The most distinctive architectural sculpture in Merseyside and Cheshire came from Birkenhead’s Della Robbia Pottery, which took its name from, and imitated the technique of, the Florentine Renaissance sculptor, Luca Della Robbia (1399/1400–1482) whose workshop produced sculptures in polychrome enamelled terracotta, a cheaper and easier substitute for marble and bronze. Della Robbia’s earliest documented use of this medium was a Resurrection lunette in the Duomo, Florence (c.1442–45). At the end of his life his flourishing workshop passed to Luca’s nephew, Andrea and thence to his sons.
In Britain, terracotta figurative and decorative ornament became widely used in the 1880s and 1890s on the façades and in the interiors of city-centre buildings. In Liverpool, the glaring terracotta decoration of Alfred Waterhouse’s Victoria Building for the University of 1889–92 might have been a direct inspiration for the Della Robbia Pottery in Birkenhead. Further possible influences were a selection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian ‘Della Robbia Ware’ exhibited at the Spring Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, in 1894 (catalogue nos. 506–15), loaned by the South Kensington Museum, and Doulton Pottery’s experimentation with Polychrome Stoneware architectural panels and friezes in Lambeth during the 1890s. Another source for the Della Robbia Pottery was the late nineteenth-century revival of vernacular timber-framed construction in Cheshire, favoured by John Douglas, Edward Ould and the Arts and Crafts movement, which introduced a new interest in the associated craft of pargetting. This included making figurative and pictorial plaster reliefs for the exteriors of buildings, surviving examples including the lodge of Ould’s Bidston Court of 1891 in Birkenhead, which anticipate Della Robbia Pottery ceramic friezes, but are yet more fragile in technique.
Architectural sculpture produced by the Della Robbia Pottery comprised polychrome glazed terracotta, generally in the form of low-relief tiles assembled to form a scene or composition. There were technical difficulties in the manufacture of larger elements, especially if they were to be for exterior use, which probably accounted for the pottery’s relative lack of sculptural success in this area.
The Pottery, founded on 9 December 1893, under the direction of Conrad Dressler and Harold Rathbone, had capital of £5,000. Production began in 1894 from studios in Price Street and Argyle Street just off Hamilton Square in Birkenhead. Planning had begun earlier. In the late summer of 1893 Dressler and Rathbone had visited G.F. Watts, described the project to him, and obtained his support. Letters recommending the Pottery from Watts, Frederic Leighton, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, William Holman Hunt and Walter Crane were published. Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria, and a talented sculptor, gave the pottery royal support. In July 1894 she bought the most expensive of the Della Robbia vases at the Home Arts and Industries Association Exhibition in London and in 1898 she visited the Birkenhead studios and works with the Duke of Westminster, who was both a major shareholder and a great advocate of terracotta decoration on the houses of his London and Chester estates.
Rathbone, the manager, was a painter not a sculptor, and Dressler, a well-established London sculptor, seems to have been at first the dominant artistic figure. The Pottery became best known for its domestic wares, especially vases, bowls, jugs and plates, although initially the intention was to concentrate on fountains and on architectural reliefs, figures, groups and friezes for the interiors and exteriors of buildings. This was the department for which Dressler was immediately responsible. The Liverpool Mercury reported in February 1894 that he had ‘taken up his residence in Birkenhead. His object is to revive the making of coloured and glazed terracotta ware for architectural purposes after the manner of Della Robbia’. The Builder had given a more exact account in January: ‘The object is the production of an architectural decoration in earthenware with figure or ornamental design partially coloured and covered with a glaze or enamel capable of withstanding the effects of the English climate. The promoters, recognizing the fact that the use of steam power has a tendency to paralyze artistic development […] intend that the principal work in the pottery shall, so far as possible, be done by hand.’ Four months later the Liverpool Mercury emphasized the Arts and Crafts element in the new pottery: ‘In the architecture of the future ceramic art is destined to play the chief role in decoration […] The works at Price Street, though modest in size, are, we believe the first that have been commenced in this country […] The upstairs studio is covered on all sides with busts and models, plaster casts, copies and casts from life, and groups in every stage of development. Among other productions in progress is a fountain in the Italian Renaissance […] style of the Della Robbias. The height is 12 feet and in the centre of the tympanum is a group of a mother and two children representing Maternity. The basin is supported on three legs with lions’ heads and the water will be delivered through the mouth of a dolphin which is being teased by two baby boys. This will be coloured in the Della Robbia style in white, blue, yellow and green and will form a handsome ornament for a public garden. A number of elegant and useful articles have been produced, such as candlesticks, jardinières [etc …] This undertaking differs from others in the fact that the articles are coloured and modelled by the artists themselves, instead of in the usual way of manufacturers employing craftsmen. It is a revival of a medieval art adapted to modern uses.’
Harold Rathbone’s father, Philip, who presumably provided much of the original capital for the Pottery, was keen to provide sculpture for public and other buildings in British cities in order to encourage municipal pride and civic confidence. In December 1895 an article in the Liverpool Mercury entitled ‘Street Decoration in Liverpool’ commented: ‘Very few of us can expect to live in houses built of polished granite, porphyry or jasper; but we may expect to see those we have embellished with enamelled terracotta, Della Robbia or glass mosaic.’ Della Robbia sculpture was designed partly by the Pottery’s own artists in the Della Robbia Birkenhead studios and partly – despite Arts and Crafts principles – by more celebrated London artists including Anning Bell, Edward Burne-Jones, Benjamin Creswick and above all Ellen Mary Rope. Rathbone had been a pupil of Ford Madox Brown in the mid-1880s. Brown died in 1893, but Rathbone owned a considerable collection of his works, especially his cartoons, and he used some characteristically idiosyncratic designs by Brown for a considerable number of Della Robbia panels and plaques.
The opening of the Liverpool School of Architecture and Applied Art in 1894–95 with its strong Arts and Crafts Movement bias encouraged manufactures combining the fine and applied arts, and many of their students worked at the Pottery. Indeed, Dressler was deeply convinced by the ideology of the Arts and Crafts Movement. His lecture, ‘The Curse of Machinery’, published by the Liverpool Ruskin Society in 1896, was delivered to various local groups and infuriated the Manchester cotton manufacturers. He insisted that only local clay should be used, enabling the excavators to take a personal interest in the results of their labour. Dressler left the Pottery after about 18 months, having quarrelled with Rathbone apparently over the import of clay from outside the local area. Giovanni Carlo Manzoni, another sculptor, took over the architectural side of the pottery, but he had neither the reputation nor the forcefulness of Dressler and this part of the business declined in importance.
Della Robbia pottery was exhibited extensively in Britain and overseas. It appeared in London at the Arts and Crafts Exhibitions, especially those held in 1896 and 1899, at the Home Arts and Industries Association Exhibitions between 1894 and 1900 and at S.J. Waring and Sons’ galleries in Oxford Street in 1897. It was shown in Manchester at the Arts and Crafts Exhibitions held there in 1895 and in Liverpool at the Autumn and Spring Exhibitions held at the Walker Art Gallery between 1894 and 1906. It was displayed at the great Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, at the Cork International Exhibition of 1902, and at the People’s Palace in Glasgow in 1904. However, these exhibitions concentrated on the domestic ware, and the large architectural reliefs were never widely popular despite substantial commissions from, among others, the Liverpool Domestic Mission, the Unitarian Church, Liscard, Carnatic House, Liverpool (panels now in the Williamson Art Gallery, Birkenhead), the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, the Liverpool Museum, and the Savoy Hotel, London. Much of this work derived from Rathbone’s extensive personal contacts. Some Della Robbia tiles can still be seen on the fronts of houses on the Wirral, but they were probably installed through the recommendations of Della Robbia staff or architects living in the same street.
In 1900 the Pottery merged with Emile de Caluwé’s ‘Architectural and Ecclesiastical’ sculpture firm of 36 Oxford Street, Liverpool, forming the Della Robbia Pottery and Marble Company, probably in search for orders from churches. In that year a Della Robbia panel entitled Christ Blessing Little Children was exhibited at the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition (catalogue no. 1460), signed by Harold Rathbone; it is probably the rather severe and hieratic plaque now in the Baptistery of St John’s Church, Sandiway, Cheshire. In 1902, the Pottery exhibited a gilded terracotta seated statue of St Peter and a ‘Holy Water Font’ with a crucifix and lily design at the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition, indicating that they were targeting Catholic churches (catalogue nos. 1428 and 1434). Religious subject-matter was not entirely new, Rathbone had contributed two fonts to the 1895 Autumn Exhibition, one decorated with two angels crowning the Virgin and the other with the Crucifixion (catalogue nos. 1296 and 1297). In 1905 no architectural sculpture was shown there, and the pottery’s display was confined to plaques and domestic ware, although in the same year the Glasgow City Museum and Art Gallery bought 15 pieces, including two important panels by Dressler, for a total of £40. In the same year, Philip Rathbone’s widow, Jane, who had apparently been financing the Pottery, died and by then business was facing severe difficulties. The Pottery closed in 1906; the Rathbone family reportedly lost £10,000 from running it.
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Emma Roberts, 2012; revised, Joanna Barnes, November 2025