Tiles with floral decoration

These 501 high-quality Dutch ceramic tiles are for the most part incorporated in a room of the Robert Moawwad Museum, originally the dining room of the Pharaon house. Others are in two places on the upper floor. They are decorated, using several shades of cobalt blue on a white background, with bouquets set in vases, at the centre, and single flowers positioned diagonally in the corner of each tile. Ten or so models of bouquets can be observed, inspired by sixteenth century and seventeenth century engravings of flowers. Certain vases were identified as Chinese vases exported during that period to Europe, while others were manufactured locally.

It seems that very few similar tiles remain in the Netherlands. The closest are those of Het Loo Palace, near Amersfoort, built in 1690-92. The Beirut tiles come from the Bassili House in Alep where a few are still to be found in the entry courtyard. According to John Carswell, other Dutch tiles from the same period were present in Alep, in an Ottoman home in the citadel and in the Greek Orthodox church at Jdeideh. All of them belonged to a series of faiences produced in the Netherlands from the second half of the seventeenth century, influenced by the large-scale importation of Chinese porcelains by the East India Dutch Company. Created in 1602 and active for two centuries, until it was liquidated in 1795, this company was the largest of the first modern European trade companies operating in Asia. Through trade it promoted the circulation of patterns between the Extreme Orient, the Islamic world and the Occident.

The faiences of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces, known by the restrictive terms of "Delft" or "delftware", were themselves exported on a large scale throughout the Occident[1] as well as to the Islamic countries. Unfortunately, the exports toward the Middle East were poorly documented as compared to those destined for European countries, due to the fact that the tiles were often poorly identified. Two recent studies addressed the use of Dutch tiles: one concerned the Ottoman palaces built in Algiers in the eighteenth century (for example the Dar Hasan Pacha), whereas the second focused on the tiles of a church (Surp Kriko Lusavoriç) in Istanbul dating back to the eighteenth century. In this text, a comparison was made with Dutch tiles from the same period found in the harem at Topkapi.

These Dutch tiles demonstrate not only the influence of Chinese porcelain, but also the popularity of these patterns on both sides of the Mediterranean. This Chinese influence is also evident in Syrian tile production in the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries (examples in the Robert Moawwad Museum and in the Georges Antaki private collection in Alep).