Kitchen Ceramic Panel

Ceramic panel which depicts a woman standing with her head turned to her right holding a dish with a plucked and headless bird, in her hands. She is dressed in a yellow underskirt and a green coloured bliaud dress, a while linen blouse with ruffled sleeves with a white scarf around her front with a red jerkin. She wears a yellow apron tied around her waste and has cobalt blue leather high healed shoes and white tights. Her hair is braided and is tied back in a bun, held in place by a pin and she wears large earrings. On the right of the woman, there is a large greeny-blue storage jar on the floor. On the wall, hanging on a meat hook is a butcher’s cleaver and from a rope hangs a hook. This is probably an anchor type hook, although part of the image is missing, and from which strings of morcilla (blood sausage) are hanging. On the left, at the feet of the woman is a cat of which the head, back legs and tail are preserved. On the wall, there is another spiked anchor type hook from which hangs a plucked bird and a leg of pork. The scene is surrounded by a simple border in the upper part, but this is missing on both sides as the tiles have been cut, removing the outer parts of the tiles (3.5 cm missing from the right hand tiles and 10 cm from the left hand side). The lower part was probably not decorated with the same border like the top part.

This panel is accompanied by another similar one in which a man appears holding a “horchatera” (to make horchata) or a barrel shaped flask containing a liquid such as “agua limón” (a lemon refreshment) or water, over a wooden table for cutting meat on. By his feet there is a dog licking up the blood which has dripped from a rabbit hanging from a meat hook. A couple of pans and a string of sausages are also hanging up. On the left there is a bench with a stemmed tray which contains four glasses, which completes the scene. A complete border similar to that on the other panel surrounds the scene. The border does not cover the lower part of the panel. Both panels are made up of thirty tiles which are numbered on the back in black. They also have a mark on the left of the number which prevents any confusion amongst the tiles. In the first tile the mark is a type of in the upper corner of the tile. In the second there is the number > right next to the left side of the tile. Some of the numbers are underlined and the last number, 30, appears to have been underlined twice, possibly to indicate that it was the last tile. This could indicate that there wasn’t a border on the lower part of the panel. The pieces and whole tiles that are missing have been reconstructed as closely as possible using the original dimensions and colours. The head of the dog which appears with the man looks like a pig’s head and does not fit well with the rest of the body. The fact that it has the same mark on the back leads us to think that the tile was broken in the workshop and at the time of putting together the panel, the tile was re-made, but not following the style of the whole scene. Both panels have very carefully drawn designs, outlined in manganese, and the compositions are to a very high standard.
FLORES ABAT, M. A., 2001.