Flowers from the Netherlands, then

Dutch earthenware tile flowers Albany Institute

Decorative arts break: The earthenware tiles above are from the collection of the Albany Institute -- they date to around 1625 and they were made in the Netherlands. We love the illustrations of the flowers and the blue-patterned background. If you head over to the Albany Institute's online collections you can zoom in and see all the little details.

These pieces are tin-glazed, which gives them that characteristic shiny white background. The style was hugely popular in the Netherlands around this time -- the country made huge numbers of them. And a specific version of this technique, famously using blue patterns on white, became associated with the Dutch city of Delft. The style of the tiles above is called faience.

These tiles were a gift to the museum from Mabel Brady Garvan. She and her husband -- Francis Patrick Garvan, a prominent attorney and chemical industry official during the first quarter of the 20th century -- were collectors of all sorts of decorative objects. Many of those pieces are in the The Mabel Brady Garvan Collection at Yale.

The Albany Institute has all sorts of pottery and earthenware in its collection, many examples of which are posted in the museum's online collection if you'd like to gawk.

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