William De Morgan
Design for a square tile, depicting an ostrich-like bird poking its long beak into an eggshell, 1872–88, Orange and brown watercolour on paper, 153 x 153 mm, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Given by Mrs William de Morgan, E.1054-1917, ©️ Victoria and Albert Museum, London
She Leaves Her Eggs to the Earth
Commentary by Hilary Davies
William De Morgan’s ostrich-type bird looks out at us cheekily from a design from his Chelsea period of ceramic tile manufacture. This was a highly productive time in his career, when De Morgan was experimenting not only with the chemistry of the procedures involved, but also with the artistic potential for creating domestic objects that were aesthetically pleasing. He was a close friend of William Morris: the two men shared a passion both for the profusion of the natural world and the need to offer beauty to an increasingly industrialized society whose members were often reduced to drudgery and removed from the life-enhancing qualities of good art and craft.
Beautiful designs on the apparently humble tile that might surround a fireplace or decorate a kitchen were, in this period, De Morgan’s solution.
He also, like the author of Job, saw the humorous, crazy, or inexplicable in the natural world. This fantastical bird is a composite, with something of the crest of a secretary bird and the curved beak of a hornbill. But its short wing and tail feathers and powerful high ‘heel’ or ’ankle’ are distinctively ostrich, as is the deliberate reference to its nesting behaviour. By its pointed gaze, this bird, already a mockery of the avian world by the fact of being flightless, dares us to challenge what it is doing. The egg’s unprotected position on the bare earth (‘she leaves her eggs to the earth, and lets them be warmed on the ground’; Job 39:14) makes it clear it is an ostrich egg that is being broken open and devoured. It is an extreme instance of the lines, ‘She deals cruelly with her young, as if they were not hers’ (v.16).
The river and the pyramids clearly visible here are details relevant to God’s blast at Job. This ostrich is scavenging in the vicinity of one of the world’s greatest life-giving rivers, a river that humanity may have tamed to some extent already in biblical antiquity but whose flux and fall are still entirely dependent on winter snows far to the south. In other words, the uncontrollable forces of nature. Further off, the pyramids, those massive monuments to the human desire to preserve life for ever, have shrunk to two small triangles on the horizon that fit between the bird’s ravaging bill and stalking leg. It is not only nature’s foolishness that is being mocked here.
