William De Morgan - Once in a generation panel - sold for £65,000

William de Morgan – A monumental and important architectural tile panel from the Fulham Period circa 1888 to 1898, decorated in the Persian style with large central flowering plant in trefoil cartouche flanked by perched fabulous birds, writhing serpents and stylised trees, within a field of flowering branches and scrolling foliate sprigs, in brilliant turquoise, green, purple and tonal blue glaze, decorated with over sixty four 15cm x 15cm tiles with further slender border tiles to the outer frame. Comprised of three slabs made up in the factory, backed mostly with blank De Morgan tiles, one panel reverse includes four William De Morgan decorated tiles. 

Carrying a pre-sale auction estimate of £50,000 to £60,000 this is one of the, if not THE most significant pieces by this artist to ever be offered for sale. With the kind assistance of the family we can share the research which brings the piece to life and tells more of the tale of this ceramic masterpiece!

Provenance of the Higgins tile panel by William De Morgan

This tile panel, made of three large slabs, was without doubt made by William De Morgan, both on technical and stylistic grounds, also the tiles making up the back of the slabs are a mixture of marked Sands End blank tiles, and patterned waster tiles from the works. The panel dates from the 1888-1898 period, perhaps later rather than earlier in this era.

When the tile panel was sold at auction in 1977-78, an auction catalogue (Sotheby’s) gave the provenance as ‘Glebe House, Chelsea’ and having been owned by ‘the novelist Henrietta Leslie’. The panel was sold by the ‘owners of Glebe House’, who had acquired the property after Henrietta Leslie’s death.

Glebe House, also 63 Glebe Place, does have an important connection with the history of William De Morgan and a provenance through this route seems likely.

Provenance of the panel:

• Installed in 1890s in Glebe House, 63 Glebe Place, Chelsea, by Reginald Blunt, manager of the De Morgan works.
• c.1910 – 1946 , Glebe House owned by the Raphael/Schutz family, wealth in the family coming from merchant banking.
• The sculptor William McMillan lived at 63 Glebe Place in 1921, probably rented from the Raphael/Schutze family.
• c1946–1974, the writer David Carver lived at Glebe House. He was an author and Secretary of the international PEN literary society.
• Around 1978 the panel was sold at auction to Richard Dennis, Kensington Church Street.
• 1978 the panel was purchased from Richard Dennis by Peter Higgins, surgeon and ceramics collector. He lived in Newcastle under Lyme, Aldsworth (Gloucestershire) and lastly Oxford.
• Peter Higgins died in 2024 and ownership passed to his children.

Glebe House is on Glebe Place in Chelsea. If you go up Cheyne Row from the River Thames and pass De Morgan’s home and site of his first pottery at the top of the Cheyne Row, Glebe Row is almost a continuation of Cheyne Row – Glebe House is thus just a few yards from De Morgan’s house and the original works (though by the 1890s the works was in Fulham and De Morgan had moved elsewhere in Chelsea).

Reginald Blunt was secretary to Cheyne Hospital and by his own account ‘a Jack of All Trades, engineer, businessman, man of letters and local historian’.  He wrote a series of books on the history of Chelsea that form the basis of the modern history of the area. Importantly, he also worked for the father-in-law of Halsey Ricardo, the architect who was De Morgan’s partner from 1888 onwards. Doubtless he knew the De Morgan family through this connection. From 1897 to 1907 he was Manager of De Morgan’s works at Sands End. This was a difficult period for the factory, Ricardo dissolved his partnership with De Morgan in 1898 and a partnership was formed with the Passenger brothers and Frank Iles (painters and fireman at the works). De Morgan called Blunt his ‘Chancellor of the Exchequer’, and certainly many financial storms were weathered before the closure of the Fulham works in 1907.

In an unpublished autobiography Blunt wrote of De Morgan and Ricardo, ‘Two more attractive and delightful directors with whom to co-operate it would have been hard to find…De Morgan’s generous trust in his Manager was really touching and there was sometimes nothing left in the treasury to pay that Manager’s reputed salary he was free, and was continually urged, to take it out in pots and panels, to the occasional enrichment of Glebe House’. Thus it seems likely that this panel was payment in kind to Blunt.

The Raphael family owned Glebe House from around 1910. Arthur Lewis Raphael came from a family of merchant bankers. However he was an addicted gambler and died when young. Arthur’s wife was the painter Mary F Raphael. She was also was a suffragist and pacifist and together with her daughter Gladys invited Emmeline Pankhurst to give an address from Glebe House in 1914, in defiance of the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ that tried to prevent suffragettes from speaking publicly (the Museum of London has a photograph of Pankhurst speaking from the balcony). Glebe House was apparently presented as a safe haven for suffragettes released from prison.

Their daughter Gladys was a writer and published under the pseudonym Henrietta Leslie. Her birth name was Gladys Henrietta Raphael, by marriage she became Gladys Henrietta Mendl and then Gladys Henrietta Schütze.

The 1921 census shows Glebe House as occupied by the sculptor William McMillan, he was presumably renting as the person responsible for the return was Dr Schutze. It is known that Gladys/Henrietta Leslie was not living there at this time, and she died abroad in 1946.

It seems probably that the author David Carver owned Glebe House after it was sold in the late 1940s until his death in 1974. He was General Secretary and Treasurer of P.E.N., an international society for ‘Poets, Essayists and Novelists’. He died in 1974, so that the sale of the tile panel later in the 1970s is consistent with dispersion of assets after his death.

In recent times, Glebe House has been gutted and rebuilt, though the frontage is original. Its serves as a small art gallery.

SOLD ON THURSDAY 13TH MARCH FOR £65,000 AGAINST AN ESTIMATE OF £50,000 - 80,000

CLICK HERE TO VIEW WILLIAM DE MORGAN PANEL

Posted on 4 March 2025 in: Auction life