Art Tile in Cleveland’s Carnegie Libraries

Art tile

The interiors of Cleveland’s early Carnegie Libraries reflect the aesthetics of the Arts and Crafts movement, with fireplace inglenooks, mottos carved into mantels, and hand-decorated art tiles installed around fireplaces in the children’s reading rooms. The first fireplace tiles were commissioned prior to 1906 from the Malin sisters, a family of Cleveland china painters with a studio in the Arcade. The sisters painted three sets of story tile depicting literary themes: King Arthur stories, Greek myths, and Shakespeare plays. The tile were designed to be removable, and slipped into frames around the fireplace. Librarians rotated the story tile sets among the branches in coordination with story telling cycles held around the fireplace.

Only the set of Shakespeare tile survives today. It is on view in the Main Library Literature Department and in the Library’s digital image collection.

When the Carnegie West Branch was built in 1910, the Library placed an order with the Grueby Faience Company of Boston for eight ceramic tiles, inspired by Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland, for the children’s room fireplace (The eight were selected from a series of eighteen Alice tile designs.) Fourteen of Grueby’s Alice tile were shown at the Chicago Art Institute in 1908 as part of an Arts and Crafts exhibition.

The tiles remain in their original installation in the children’s room at the Carnegie West branch. Grueby's distinctive matte green glaze is used as the background for the story tile figures and also for the solid green tile used as the fireplace surround.

The South Branch was built in 1911 and has two fireplaces decorated with ceramic tile made by the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The children’s room fireplace includes medieval designs in red clay with a blue or dark green glaze. An author who used this branch as a child asked for rubbings of the tile, because she wanted to describe them in a story she was writing.

You can view all the story tile images in the CPL Digital Image Collection here.

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