Lascaux Cave Painting

Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.

Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.

Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.

Lascaux sits on a wooded hillside above Montignac, a town on the Vézère River in the Dordogne department of southwestern France. It is part of the Vézère valley UNESCO World Heritage Site, which protects 15 prehistoric sites and 25 decorated caves inscribed in 1979.

The cave was closed to the public in April 1963 after carbon dioxide, heat, and humidity from visitors triggered algae (the so-called maladie verte) and white calcite deposits that began to grow over the paintings. It will not reopen. Visitors today see the Lascaux IV facsimile in Montignac.

Four teenagers from Montignac entered the cave on 12 September 1940: Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel and Simon Coencas, along with Ravidat's dog Robot. Ravidat had noticed a hole left by an uprooted tree a few days earlier and returned with the others to climb in.

The paintings are approximately 17,000 years old, from the late Solutrean and early Magdalenian periods of the Upper Paleolithic. The site contains about 600 painted figures and 1,500 engravings: aurochs, horses, deer, ibex, one bear, one rhinoceros, and the Shaft scene with its wounded bison and bird-headed figure.

Lascaux II opened in 1983 about 200 metres from the original and reproduces the Hall of the Bulls and the Painted Gallery. Lascaux IV opened in December 2016 in Montignac as the Centre International de l'Art Pariétal; it reproduces the whole cave using laser-scanned, hand-painted facsimiles.

Four mineral pigments. Red and yellow ochres from iron-oxide-bearing clays in the Vézère valley, black from manganese dioxide, and a sparse white from kaolin (china clay). They were applied with chewed-twig brushes, hollow-bone blowing tubes, and palm prints, and bonded into the limestone surface.

A black aurochs in the Hall of the Bulls (Salle des Taureaux) measures roughly 5.2 metres in length and is the largest known prehistoric cave painting. The Hall holds four aurochs alongside horses and stags, painted directly onto white-calcite-coated limestone.

It's been a meaningful gift for our customers who keep books on parietal painting, archaeology, or Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams. The Lascaux tile carries that russet-and-black palette into a room without flattening it into a textbook reproduction. A Small or Medium works on a desk or in a reading nook.

The deep ochre, charcoal, and white palette settles into rooms built around earth tones. It reads well in Wabi-sabi, Earthy Modern, and Library-Maximalist interiors, anywhere old leather, walnut, kilim rugs, and ceramic vessels already live. It is less at home in a high-gloss minimalist room.

Earth-tone palettes and ancestral-modern interiors, which lean on natural pigments, clay tones, and primitive forms, have been a sustained design through-line since around 2023. The Lascaux tile sits naturally inside that family alongside terracotta, oxblood, unbleached linen, and unfinished wood.

Above a standard three-seat sofa, a single Large reads as the focal piece. A 4-tile Mural fills the wall above without crowding the seating; a 9-tile Mural carries a wider wall. Above a console table in an entryway, a Medium or a 4-tile Mural is the more proportioned choice.

Yes. Order it in Dura Satin or Matte for those rooms. Both finishes are scratch-resistant and handle direct water contact, splashes, and steam without degrading. Glossy is best kept to framed wall art in dry rooms, where the deeper sheen reads as showpiece.

A microfibre cloth with warm water is enough for most marks. For stubborn residue (cooking grease, soap film) add a drop of mild dish soap. Avoid abrasive scrubbers, bleach, and ammonia-based cleaners; they degrade the surface finish over time.

Yes. The Lascaux composition was painted by Reid Wender in the studio's stained-glass-and-alcohol-ink visual language, then slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure beneath a thin glossy finish. Single studio. No licensing. No outside artists.