Innovation and Revivalism: Powell & Sons’ Opus Sectile Mosaic

Abstract

The late-nineteenth century saw a flourishing of mosaic in British architecture. Both traditional and innovative methods of mosaic-making were deployed in a wide variety of contexts from the 1850s onwards: in domestic, public, sacred, and secular buildings; for interior and exterior decoration; at large and small scales. Widespread experimentation with new materials, facilitated by the affordability of energy-intensive manufacturing processes, was complemented by a growing body of scholarship on the history of mosaics. Opus sectile was a novel type of opaque glass for mosaic-making that was developed by glassmakers James Powell & Sons in the mid-1860s. This new material quickly gained in popularity and was used in a variety of architectural projects throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries (for a list see Dennis Hadley, Powell’s Opus Sectile Locations [Coventry: Tiles & Architectural Ceramics Society, 2018]). Through a discussion of the development of opus sectile and its use in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, the article explores its place in a landscape of both technological innovation and stylistic revivalism.

Introduction

Widespread interest in mosaics among British architects provided fertile ground for leading glass manufacturers James Powell & Sons to introduce a new decorative technique in the 1860s by using opaque glass tiles in various shapes to create designs. This new material soon came to be known as opus sectile. The versatility of Powell & Sons’ new material, and their ambitious attempts to demonstrate its aptness for use in a wide range of architectural contexts, enabled it to transcend the boundaries of style. The nimble manufacturer could promote their product by drawing comparisons with both classical and medieval models, and extol both its traditional values and its affordable, practical modernity. By focusing on the material qualities and manufacture of opus sectile, we can see how its growth was driven by technological factors as well as interpersonal relationships, not simply by shifting fashions.

Developing a new material: The production of opus sectile

In the mid-nineteenth century, Powell & Sons’ manufacturing was mainly focused on two well-established areas: glass tableware and stained-glass windows. Glass production requires an exceptionally high input of energy, a property that had historically made glass extremely expensive; its sudden ubiquity in the nineteenth century is a striking example of how—as architectural historians Barnabas Calder and Alex Bremner point out—“the energy context shapes all buildings” by determining how materials can be produced, transported, and worked.¹ Glass was a particularly potent symbol of the growing capacity for coal-powered industrial processes to turn cheap raw materials into increasingly affordable luxury goods. Such transformation demonstrated Britain’s economic power by “lofting commodities into a higher cultural register.”²

Until 1844, the glass trade in Britain had been controlled by a restrictive tax regime; as a flint-glass maker, Powell & Sons had not been permitted to produce window glass by blowing or rolling. To circumvent this constraint, they developed small molded lozenges of glass called quarries, which were marketed for use in church windows.³ They continued to manufacture these after the repeal of the tax law, and ecclesiastical glass became a key element of the firm’s business, enabling them to establish contacts with leading church architects, designers, and furnishers.⁴

The new material, which would come to be known as opus sectile, combined techniques used in the production of glass quarries with elements of traditional mosaics and stained glass. Its development began when George Rees, an employee at the glassworks, invented a method for producing slabs of compacted opaque glass from waste fragments of flint-glass contaminated with clay. This contamination often occurred during the risky process of removing a clay pot of molten glass from the furnace. The dangers of this operation were described by George Dodd in The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1841: “It frequently happens that the old pot breaks, and the pieces, becoming partially vitrified, adhere to the bottom of the furnace: in such case the men stand in front of the fiercely heated openings, and dig up and remove the broken fragments of pot by means of crow-bars and other instruments.”⁵ The new material made from these recovered fragments was initially christened “Rees mosaic.” Rees’s method involved grinding the waste to a powder and baking it in a mold to form a slab, in a process like that used to make glass quarries; the bulk of the resulting material was coarse and gray due to the inclusion of clay, with a finer, colored coating being added to the top surface.⁶ The slabs were about a quarter of an inch thick with a rough eggshell-textured finish, and could be cut into shapes, painted with enamels if a more elaborate design was required, and then fired again to fix the paint permanently, before being assembled like a jigsaw and cemented into place. The eggshell finish was opus sectile’s unique feature, resulting from its production from incompletely vitrified material. This gave it something of the appearance of a fresco rather than a reflective window or glittering mosaic. Opus sectile lent itself particularly well to the naturalistic depiction of textures such as fabric and skin (Figure 1), and the matte tiles formed an effective contrast when combined with gold tesserae.

The production of opus sectile was described in 1870 by a correspondent for The Builder, who contrasted it with the stained glass being made elsewhere in the glassworks:

[I]t is difficult to recognise the same material when it is seen in the form of wall tiles and pavements of peculiarly quiet tones of colour and unglazed surface. These tiles, when cut into leaves or scrolls, form elaborate pavements of most agreeable tone, and with the same opaque glass, cut in shapes in the same way that transparent glass is cut for lead lights, pictures are formed, which may be finished in outline, or elaborately shaded.⁷

Descriptions of visits to glass factories constituted an established journalistic genre at this time. Cultural theorist Isobel Armstrong notes how these narratives typically contrast the frightening heat and dirtiness of the factory with the beauty and clarity of the product, whose “scintillating glamour” is “polished, glistening and brilliant.”⁸ It is notable, then, that opus sectile is described in quite different terms, as “quiet” and “agreeable”–—not glamorous or overtly luxurious, yet still highly feminized; Armstrong notes that this is typical of finished glass products, in contrast to the exaggeratedly masculine labor of their production.⁹

The first recorded purchase of opus sectile was made in August 1863 by the domestic architect William Nesfield (1835–1888): twelve 5½-inch colored squares, which were ordered alongside forty-two smaller tiles of gold glass.¹⁰ The material quickly gained in popularity and was being produced in considerable quantities by the end of the 1860s—although the process was unreliable at first, partly because it was difficult to establish the correct firing temperatures to successfully fix the pigmented layer to the coarser substrate. As a result, many early commissions suffered flaking and surface loss, and had to be remade. In his history of the material, Dennis Hadley questions why Powell & Sons did not simply add an opacifier to ordinary window glass, which would have enabled them to produce opaque glass tiles straightforwardly and avoid these teething problems.¹¹ This question, though, misses the fact that Powell & Sons were not motivated merely by a desire to produce a particular visual effect, but by the need to use their raw materials efficiently. Crucially, the production of opus sectile used up waste that would otherwise have been discarded. The manufacture of fine table glass involved the waste of more than half of the pure raw materials; the less contaminated parts of this could be remelted and reused, and that which was “too much discoloured to be worked into table glass” was used for quarries, but only the coarse base layer of opus sectile could be made from “the lowest type of waste glass.”¹² As the glassworks’ manager Harry Powell (1853–1922) explained, it had previously been “the custom to scrap as useless all fragments of flint-glass contaminated with clay.”¹³ There was thus a strong economic incentive for the firm to perfect the production of their new invention, rather than resorting to more reliable but expensive methods of making opaque glass tiles from unused raw materials. As Powell put it, “an economical desire to prevent waste led to the development of the craft of mosaic.”¹⁴

The context for opus sectile: The Victorian mosaic revival

The mid-nineteenth century saw a revival in the popularity of mosaics in British architecture. An initial spur for this revival came from the restoration of Hagia Sophia, Constantinople, in 1847–1849, during which spectacular Byzantine mosaics were uncovered, highlighting the importance of Byzantine influences in the history of mosaic-making. Scholars writing about mosaics in the 1850s and 1860s focused their attention both on the time of Emperor Constantine (d. 337) and his successors and on the proliferation of mosaics in the Byzantine style in Italy from the eleventh century onwards.

British architects took their reference points for mosaic design from several key sources published during these years. In The Stones of Venice (1851–1853), John Ruskin described the city’s churches and palazzi; noting the way that their mosaics combined marble with gold enamel tesserae, he suggested that “the alternations and intermingling of these two effects form one of the chief enchantments of Byzantine ornamentation.”¹⁵ Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament (1856) featured geometric patterns that were popularized by architects including Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820–1877), William Butterfield (1814–1900), and George Edmund Street (1824–1881).¹⁶ Archaeologist John Henry Parker (1806–1884), who traveled to Italy in 1859 and again in 1864–1865, published Mosaic Pictures in Rome and Ravenna in 1866; despite the book’s title, it ranges across a broad geography, from Norman Sicily to the Holy Land.

Mosaic was a practical option, resistant to the damp British climate, and easy to clean in the smoky air of the Victorian city. As a technology, it was made more accessible by the new coal economy and was simultaneously marketed as a way to mitigate the effects of air pollution by remaining bright and colorful. The visual impact of pollution from coal burning was a topic of increasing concern in the 1860s and 1870s, making mosaic’s durability an important selling point.¹⁷

Mosaics were also valued for their ability to tell a story, which made them especially appealing when designing public spaces. A discussion at the Architectural Association in 1867 centered around the idea that, through their use, buildings could be put to work as instruments for “improving and elevating the public taste.”¹⁸ As the archaeologist and art historian Austen Henry Layard (1817–1894) put it in his address to the Royal Institute of British Architects the following year:

Millions have yearly to while away some spare minutes in railway stations, town-halls, and courts of law. We might make such places, as the Greeks and Romans did their public edifices, a means of teaching and amusing the people … by representing on their walls great national events, or recording important scientific discoveries.¹⁹

The productive tension between revivalist sentiments and the drive toward progress and innovation is clear in Layard’s proposal: mosaics would propagate the civic virtues of the ancient world, but they would do so by representing scientific breakthroughs, and not just in traditional civic settings but in the new public space of the railway station or, one might suggest, the museum. Indeed, mosaics became a prominent feature of the new complex of cultural and educational buildings in South Kensington from the 1850s onwards.

Through a series of visits to Italy, Henry Cole (1808–1882), the director of the South Kensington Museum, introduced his design team to the architecture of profuse decoration and polychromy that would come to characterize Albertopolis. Cole himself traveled to Rome in 1859; designer Godfrey Sykes (1824–1866) toured Italy in 1861, followed by architect Francis Fowke (1823–1865) in 1863; and, finally, Fowke’s successor Henry Scott (1822–1883) accompanied Cole to Italy in 1868 to look specifically at architectural mosaics.²⁰ On this last trip, they toured Venice with Layard, and then made a brief visit to Ravenna, whose fifth- and sixth-century mosaics Cole described as “much finer than the later Byzantine in Venice”; they traveled on together to Rome, Naples, and Pompeii, and finally Cole made a voyage to Sicily, where he found the Capella Palatina with its twelfth-century mosaics “very impressive.”²¹

Their experiences fed into the decorative schemes at the South Kensington Museum, and into various technical experiments with mosaic materials.²² These included an unrealized plan for mosaics made from ceramic tesserae to decorate the 1862 International Exhibition buildings and a variety of mosaic floors throughout the museum, as well as the so-called “Kensington Valhalla,” a series of portrait panels showing great figures in art history, whose stylistic direction was inspired by the church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna (Figure 2). A ladies’ mosaic class was formed at the museum and worked on projects, including a vast frieze for the Royal Albert Hall. Henry Sandham (1832–1892), the curator of the Museum of Construction and Building Materials (a department of the South Kensington Museum focused on innovations in building), concluded that with these “several experimental works now tested for durability for some time, it may be presumed that mosaic work … will find a general favour for building decoration.”²³

Beyond South Kensington, the mosaic revival was initially focused on glass mosaics made from small tesserae, often with gold backgrounds. The pioneer in producing these was Antonio Salviati (1816–1890), who set up a business in Venice in 1859 to revive local skills in the medium. This involved a collaboration between Venetian glassmakers and artists brought from Rome who were experienced in making miniature mosaics.²⁴ In 1860, Salviati was introduced to Layard, who encouraged him to exhibit his mosaics at the 1862 International Exhibition. This led to several large commissions in England, including the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore, the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park, and a reredos for Westminster Abbey. Salviati’s business was taken over in 1866 by a consortium of English businessmen led by Layard.²⁵

While Salviati promoted a revival of historical techniques in Italy, a similar process was underway in Russia, where the government supported a flourishing glass industry.²⁶ The state-owned Imperial Glassworks, established in the early eighteenth century, employed leading European and local artists.²⁷ It was noted for its wide range of colors, and one of its specialties was mosaic glass; the mosaic department was established in the 1850s by two Italian glass chemists, the brothers Giustiniano Bonafede (1823–1866) and Leopoldo Bonafede (1833–1878). Under the direction of the Bonafedes, mosaics were made for St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg and other churches, continuing a tradition of mosaic decoration that had persisted in the Orthodox church since the Byzantine period.²⁸

In contrast to the efforts of Italian and Russian firms to revive local glassmaking traditions, British manufacturers were pioneering new techniques in mosaic production. Minton & Co. introduced encaustic ceramic tesserae made using a method first developed for the manufacture of buttons (Figure 3). This involved compressing clay powder using screw-presses; the resultant small tiles were praised as being “extremely dense, durable, and of almost mathematical accuracy in their sizes and forms.”²⁹ The same method of manufacture was adopted by Maw & Co., who by 1860 were producing a wide variety of tesserae and mosaics.³⁰ In 1863, Powell & Sons were the first to succeed in producing glass mosaic tesserae in Britain.³¹

The experimentation undertaken by British manufacturers seems to have been driven, at least in part, by the desire to compete with the burgeoning Italian and Russian mosaic industries. Writing in the Museum of Construction & Building Materials’ annual report in 1864, Francis Fowke observed a growing interest in the production of glass mosaic among British manufacturers, which he suggested had “probably arisen from the collection exhibited, of similar productions in Russia,” which had formed a central part of the Russian displays at the 1862 International Exhibition.³² The same report included a description of the mosaic workshop at the Russian Imperial Glassworks, including details of technical improvements in manufacturing. Among these was a method for producing gold mosaic tiles that would “avoid the formation of creases and undulations on the surface of the enamels.”³³

Modern technical perfection was not always the goal of those entering this internationally competitive market. Powell & Sons’ conventional glass mosaic tesserae and small tiles were made in a wide range of colors, including gold, with a finish that was closer to medieval precedent than the Bonafede brothers’ version; the gold tesserae in particular would often go on to be used in combination with matte opus sectile to create an effect like that described by Ruskin in the Byzantine mosaics of Venice. The quality of Powell & Sons’ work was recognized by leading architects; writing in 1863, William Burges (1827–1881) noted:

The modern gold mosaic has the upper sheet of glass too thick and too pellucid. In old work the impurities of the upper sheet vary the surface of the gold. Messrs. Powell of Whitefriars have made some gold tesserae which are quite equal to the old.³⁴

The contrast between this description and Minton’s “mathematical accuracy,” as well as the Russian ambition to eliminate “creases and undulations,” is notable. The mosaic revival in Britain spanned a wide range of styles, and the market was served by manufacturers whose offerings ranged from studied variability to mass-produced modernity. It was in this context that opus sectile rose to popularity.

Why “opus sectile”? Naming a new material in an age of revivalism

As its use became more widespread, the name applied to Powell & Sons’ new material began to shift. Its initial designation as “Rees mosaic” had made sense within the firm. However, to the public it carried no special significance–—clearly a more descriptive name would be more memorable and useful. The first use of a new terminology seems to have been in July 1872, when a reviewer for Building News described a frieze of “pictures in Powell’s mosaic glass (opus sectil [sic]).”³⁵ The use of this term must have been inspired by an awareness of the similarity between Powell’s material and its Roman and medieval precedents.

To mid-nineteenth-century historians, “opus sectile” denoted a decorative paving technique used in the Roman empire, and later revived by craftsmen in medieval Italy and elsewhere. As its literal translation (“sliced work”) suggests, “opus sectile” designs were formed from thin slabs of different colored marbles and other materials cut into shapes that fitted together in a geometric pattern. Treated as a direct Latin quotation, “opus sectile” formed part of a Victorian technical vocabulary that attempted to delineate the various types of mosaics mentioned in classical sources, although the results were not always clear or consistent. The difficulty in interpreting Roman descriptions of mosaic styles was acknowledged by John Henry Parker, who lamented that:

[I]t is in fact now almost impossible to explain or apply the different names which were probably applied to different varieties of the art; as, “Opus musivum,” “musaicum,” “mosaicum,” “mosibum,” “museum;” “opus tesselatum,” “vermiculatum,” “reticulatum,” “albarium et sectile.”³⁶

There does, though, seem to have been a consensus as to the correct interpretation of “opus sectile.” For example, Matthew Digby Wyatt gave a paper, “On the Art of Mosaic, Ancient and Modern,” to the Society of Arts in February 1847, in which he described four types of ancient mosaics: “two applying generally to pavements – ‘Tesselatum’ and ‘Sectile’ – and two usually to mural decoration, namely, ‘Figlinum’ and ‘Vermiculatum’.”³⁷ According to Digby Wyatt:

[I]t is to the Opus Sectile that the Pantheon at Rome is indebted for its simple yet magnificent pavement. This variety of mosaic was formed of thin slices of differently-colored marbles, called crusta: which were cut into slabs of such forms as, when combined, should compose some regular geometric figure.³⁸

The architect Thomas Hayter Lewis (1818–1898), addressing the Architectural Association twenty years later, noted that: “The Roman pavements were of several kinds. That of which we have, perhaps, the finest specimens was the simplest (opus sextile [sic]), and was of geometrical pattern, formed of pieces of marble of different sizes and color.”³⁹ This usage remained current at the turn of the century. In 1899, the architectural sculptor William Brindley (1832–1919) described the “sectile or slab pavement” traditions of Italy, associating the term firmly with geometric marble pavements.⁴⁰

Somewhat more confusion arose when applying the term “opus sectile” to medieval and early modern mosaics. In his paper at the Society of Arts, Digby Wyatt pointed to a revival of “opus sectile” in medieval and renaissance Florentine mosaic, a technique in which detailed pictures were created by inlaying shaped sections of gemstones into marble.⁴¹ This was quite different from the earlier geometric pavements formed from sliced marble. However, the term was also used to describe more direct descendants of the ancient technique. For example, one writer in 1875 observed that:

The cost of cutting marble into various forms so as to reproduce or revise the opus sectile so largely employed in the days of the Renaissance, and in that form of Medieval art which in Italy preceded it, has prevented its adoption in more modern times.⁴²

“Opus sectile,” then, was a widely used term in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, with a constellation of meanings clustered around the idea of marble and colored stone, cut into various shapes that were usually arranged into geometric designs, and principally used for flooring.

A direct comparison between Powell & Sons’ new material and its ancient predecessors had been drawn in The Builder in 1870, in a review that described Roman mosaics “composed of pieces of glass and marble, cut into such forms as to fit them to form parts of the design, as in the same manner pursued by Messrs. Powell,” although that article did not use the term “opus sectile.”⁴³ Once it had been applied to the new material by Building News, though, The Builder’s writers were quick to catch on, reporting in October 1872 that a reredos “executed by Messrs. Powell, of London, in ‘opus sectile’ mosaic” had been given to the newly enlarged and restored St. Giles’s, Reading,⁴⁴ and describing a new reredos at Wilstead church “executed … on opaque glass, in a species of mosaic known as ‘opus sectile’” in 1873.⁴⁵

The decade between the invention of the new material and its consistent designation as opus sectile may have obscured the early history of its development. Architectural historian Teresa Sladen dates the material’s invention to 1870,⁴⁶ while Hadley suggests that the term “opus sectile” was first applied to it as late as 1877, noting that its first appearance in Powell & Sons’ own internal documentation was in April of that year.⁴⁷ Several orders placed in 1877 were described internally as being made “in “Opus Sextile” [sic]”; previously, the use of the new material had generally been indicated only by the note “Rees” in the margin of the order.⁴⁸ Soon afterward, the firm began actively promoting their work under this new name; in 1878, they advertised “a series of opus sectile and mosaics, in painted opaque glass, for wall decoration, tablets, and pavements.”⁴⁹

The appropriation of Latin terminology to name this new material should be understood in the context of contemporary architectural antiquarianism. Powell & Sons’ material had only a limited overlap with its namesake—ancient opus sectile was made primarily from marble arranged in geometric patterns for flooring, while the new glass opus sectile was frequently used for figurative mural decoration. But the name did something more than simply pick out a superficial similarity. It offered a clue as to how the new material could be understood as part of a wider program of architectural revivalism, suggesting that its novelty was offset by a deeper historical rootedness. Although the Latin term evokes classical associations, it also alludes to later Italian techniques, such as the Florentine gemstone mosaics described as opus sectile by Digby Wyatt. Rather than implying that Powell & Sons were directly reviving a specific tradition, it perhaps served to place their new material within a centuries-old lineage of evolving mosaic types associated with Italy and with the decoration of grand public and ecclesiastical buildings.

The use of ancient terms to describe, and thereby to contextualize, new materials and techniques had a parallel elsewhere in the mosaic revival: a writer describing Minton’s encaustic tesserae in 1880 claimed that “[a]mong the numerous revivals of processes which had become extinct which we owe to the late Mr. Herbert Minton was that of the manufacture of ceramic tesserae for the production of tessellated pavements.”⁵⁰ In fact, as discussed above, this was a highly innovative process reliant on industrial machinery, and quite distinct from the cubes of marble that composed Roman mosaic pavements. The sense of lineage and the existence of historical models for current practice were becoming increasingly important to architects in this period, as historian William Whyte observes: having focused formerly on an understanding of geometrical principles, “[a]rchitectural training became a process of learning how to draw the details of medieval buildings and the analysis of architectural design became, to a certain extent, the identification of the origins for this or that idea.”⁵¹ The historicizing term “opus sectile” provided a sort of fictive origin story that may have helped architects and clients to interpret the new material and have confidence in using it.

How was opus sectile used?

The possibilities offered by this new material were soon recognized by the architect and stained-glass designer Frederick Preedy (1820–1898), who commissioned a figure of Elias in “rough mosaic glass for painting” in May 1864.⁵² This was the first use of opus sectile for a figurative design. Powell & Sons themselves produced similar glass pictures in-house shortly afterward: by the end of the month, they had a head of Christ and an angel in stock.⁵³ The first order for ready-painted opus sectile was placed by the artist Henry Holiday (1839–1927) in March 1865, and two months later, a reredos designed by G. E. Street was supplied to a church at Bow Common.⁵⁴ At this early stage, opus sectile seems to have been marketed as an affordable alternative to conventional mosaic; an order book entry for January 1866 reads: “Rev Brymer Belcher called to see some mosaic work. Says he likes real mosaic best. Painted mosaic would do for him. Thirty shillings a sq ft including figures and background.”⁵⁵ Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, the use of traditional glass mosaic was limited by its high cost; opus sectile was both cheaper and, in some ways, closer to the type of decoration traditionally used in Gothic churches due to its similarities to stained glass and medieval wall painting.⁵⁶ It bridged the divide between the opulent surfaces and sensuous materials of the Byzantine revival and the complex structural and decorative articulation of the Gothic revival, serving as an intermediary between mosaic and fresco painting.

The late 1860s and early 1870s marked a period of change for Powell & Sons, as a new generation of the family began to take control of the firm. James Crofts Powell (1847–1914) joined the company at the age of twenty and would go on to lead the stained-glass department. In 1866, he met the architect Thomas Graham Jackson (1835–1924); they became close friends, and Jackson’s contacts helped to boost Powell & Sons’ popularity with leading architects and artists.⁵⁷ The Powells, in turn, offered Jackson new contacts within the “intellectual aristocracy” of the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as commissions ranging from tableware to buildings.⁵⁸ Harry Powell, James Crofts Powell’s younger cousin, joined Powell & Sons in 1873. He had studied chemistry at Oxford (where he also attended lectures by John Ruskin), and he applied his scientific knowledge to the production of new colors of glass; after his appointment as manager of the glassworks in 1875, the firm’s range of colors and styles expanded substantially.⁵⁹

Perhaps reflecting James Crofts Powell’s growing influence at the firm, several architects were invited to inspect the experimental new opus sectile glass in November 1867.⁶⁰ William Butterfield “[thought] the material very nice” but added that “the colour should be divided with black.” This suggests that he was interpreting it in the context of stained glass, rather than conventional mosaics or tiles; perhaps this view had an influence on the mainly ecclesiastical contexts in which it was later put to use. Others in the group were more skeptical. William Burges expressed concern that “dirt will hang to the material and will not be easily removed.” Nesfield, the only one with experience of using it, declared it “quite in its infancy” and noted that the “colors must be more harmonious and better quality,” and the “outline very much more precise.” It would take several more years of experimentation before the technical and aesthetic standard of the new material reached a level to match that of Powell & Sons’ stained glass and table wares; nevertheless, T. G. Jackson (possibly out of loyalty to his friend James Crofts Powell) called it simply “very good.”

At the time, Jackson was working on St. Mary’s Church, Binsted, Sussex, where his restoration of the interior included paving the chancel with opus sectile.⁶¹ The design of the pavement follows medieval examples closely, with scrolling S-curves surrounding circular elements, and rectangular areas of small tessellated mosaics outlined by larger tiles. According to The Builder, the new paving material was “used here for the first time.” As we have seen, it had in fact already been used for several projects, but this may have been its first large-scale application for flooring. In material terms, though, the opus sectile employed for floors was identical to that used in mural decoration. Jackson went on to use opus sectile very frequently, including for the walls of a summer house for George Cubitt at Denbies, Dorking, in 1870 as well as numerous churches.⁶²

Jackson’s pavement at St. Mary’s, Binsted, was described in the press as being “modelled on Cosmati work in Italian 13^th century style.”⁶³ This refers to a medieval decorative technique in which geometric shapes were cut from a variety of colored stones or glass, and inlaid in a bed of mortar. Cosmati work was of interest at the time to revivalist architects such as Burges.⁶⁴ The best-known British example is on the high altar platform at Westminster Abbey, but it was most frequently used in Rome and Naples in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, both for pavements and to decorate pulpits and other church furnishings. Among the most spectacular surviving examples are the extraordinary twisted columns of the thirteenth-century Lateran cloister in Rome. Echoing this example, Cosmati work was employed in South Kensington to decorate the twisted columns of the arcades at the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens. The collection at the Museum of Construction & Building Materials included a “portion of a stone column inlaid with mosaic,” made by Powell & Sons in 1864; the note “Rees” in the margin of the order for this column shows that it was made with opus sectile rather than traditional glass mosaic.⁶⁵ Although it is unclear whether the column was twisted, the existence of this object suggests that, from the very first stages of its development, the firm may have been deliberately making links between their new material and medieval Roman Cosmati work.

In 1872, opus sectile was used on the exterior of an office building designed by Vaughan and George–—the first commission for a commercial client.⁶⁶ The offices of Sotheran, Baer & Co. occupied a corner site at 36 Piccadilly. The facades were decorated with two groups of decorative panels, produced from cartoons by stained-glass designer Harry Burrow (1846–1882): one series above the ground floor in opus sectile representing important moments in the history of literature, and another above the first floor in painted tiles showing the processes of book production. (Sadly the building was destroyed during the Blitz and no detailed drawings of the panels survive.) The manufacture and installation of the opus sectile sequence were priced at just £50—a notably low figure. This was a strategy that Powell & Sons sometimes used to attract more business, and it suggests that they hoped to be invited to decorate other commercial premises.⁶⁷

The company also made other attempts to appeal to a secular client base. For example, one of the most ambitious surviving early opus sectile panels, made ca. 1865, shows Pluto and Proserpina; it was acquired for the Museum of Construction and Building Materials, and one of its three large sections is now in the V&A (Figure 4). The style and subject matter of this panel demonstrate the suitability of the material to tell stories of all kinds, not just on religious themes. The choice of Roman mythology also reinforces opus sectile’s links to both the history of classical revivalism and the decorative techniques of the ancient world. Proserpina herself, as a personification of spring and rebirth, was emblematic of the Renaissance, and the myth had been treated frequently by Italian artists in the early modern period, most famously by Bernini in his Rape of Proserpina (1621–1622). Meanwhile, the panel’s allusion to ancient precedents is reinforced by stylistic choices such as the patterns of stylized acanthus leaves, flowers, and waves on the drapery, the use of Roman lettering, and the setting of the figures against a Pompeiian red background. The presence of this panel, which when complete was an impressive 3’6” x 13’ (1.07 x 3.96m), in the displays of the Museum of Construction & Building Materials would have made a bold statement about the new material to an audience interested in the latest developments in architecture and interior design. Despite Powell & Sons’ efforts, though, it did not become a popular material either for commercial or domestic buildings, where its use remained restricted to occasional wealthy clients such as Cubitt, Titus Salt, and Reginald Chandos Pole.⁶⁸

Opus sectile did, however, prove quickly popular in churches. It was surely boosted by the fact that the Powell family were prominent High Anglicans who often made panels for church clients at heavily discounted rates.⁶⁹ T. G. Jackson continued to be a particular champion of its use, commissioning pavements for Sevenoaks Weald Church in 1872 and for a new church at Annesley the following year.⁷⁰ At this stage in his career, Jackson was associated with George Gilbert Scott’s (1811–1878) practice, making him well placed to promote the material to other church architects; and indeed it was soon adopted by J. P. St. Aubyn (1815–1895), Arthur Blomfield (1829–1899), and Scott himself, all of whom had placed orders by 1874.⁷¹ By the end of the 1870s, orders for reredoses had been placed by Henry Woodyer (1816–1896), a well-known Ecclesiologist and pupil of Butterfield, and F. T. Dollman (1812–1899), a pupil of Pugin and author of books illustrating “ancient” English architectural details.⁷² The appeal of opus sectile to architects such as these shows how seamlessly it could be integrated into the Gothic revival style.

As Powell & Sons’ technical confidence with the material grew, it was produced in a wide range of bright colors and used in increasingly ambitious schemes. In 1878, Blomfield remodeled the interior of St. Mark’s Church, Mayfair, a huge project with a total cost of £9600. Blomfield’s lavish polychrome Romanesque interior features an opus sectile reredos designed by Nathaniel Westlake (1833–1921), with a large central scene showing the Transfiguration flanked by depictions of the Evangelists (Figure 5).⁷³ At St. Mark’s, opus sectile took its place alongside polychrome brickwork, book-matched marble panels, wall painting, and stained glass to transform a relatively austere Georgian interior into a sensorily rich environment more suited to Victorian ecclesiastical tastes. Elsewhere, opus sectile was used to enrich more modest Gothic interiors. The church of St. John the Evangelist in Waterbeach, Cambridgeshire, was restored in 1879 with a new reredos by Powell & Sons, who also made opus sectile mosaics for the super-altar and the pulpit three years later.⁷⁴ For a cost of under £300, this small medieval Fenland church was now host to a bright dream of the Holy Land, its olive groves baking under the heat of a golden sky, as well as the glamorous figure of Christ robed in purple and seated in glory on a rainbow. Although Powell & Sons also continued to supply their opaque glass for use in geometric pavements, sales of figurative designs rose steadily from almost thirty commissions in the first half of the 1870s to over fifty in the first half of the 1880s.⁷⁵

From 1888 until the First World War, Powell & Sons showed their products at every exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, a fashionable showcase for leading British design firms.⁷⁶ The displays often featured opus sectile, attracting favorable notice from reviewers.⁷⁷ The stained-glass artist and painter Henry Holiday, who had been among the most prolific designers of opus sectile since 1870, was particularly praised for his mastery of its possibilities. In 1906 he showed a panel depicting the Three Graces, of which one critic observed that “The fair, flat colors of the painted ware are to stained glass as is fresco to oil-painting.”⁷⁸ In showing with the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, Powell & Sons were asserting the material’s suitability for use within a particular design idiom and emphasizing its relationship to medieval precedents. Opus sectile was used in significant Arts and Crafts interiors, such as Middleton Cheney Church, Northamptonshire,⁷⁹ and the Barcote Chapel in the south transept of St. Mary the Virgin, Buckland, Oxfordshire (Figure 6).⁸⁰ The latter scheme was realized in 1890–1892 and included an almost overwhelming wealth of imagery illustrating the Te Deum Laudamus, probably designed by Holiday. The opus sectile covering the walls is complemented by a painted ceiling, stone mosaic floor, elaborately carved pews, windows in both figurative stained glass and patterned glass quarries, and wrought iron light fittings; the total cost was £1000, a vast sum for decorating such a small chapel. By the end of the century, then, Powell & Sons had extended the reach of opus sectile to a wide ecclesiastical market covering a variety of styles and budgets, even if their attempts to promote it to secular clients had been less successful.

Conclusion: Innovation in the service of revivalism

To understand why Powell & Sons’ glass opus sectile flourished in the late-nineteenth century, we must take into account both its modernity and the way in which it was understood and marketed in relation to its ancient namesake. For both the Romans and the Victorians, the polychromy of opus sectile was at the heart of its appeal. As Calder and Bremner observe, the ancient Roman enthusiasm for rare colored marbles was a form of “conspicuous consumption of labor,” since many of these materials were difficult to extract and had to be shipped long distances across the empire.⁸¹ To assemble a polychrome interior therefore meant marshaling significant manpower for quarrying and transport. In the nineteenth century, by contrast, color in architecture was a product of the newly abundant supply of coal.⁸² In the case of Powell’s glass opus sectile, a high input of energy in manufacturing substituted for the labor-intensive processes of traditional mosaic-making. If asked to account for the invention of opus sectile, George Rees and Harry Powell might have described the thrifty reuse of contaminated waste, positioning the new material as an exemplar of Victorian resourcefulness and frugality. But opus sectile was not just an attempt to avoid wasting materials during the manufacturing process. It was a means by which existing techniques such as wall painting and natural materials such as colored stones were displaced by a more energy-intensive alternative in the pursuit of desirable features such as brighter and more predictable colors, durability, cleanliness, and increased crispness of detail. It was these practical and aesthetic qualities that made opus sectile so appealing to architects working in a variety of historicizing styles—from Romanesque to Gothic, or Arts and Crafts—while simultaneously rooting it in its own time.

Lily Crowther is an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership student at the University of Oxford and the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), working on the history and legacies of the Museum of Construction & Building Materials. Lily is also Curator (History) at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, and was formerly an assistant curator at the V&A. Her research interests are in the making of the built environment and the ways in which made objects can transmit skills and embodied knowledge.

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Acknowledgments

My supervisors, William Whyte, Simona Valeriani, and Claire O’Mahony, all offered advice on previous iterations of this research, which helped to shape my approach to the subject. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers whose comments on the first draft of this article were immensely constructive. Finally, thanks are due to the staff at the Archive of Art and Design, and to Florence Tyler and her colleagues in the Ceramics and Glass collection at the V&A, who generously helped me to access primary sources during a very challenging period.

Funding

This research was funded by a Collaborative Doctoral Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/T00259X/1).

Footnotes