British Manufacturing Industries: Pottery, Glass and Silicates, Furniture and Woodwork.Arnoux, Léon
History
British Manufacturing Industries: Pottery, Glass and Silicates, Furniture and Woodwork.
Arnoux, Léon
Manufacturing industries -- Great Britain
It is manifest that if different metallic oxides be used with the same
glass, mixed tints will be produced, so that by mingling small
quantities of oxide of cobalt and protoxide of copper, a blue glass
having a greenish hue may be obtained. The revival of glass painting
has caused manufacturers to turn their attention to these mixtures, in
order to produce tints resembling those of ancient stained glass.
Messrs. Powell and Son, of Whitefriars, were the first to perform
experiments on these mixtures, and after much laborious attention and
patience their efforts have been crowned with great success, for they
have been enabled to produce glass as beautiful in tint and in texture
as the best specimens of ancient manufacture. Their example has been
followed by others, such as Messrs. Hartley of Sunderland, and Messrs.
Chance and Co. of Birmingham.
While treating of the effect produced by different metallic oxides
upon colour, it may be well to mention that the opaque glasses used
for such purposes, as the enamelling of watch-faces, are made by
mixing with the materials a certain quantity of arsenious acid (or
white arsenic), in much larger quantities than when it is employed
simply to correct the tint imparted to glass by the iron impurities in
the sand. Oxide of tin also renders glass white and opaque, and a
certain quantity of bone ash will produce a similar effect, though not
in so satisfactory a manner.
_Glass painting_ first became general in this country at the time
when the Early English style of architecture prevailed, and some of
the best specimens were executed during that period. By the best
specimens is not meant, that the figures painted upon those windows
were artistically as correct as similar works of a later date, but
that they were designed and executed in accordance with those
principles, which should always govern the adaptation of a substance
like glass to ornamental purposes. The earlier mediA|val artists
depended for effect more upon the boldness of their outline, than upon
the intensity of their shading or the delicacy of their manipulation.
The form of a thirteenth-century figure is merely indicated by a few
bold and well drawn outlines, the features being formed by lines, the
pupils of the eyes by simple well-shaped masses of opaque pigment; and
such a treatment as this was quite sufficient to convey what was, to
the observer, more or less a symbolical, than a truthful
representation of the Scripture history which they were intended to
illustrate. These artists remembered that windows are openings in a
building, through which light has to pass, and they did not,
therefore, like many of the later imitators, render them opaque by
masses of intense shadow, which perfectly obscure the colour of the
glass upon which the picture is painted, and render the passage of
light through it simply impossible. The thirteenth-century glass
painters, too, in the treatment of their shadows, bore this great
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