Found in Montpellier, this 17th-century Delft tile is hand-painted in cobalt blue on tin-glazed earthenware, the scene set in a roundel of a shepherd with his staff walking out toward a fishing boat, a dog at his side, a country house behind him, and the spires of a Dutch town in the distance. Tiles like this have been painted in the city of Delft since the early 1600s, when Dutch potters first set out to copy the blue-and-white porcelain coming from China and ended up inventing a style entirely their own - a kind of painted journalism, the daily life of the Low Countries pressed into squares of clay and fitted into the walls of Dutch farmhouses and merchant homes by the thousand. Sylvie hangs it on a wall alone, the kind of small thing that asks you to step closer.
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