Ella Grainger (1889-1979), wife of Percy Grainger and a talented artist and poet in her own right, began her ceramic tile work whilst attending classes at the London County Council Central School of Arts in 1920. Her work involved the use of coloured and gold china paints (now housed within the Grainger Museum) which were hand painted on the glazed tile surface and then re-fired. Many included some of the poems or "rimes" that would later be developed in Bereavement and Other Poems (1928), The Pavement Artist (1939) and A Wayward Girl (1941).

Exhibitions of the tile portraits and designs took place at the Bond Street Galleries in London (1925), the Ferragil Galleries in New York (1930) and with the Contemporary Art Group at the Athenaeum Gallery in Melbourne (1935).