The Bible Fireplace

George Gough Booth commissioned this fireplace in the spring of 1920 for the newly built Oak Room at Cranbrook House. Its designer, Henry Chapman Mercer, was a prominent archaeologist, historian, and curator, as well as the proprietor of the Moravian Tile and Pottery Works, an experimental ceramics manufactory in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The Moravian Pottery Works's designs were inspired by historic American handicrafts and motivated by Mercer's anti-industrial principles. Booth conceived of the new wing of the house as a showcase for contemporary craftsmanship; Mercer’s fireplace formed a part of this program. As Booth explained in a letter to his architect, Albert Kahn, “it has been my wish that all the leading craftsmen of the country shall be represented in the building improvements I have been making, and I have selected [the Oak Room] as the place to have a fine example of Mr. Mercer’s tile work.”

The Bible Fireplace consists of fourteen panels of “brocade” tile, a technique invented by Mercer in which high-relief, molded ceramic elements are embedded in a concrete backing. The ceramics are unglazed, revealing the naturally varied colors of the clay. Eleven of the panels depict scenes from the Bible, while three—“The Wedding Dance,” “The Bride and Groom,” and “The Family Quarrel”—are genre scenes. Their designs are based on cast-iron stove plates, produced by German immigrant artisans in New England, predominantly Pennsylvania, in the 18th century. Mercer was fascinated by these early German-American stoves. He formed a large collection of surviving examples, many rescued from junk heaps, and published two volumes on their history, of which the second, The Bible in Iron, forms the conceptual foundation for his amalgamation of stove-plate imagery in the Bible Fireplace.

Mariam Hale
2023-2025 Collections Fellow
Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research
January 2024