United States or Ghana ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The fatherland of the enameller is Southern Mesopotamia and especially Babylonia, where enamelled bricks seem to have been used in extraordinary quantities. The wall of Dour-Saryoukin, the town built by Sargon, has been found intact for a considerable part of its height. As in the retaining wall of the palace, coloured brick has there been used with extreme discretion.
"Upon my word," replied the old beau ironically, "the good count can boast of a valet who knows almost as much as Rachel, the famous English enameller. At a little distance you would have sworn that he was sixteen years old, and that he was going, not to be married, but to be confirmed." "And how did he look?" "Restless, I think."
Perhaps the success of the school was due in great part to the discretion and good management of the artist who had been nominated its chief instructor: George Michael Moser, a gold and silver chaser, enameller and modeller, Swiss by birth. Something also it owed to its unpretentious yet practical and utilitarian character.
In fact, this art is rather an elemental one, and any departure from old established rules is liable to lead the worker into a new craft; his art becomes that of the inlayer or the enameller when he attempts to use larger pieces in cloissons, or to fuse bits together by any process.
At Babylon as at Nineveh the palette of the enameller was very restricted. Touches of black were used to give accent to certain details, such as the hair and beard, or to define a contour. The surface of the brick was not always left smooth; in some cases it shows hollow lines in which certain colours were placed when required to mark distinctive or complementary features.
The results obtained by the enameller were pretty much the same in Assyria and Chaldæa, and we are inclined to look upon the older of the two nations as the inventor of the process, especially as it could hardly have done without it so well as its younger rival, and in this opinion we are confirmed by the superior quality of the Babylonian enamel.
No explorer has found anything in the remains of a Chaldæan city that can be compared to the archivolt of enamelled bricks discovered by M. Place over one of the gateways of the city founded by Sargon. We can hardly doubt however that the art of the enameller was discovered in Chaldæa and thence transported into Assyria.
They may be beaten with the hammer, shaped by the chisel, or engraved by the burin; their surfaces may be either dead or polished; the variety of shades of which they are capable, and the brilliance of their reflections, are among the most valuable resources of the decorator, and the colouring principles they contain provide the painter and enameller with some of his richest and most solid tones.
West returned from the palace full of this royal announcement. He at once put himself in communication with three ex-Directors of the Incorporated Society, Cotes, a fashionable portrait-painter; Chambers, who had been instructor in architecture to the King when Prince of Wales; and Moser, the gold-chaser and enameller, who had taught the King drawing.
And the Spirit of the Furnace mysteriously answered him with murmuring of fire: "Canst thou learn the art of that Infinite Enameller who hath made beautiful the Arch of Heaven, whose brush is Light; whose paints are the Colors of the Evening?"
Word Of The Day