opposite: the sheaf of stencil evidence – 48 stencil tracings of tiles and borders. A pattern might be a single colour with a single stencil; others have perhaps 5 colours each requiring its own stencil. Plus, a pattern might be done in a number of different colours for different tile sets, as below. opposite below: Travessa das Pedras Negras, 14-20 left: Rua do Chão da Feiro, 3 below: blue/blue at Largo do Terriera, 18-20, green/yellow and green/blue on Travessa do Terriero do Trigo.
1. stencil production What is curious bout the lack of information on stencils as a tile- painting technique is that if one looks at an eighteenth century tile closely, it is evident that a stencil has been used. One can see the continuity of stroke across the pattern, derived from hand pressure and variations in the brush, and the evidence of flow- back where the brush loaded with glaze hits the edge of the cut out shape in the stencil. A tile-sized stencil is cut in oil-impregnated card for each colour and tinted glaze is brushed over the tile: still done by hand, but standardised by the stencil. The individuality of the hand holding the brush as it passes over each tile is what gives a wall of several thousand identically patterned tiles such life.
While I was obsessively tracing tile patterns, putting up with the ubiquitous hissing from men in windows above, figuring out the order of the colour layers, the calculation of how each tile attaches to its neighbour making a larger pattern unit, and photographing the tile, the pattern unit and then the whole surface, I was also thinking about why this use of tile happened at all. There is a history here, a colonial history that predates the colonial zenith of the nineteenth century. There are tiled walls in the Netherlands, cobalt blue and white Delft replicating much more cheaply the exceedingly expensive Chinese porcelain that arrived in the Netherlands in the early seventeenth century by way of the Dutch East India Company. In 1661 there was a peace treaty signed between the Netherlands and Portugal and an exchange of colonies and, clearly, other customs.
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