A short history of the Dutch wall tile

The Dutch wall tile is a strange survivor. It was invented to solve a damp-wall problem, it became a national decorative habit, and four centuries later it is still hanging in kitchens, only now it usually has a joke on it. Here is how it got from one end of that to the other.

It began as damp-proofing

Dutch houses were built of brick on wet ground, often with a canal a few metres away. The bottom of an interior wall took a constant beating: rising damp, mud, scrubbing water, spilled milk. A row of glazed tiles along the base of the wall solved all of it at once. The glaze is waterproof, wipes clean and does not stain.

So the earliest tiled surfaces in Dutch homes were practical: skirting height, around the hearth, behind the water butt, inside the dairy. Not decoration. Maintenance.

From skirting board to eye level

Once tiles were being made in quantity they became cheap enough to use where they were not strictly needed. Fireplaces got tiled surrounds. Whole kitchen walls went blue and white. Wealthier houses built tiled tableaux, large multi-tile pictures of ships or flower vases, into a hallway.

The format settled into something very recognisable: a thin square tile, a single motif in the middle, and a small ornament in each corner that joined up with its neighbours to make a continuous pattern across the wall. Corner ornaments have names in Dutch, the ox-head and the spider among them, and you can date a wall roughly by which one was used.

What got painted on them

The subject matter is the reason old tiles are still collected. It is domestic, observant and often funny, and it captures ordinary seventeenth-century life better than most paintings do.

• Ships, from tiny fishing boats to full men-of-war, painted by people who saw them daily.
• Children at play: hoops, kites, stilts, sledges, tops. An accidental catalogue of games.
• Animals, especially dogs and cats and improbable sea creatures drawn by someone who had only been told about them.
• Soldiers and horsemen, usually one to a tile, standing on a tiny patch of ground.
• Flowers in a vase, the single most common motif of all.
• Biblical scenes, painted in whole sets for a stairwell or a chimney breast.

Where the words come in

The talking tile is much younger than the painted one. The old picture tile does not carry text at all, or carries only a name and a date. The tile with a saying on it, what the Dutch call a tegeltjeswijsheid, literally “tile wisdom”, is essentially a popular twentieth-century genre that borrowed a seventeenth-century object.

That is worth being honest about, because a lot of sellers imply otherwise. Most of the sayings themselves are old: proverbs, folk sayings, bits of moral advice that were in circulation long before anyone put them on ceramic. What is recent is the pairing.

Why the genre stuck

A tegeltjeswijsheid works because of a tension between object and message. The object is formal: a square, a border, a centuries-old blue. The message is usually dry, self-deprecating or faintly rude. Dutch humour lives exactly in that gap, and the tile is the perfect delivery mechanism for it.

It also survives because it is the right size for a gift. Small, flat, cheap to post, impossible to duplicate if the words are specific to one person. That is the same reason the format still works now. If you want to read what the well-known sayings actually mean, several of them do not translate the way you would expect: see famous Dutch tile proverbs.

The tile now

What has changed is who writes the text. For most of the twentieth century you bought a saying somebody else had chosen. Now the interesting tiles are the ones with a line that only makes sense to two people. Browse the collection of Dutch tile proverbs for the traditional ones, or write your own on a quote tile. The object has barely changed in four hundred years. The authorship has.