The Tile Club: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting The Tile Club | Page 22

riages, commenting along the way about local history,
including the “once valorous Montauk tribe...reduced
to a pitiful handful.” 48 At Montauk they visited “King”
David Pharaoh, who had asserted himself as sachem of
all living Long Island Indians. When one of the Tilers
asked to sketch him, Pharaoh declared, “I wouldn’t like
to. There was an insulting sketch of me made some
time ago.” 49 This was probably another apocryphal
yarn devised by the Tilers as an oblique reference to
Winslow Homer who had made a sketch of Pharaoh
in 1874. 50 It also further suggests that Homer might
have influenced the groups’ choice of sights to visit on
Long Island. From Montauk they began their jour-
ney home, stopping at a fashionable hotel on Shelter
Island, where they “resumed the habits of civilization…
[and were] reabsorbed into the relentless tide of com-
monplace.” 51 A photograph identified “members of the
Tile Club sketching, Greenport,” dated 1878, suggests
they stopped on the “north fork” on their trip back to
New York.
Close on the heels of the Scribner’s Monthly article
(February 1879) which included twenty-seven illustra-
tions (only five of which seem to be designs for tiles),
there appeared a booklet produced by Laffan for the
Long Island Railroad, The New Long Island: A Hand-
book of Summer Travel. 52 Much of the text and many
of the illustrations were derived from the magazine
account of the Tilers’ trip. The purpose of this publica-
tion was clearly promotional, and the artwork was used
as endorsements for tourism on Long Island. Fares to
every village were included, and as an inducement to
settle on Long Island, the railroad offered one year of
free travel to newcomers, obviously a means of increas-
ing ridership.
During the winter of 1878–79, the composition of
the Tile Club began to change, as did its focus. Two of
16 THE TILE CLUB: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting
its earliest members, and avid supporters of painting
tiles, Wimbridge and Paris, left, the first for Bombay,
the second for a remote island in the English Channel.
The club’s staunchest Anglophile (also a great admirer
of English crafts), Abbey, moved to London. New
inductees included the painters William Merritt
Chase, John H. Twachtman, Frederick Dielman, and
the lithographer and fashionable photographer Napoleon
Sarony. The club still met on Wednesday evenings; and
although artist members continued to paint tiles,
interest in this pursuit was already beginning to wane.
Meanwhile, the Tilers discussed plans for their
summer trip of 1879. One proposed that they “hire a
schooner, and explore the Long Island Sound, in search
of literary and artistic remains; but the undulating
character of the Sound waters caused the idea to be
rejected.” 53 Another suggested the New Jersey shore,
but this was turned down because of its preponder-
ance of mosquitos. O’Donovan then “feebly” advanced
the idea of a canal voyage, but got no response. Sev-
eral meetings later Smith reintroduced O’Donovan’s
proposal with more detail (and perhaps more vigor),
and the group became intrigued with the thought of
hiring a boat to travel up the Hudson River, through
the Erie Canal to Lake Champlain. It was decided:
upstate New York it would be. The activities of the
Tilers during this summer trip were fully recorded
and illustrated in an article for Scribner’s Monthly the
following March (1880) under the title “The Tile Club
Afloat.” The account consisted of thirty-one pages and
thirty-nine illustrations, none of which can positively
identified as tiles or designs for tiles. 54
After many days of effort seeking a clean barge,
the John C. Earle was finally engaged for twenty days
at seven dollars a day. It was lavishly decorated by the
“Committee on Decoration and Home Comforts,”