Tile Show Set for 2018
By Eve M. Kahn, Antiques Writer for the New York Times
January 28, 2016
A tile panel designed by Roswell F. Putnam for Hartford Faience will be part of the new Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement in St. Petersburg, Fl. Collection of the Two Red Roses Foundation, Palm Harbor, Florida.
A niche museum under construction in Florida is already publishing news of its future contents. The Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, scheduled to open in 2018 in St. Petersburg, will display the collection of the Two Red Roses Foundation, created in 2004 by the pharmaceuticals magnate Rudy Ciccarello. In the last two years, the foundation has produced catalogs of its furniture and metalwork, and its new study, "The Endless Possibilities: American Arts and Crafts Tile From the Two Red Roses Foundation," by the decorative-arts historian Susan J. Montgomery, reveals some colorful back stories of pottery.
The Two Red Roses Foundation has rescued tiled fireplaces, fountains and walls from buildings that were being renovated or dismantled. It has also acquired wooden tables, metal bookends, trivets and advertising signs that contain clay tiles. Among the recurring images on the glazed surfaces are knights, American colonial streetscapes, sailing ships, owls, pine groves, water lilies, misty waterfronts and characters from Alice Adventures in Wonderland and Cinderella. The manufacturers represented include largely forgotten companies like Hartford Faience of Connecticut, which made plaques with vistas of sailing ships for the South Ferry subway station in New York.
A 1910 panel for an overmantel, by Frederick Hurten Rhead, will be part of the new Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement in St. Petersburg, Fl. Collection of the Two Red Roses Foundation
Mr. Ciccarello said that public interest in the objects, even before the museum opens, was healthy for scholarship. “I never understood why I should be secretive”, he said.
The foundation purchases have occasionally made headlines in the antiques trade press. At Rago auction house, the foundation has paid six-figure prices for plaques made in the 1910s that depict peacocks and fish. They were designed by the British-born ceramist Frederick H. Rhead, who is said to have delayed dinner parties when fish about to be served interested him as design precedents.
A volume about the foundation’s lamps and light fixtures is due later this year. Studies of its woodblock prints, ceramics and photographs are in progress.