tiles like this one of the Madonna and Child, which came into fashion at the beginning of the 20th century, were made primarily for a Roman Catholic market by the Westraven porcelain factory in Utrecht. They were designed not to be plastered into walls but hung on them as art pieces, created in the cloisonne style where raised lines in the ceramics define the images much like the metallic edges in cloisonne enamel work. This ceramic piece of the Virgin Mary and Jesus is one of four in the gallery of the Dutch Cloisonne Tiles page in the Schools of Sacred Art section. (John Kohan)