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When the shaft is of the required size, the spider smoothes and glazes the wall with a fluid which is secreted by itself. Then the whole shaft is covered with a silken paper lining, spun from the animal's spinnerets.
Any piece of genuine Japanese art ware, of which Cloisonné is perhaps the best known; old or ancestral china; objects of historical interest; different examples of American pottery, among others the Grueby, Van Briggle, and Teco, with their soft, dull glazes, and the Rookwood with its brilliantly glazed rich, mellow browns, its delicately tinted dull Iris glaze, and other styles which are being brought out; Wedgwood with its cameo-like reliefs; the rainbow-tinted Favrile glass; the Copenhagen in dull blues and grays all these embody, each in its individual way, the requirements of art bric-a-brac.
The Greeks burn their dead, the Persians bury them; the Indian glazes the body, the Scythian eats it, the Egyptian embalms it. In Egypt, indeed, the corpse, duly dried, is actually placed at table, I have seen it done; and it is quite a common thing for an Egyptian to relieve himself from pecuniary embarrassment by a timely visit to the pawnbroker, with his brother or father deceased.
There, among them all, the painter bends over his canvas seeking to perfect the glazes and scumbles of his pearly tints, or trying to realize some dream of a face that haunts his fancy with its exquisite smile.
It is a curious reflection, however, that in spite of all the later improvements in the fictile art in spite of wheels and moulds, pastes and glazes, stamps and pigments, and all the rest of it the most primitive methods of the first potter are still in use in many countries, side by side with the most finished products of modern European skill and industry.
Ushabtis with back pier and beard; fine 650 to poor at 350. Ptolemies, 332-30 B.C. Pottery clumsy and small. Many Rhodian jars with Greek stamped handles. Glazes, dark violet and yellow-green. Glass revived for inlay figures in shrines: minute mosaic begins. Glazed beads scarce, no scarabs. Large copper coins, silver tetradrachms, base in later time, and concave on reverse.
"Yes," I said, with memories of a carelessly read pamphlet in my mind, and without any satirical intention, "I suppose you MUST use lead in your glazes?" Whereupon I found I had tapped the ruling grievance of my uncle's life. He hated leadless glazes more than he hated anything, except the benevolent people who had organised the agitation for their use.
The portrait exhibited in this year's show of Old Masters in the Academy will do the lady who walks forward, her hands held in front of her bosom, the fingers pressed together, the white dress floating from the hips, the white brought down with a yellow glaze. I do not think that we find either that gaiety or those glazes in Mr. Steer.
It is his homage to the artisans who contrived those strange forms and imagined those gorgeous glazes. In the end he will have a catalogue illustrated from his own designs. Meanwhile, he knows his potteries as the shepherd knows his flock. What casuist will find the heart to deny him so innocent a pleasure?
And then these finds served as so many springs which, turned on by a question, played off an essay on Jean Goujon, Michel Columb, Germain Pilon, Boulle, Van Huysum, and Boucher, the great native painter of Le Berry; on Clodion, the carver of wood, on Venetian mirrors, on Brustolone, an Italian tenor who was the Michael-Angelo of boxwood and holm oak; on the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, on the glazes of Bernard de Palissy, the enamels of Petitot, the engravings of Albrecht Durer whom she called Dur; on illuminations on vellum, on Gothic architecture, early decorated, flamboyant and pure enough to turn an old man's brain and fire a young man with enthusiasm.
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