Description Decorative ceramic hand-painted plate by the San Jose Pottery Company, featuring a man riding a donkey (“burro”) in a moonlit desert landscape. The plate is made with a red clay base and features a dark red brown glaze on the border. The plate is signed with a maguey cactus craftmark, the signature of the workshop. The San Jose Pottery Company was founded in 1931 in San Antonio, TX and depicted daily life scenes on pottery and tiles. The plate measures 11-1/8″ diameter and is 1/2″ thick. This particular plate was salvaged from the Windsor home on Lookout Mountain, an extraordinary 1930s hilltop estate built by George and Elizabeth Scholze, of the prominent Scholze Tannery family of Chattanooga. Designed during Tennessee’s brief but notable embrace of Spanish and Mediterranean Revival architecture, the residence was richly appointed with custom ironwork, elaborate stained glass, and an exceptional array of Mueller Mosaic Co. tiles placed throughout its stairways, fireplaces, fountains, and decorative wall programs. The interior featured one of the most extensive and artistically ambitious decorative tile installations of its era in the region—executed with a level of craftsmanship and expense rarely seen outside California’s major tile-producing studios. As the Windsor House now undergoes dismantling and salvage, surviving tiles such as this represent a rare, historically significant remnant of the estate’s original 1930s decorative program. Coordinating tiles from the same collection can be found under product code: NFT98-RW & NFT99-RW.
