Great find! I do think the hypothesis that these were done by children, or at least non-skilled laypersons as one-offs, based on some sort of template image and directed painting technique, is probably the correct answer. Here’s another one with a more abstract “cow” that looks like some sort of mythical beast. There’s so many similarities though.
This one is a different scene, but it shows a similar technique in what appear to be flags atop the sailing ships on the left.
Similarly:
The anthropomorphic screaming buildings are very common.
“18th century Delft cow tile” turns up a fair number of similar images on Google, so I’m confident those are two sailing ships on the left, a very common motif. As for the fence/plow/wagon, I didn’t come across anything similar enough to really say for sure.
Per my lengthy writeup above, I disagree strongly and believe it far more likely this is one of the millions of these tiles that were mass produced rather than one from a relative handful that might have been made by amateurs. For one, there’s just statistical likelihood. For another, the kinds of materials and production methods necessary to create such a tile would not have been readily available to the casual layperson. Your typical 17th century village just didn’t have a “paint your own pottery” workshop for the kids like nowadays.
My first thought at viewing the tile is that the wooden construct to the left of the cow is a stile, which is a structure or opening in a fence to allow someone to pass from one side to the other. I remember a little poem I read as a child about a crooked man who crossed a crooked stile.
Obviously, this is a clear example of a crooked stile.
On the one hand, we have a well-established, well-known historical industry that produced millions of exactly this kind of tile, thousands of which survive and are still in circulation, including some with very similar designs. On the other hand, we have the proposition that some modern amateur managed to produce a compelling single replica of one of these historical tiles, and that their personal artwork ended up being offered for sale in a shop as if it were one of those historical tiles.
The one I linked to is certainly being sold as from the 18th C (not 17th). Given its stylistic similarity to the OP’s cow, I’m going to say that settles it, unless you’re alleging outright fraud by what seems a fairly reputable seller (it’s not like these are rare finds. Like @Cervaise said, millions were made.)
Or - they had different aesthetic sensibilities and these were considered “good enough” for lower middle-class sink backsplashes, or wherever they ended up being used.
Or that particular style of weird-faced cattle was deeply symbolic to them at the time - maybe it represents their greatest historic enemy, the Hapsburgs or something. I mean, there’s a certain Charles II-ishness about that weird face.
A lot of Delft ceramic decoration was derivative of imported pottery from Japan and China. There is a Japanese mythical beast that may be the inspiration for these Dutch cow decorations…
I’m pretty sure for the ones sold by legit antique sellers, probably within a few years of what they say. Not the 60+ year difference there. Also, the 1800s is well after the heyday of Delftware.
There were also later (still antique) periods in which those styles were revived. It is very common for reproductions, particularly reproductions that happened during such a revival, to be attributed to the dates of the earlier period, particularly by people selling them.
Both can be true, of course. It’s easy to imagine a 12 or 13 year old laborer sitting hunched over a work table cranking out their quota of ten tiles per hour, or whatever, on pain of being cuffed about the head by an angry foreman for failing to deliver.
The only major Dutch revival I’m aware of was 20th C. I think that misattributing those as 17th C would be fraud.
Plus, as has been said - hundreds of million of tiles were produced, some Dutch houses still have originals, so it’s not like the source of period tiles has completely dried up. They still are found by the hundreds in renovations/demolitions.
Sure, some sellers might mis-date their wares. But there’s also quite a lot of actual, attributed stuff out there, with documented provenance by reputable suppliers.
There have been other revivals and phases of reproduction pretty much continuously from the 17th century onwards, not necessarily taking place in the Netherlands; for example there were reproductions of Dutch delft traditions that started coming from China, in the 19th century.
Not in dispute. The human-faced-cow tiles are the ones to consider, not every tile.
However, there is a precedent for animals being depicted with weirdly human features in prior European art, so there is no particular reason that these human-faced cows would need to be linked to the Japanese myth by anything more than coincidence.
For tiles, specifically? You have a cite for that?
Then find any tile in a similar style of definitively non-18th C Dutch provenance. All the ones I can find are rather convincingly attributed to then and there (and stylistically match). Lots of jars, plates etc, in that style but not Dutch, not seeing a lot of tiles though.