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Updated: June 6, 2025
There were lots of beautiful things here vases, enamels, jade, cloisonne, and much wondrous porcelain; and although everyone had been saying that Peking was not as rich as in 1860, when those strings of beautiful black pearls had been brought home for the Empress Eugenie, still it was clear that these Palaces contained a wealth undreamed of outside. Indeed, there were magnificent things....
These are the people who chuck engagements when they get better invitations, and always I seem to see them with expensive little bags and chains and Faberjé enamels. Men will slave for such women will carry things for them, and serve them. They have "success" until they are quite old, and after they have taken to rouge and paint. A tired woman hardly ever gets anything carried for her.
In this monument Orcagna employed carved bas-reliefs and statuettes, intaglios and mosaics, incrustations of agates, enamels, and gilded glass patterns, with a sense of harmony so refined, and a mastery over each kind of workmanship so perfect, that the whole tabernacle is an epitome of the minor arts of mediaeval Italy.
Do you remember those little frames full of enameled copper on crimson velvet, hanging among the portraits? . . . Well, those are Petitot's enamels; and there is a cabinet minister as used to be a druggist that will give three thousand francs apiece for them." La Cibot's eyes opened wide. "There are thirty of them in the pair of frames!" she said.
All painted enamels had to be enamelled on the back as well, to prevent warping in the furnace when the shrinkage took place. After each layer of colour the whole plate was fired.
The brilliant shifting crowd of two hours ago seemed to have sunk into the earth. For there is no night life in the streets of Jaipur. Travellers had passed on and out. Merchants had stowed away their muslins and embroideries, their vessels of brass and copper and priceless enamels.
The two making one, and though separate, indivisible, peculiarly fitted them for wedding rings. It is set with sapphire and amethyst, the elaborate and beautiful design enriched by coloured enamels. Dryden, in his play of Don Sebastian, describes such a ring: “A curious artist wrought them With joints so close as not to be perceived; Yet they are both each other’s counterpart.
I have known enamels to be in the stoves with heat to 270° for two and three days, and then be soft. The sulphur also caused the enamels to crack in a peculiar manner, much like a crocodile skin, and work so affected could never be made satisfactory, for here again we come back to the first principle, that if the foundation be not good, the superstructure can never be permanent.
It should not be littered up with personal things magazines, books and work-baskets and objects that belong in the living-room but it welcomes flowers and objets d'art, collections of fans, or miniatures, or graceful mirrors, or old French prints, or enamels, or porcelains. It should be a place where people may converse without interruption from the children.
This beautiful piece was included in a collection of jade, cloisonné enamels, and carved furniture gathered together in Java some years ago by a well-known collector of Chinese and Oriental curios. Now and then such pieces are to be seen in the shops of West End dealers. But it would be difficult indeed to find one so characteristic of the Chinese carver's art as the one shown.
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