In 1896 together with the unrelated Namikawa Sosuke, Yasuyuki was appointed as a Teishitsu Gigeiin, or 'Imperial Artist', the only two cloisonné makers to be so honoured. He won altogether 31 prizes at expositions both at home and abroad.
#Cloisonne bird bell series#
He was also honoured at the series of National Industrial Expositions which was instituted in 1877. Namikawa won prizes at the Philadelphia World Fair of 1876, and then at the Paris World Fair of 1878, and later at the 1889 Paris Fair. Many of his early designs were drawn by the designer Nakahara Tessen, who recorded them in his Kyo Shippo Monyo Shu. He took great care over his compositions and varied the standard motifs so that each piece was unique and with its own charm and character. Around 1878 or 1879 Namikawa Yasuyuki (1845-1927) met the German chemist Gottfried Wagener (1831-1892) with whose knowledge of ceramic pigmentation he was able to develop and refine his glazes in colour and texture to make both transparent and opaque glazes of faultless clarity. For instance, too much iron will make it turn gray, with uranium, yellow, with chromium, green, gold or iodine, red.The earliest Japanese cloisonné vessels, made in the mid-19th century, were decorated with rough, dark enameling in a crude imitation of Chinese prototypes, but already by the late 1880s Japanese enamel was one of the wonders of the international marketplace. As in glazing, the amount of each mineral added will influence the difference in colors. This process is called “falang.” The basic composition is boric acid, saltpeter, and alkaline. Next is the application of enamel, which is like a glaze for ceramics. The strips of filigree are adhered to the copper in patterns. Copper strips are 1/16 inch in diameter and the length is at the discretion of the artist. Next step is the filigree, which requires a great deal of care and artistic inspiration. Once the coppersmith finishes his work, the cloisonne craftsman begins his art.
The coppersmith must have good judgment to decide the shape, uniformity, and thickness to the piece. The making of cloisonne requires rather elaborate and complicated processes - base-hammering, copper-strip inlay, soldering, enamel filling, enamel firing, polishing and gilding.īase-hammering is the first step, utilizing copper, which is easy to stretch and hammer. When the customer put two vases side-by-side it became obvious that the painted one was of lesser quality, but the untrained eye can easily be fooled. The same size vase, painted in the cloisonne style, is worth only $20 to $50 an enameled vase would be worth hundreds to thousands. This intrigued us because the price difference is quite remarkable. The customer explained to us that the actual metal parts are not painted, but filled with the enamel.
We had to invest some time researching so we could tell the difference between an imitation and a real one. When they returned to Danville she wanted to confirm the value of what they had purchased. The customer who introduced us to this art had just come back from Iran and Iraq, where her husband had worked for some time. In the beginning during the 7th reign of the Ming emperor, the name was “Blue of Jintai” in China because the blue was the base color for enameling and Jintai was referring to the Ming emperor. The art is predominately Asian and has been practiced continuously, except during war years, since the sixteenth century - that’s 500 years.
CLOISONNE IS A method of decorating metal with enameling.
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