CHAPTER XIX.
TILES FOR DECORATIVE EFFECT.
N   EXT to paintings, etchings, and engravings, nothing
can be more effective for wall decoration than artis-
tically modelled tiles, in which color and shading
are replaced by contour. The tile designer combines the
arts of the painter and the sculptor, and his ceramic
creations, partaking both of the nature of pictures and of
delicate carvings, are well deserving of a place among the
objects of art which adorn the dwellings of the cultured.
It is a remarkable fact that, while the art of tile
making in this country is practically not more than fifteen
years old, the United States to-day excels the world in the
manufacture of relief figure tiles and tile panels. True it
is that we have had the benefit of the skill and knowledge
of some of the foremost modellers of Europe, who have
come to our shores, but we have also developed a number
of American sculptors, whose work, in this direction, has
fully equalled the best that has yet been accomplished.
Within the past year or so we have progressed with such
marvellous rapidity in the mechanical, as well as the artis-
tic, treatment of clays and glazes, that we are now able to
p)roduce tile panels of eighteen to thirty inches in length,
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