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1899
1900
Interior of Mercer’s studio. Indian House, before 1898. His personal tool collection is mounted on the walls and ceiling of this ground-floor room.
Lela’s offer of a building lot for a more spacious building; they disallowed oral descriptions of the uses of antique tools at their meetings, a Mercer idea for the communication of vital information from “intelligent persons who would not write.” The BCHS secretary, a publisher, obstructed the publication of HCM’s papers for the Society and would neither circulate these pamphlets to learned societies, nor allow HCM to do so, etc. For these reasons, and the ever-present concern about his “rather poor health,” Mercer quit.
June: elected a “craftsman” member of the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston. Founded in 1897 by a group containing several of Mercer’s close friends, the Society had as its first president none other than Charles Eliot Norton, Mercer’s old Art History Professor! The Society became in effect, a New England agent for the sale of Mercer’s tiles.
August: travelled to Austria, Bavaria, England (British Museum for medieval English tile designs), Paris (for Paris Exposition, tiles at Hotel de Cluny, etc.). Exhibited tiles at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Club, New York: first of a long series of exhibits in art museums, expositions, arts and crafts societies, over the ensuing years.
1901	Fenway Court, Isabella Stewart Gardner’s palatial museum in Boston, was essentially finished, its medieval-style tile floors furnished by HCM’s new tile works. This prestigious commission established Mercer’s reputation as craftsman and manufacturer, getting his business off to a good start.
Note:
Mercer’s tile factory, The Moravian Pottery and Tile Works, met expenses and began to make a profit almost immediately. Of the pottery’s name HCM wrote, “The name ‘Moravian’ was applied to the pottery because some of the first designs had been taken from stove-plates in the collection of the Bucks County Historical Society resembling others seen at the Young Men’s Missionary Society at Bethlehem,” an institution operated by the Moravian Church.
HCM referred to his pottery as an “artistic pottery” and patterned his designs on models gathered from an inexhaustible number of sources. A variety of media and historic periods were consulted: he drew from his travels, collections, and studies. He preferred tiles which communicated ideas, writing in 1925, “... if tiles could tell no story, inspire or teach nobody and only serve to produce aesthetic thrills, I would have stopped making them a long time ago.”
Mercer combined his love for the story-telling aspects of tile design with an unexpectedly practical bent. His patented inventions for tile production, his discoveries of new methods of mosaic-making, and his carefully-developed palette of slips, glazes, and coloration by carbon (smoking) ensured a hand-crafted product which
HENRY CHAPMAN MERCER: AN ANNOTATED CHRONOLOGY