Pasadena Museum of History is pleased to announce the recent gift by architectural historian, Robert Winter, Ph.D., of his personal collection of Batchelder tiles and accompanying archives.

The donation includes over 200 Batchelder tiles made between the years 1910 and the early 1930s, including tiles in the Arts and Crafts style (from landscape reliefs to figural corbels) as well as colorfully glazed tiles of later years in the Mayan, Spanish Revival, and Art Deco styles. Additionally, there are half a dozen objects from Batchelder’s rare later line, Kinneloa Ceramics.

“Dr. Winter’s extraordinary donation gives PMH a major Arts and Crafts collection that is particularly meaningful to the cultural history of this region,” says the Museum’s Director of Collections, Laura Verlaque. “Ernest Batchelder designed and produced these tiles first in Pasadena in 1910, and in later decades in a large factory in Los Angeles.”

Dr. Winter noted that, while these tiles were not inexpensive, they were affordable to people of more modest means, and thus “hundreds of homes in Southern California and, indeed, the rest of the United States and even Canada are endowed with beautiful Batchelder fireplaces and fountains.”

Today Batchelder tiles are prized collectibles, much sought-after by tile aficionados, preservationists, and historians enamored of such exemplary works of California design, as well as by many others who simply admire their beauty.

Dr. Winter joined SAH in 1957, became a Benefactor in 1995 and was made a Fellow of the Society in 2006.  

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