Just as you go out of the studio your eye can scarcely fail to fall
upon one particular wooden hanger to be screwed on a door. If you know
the "Rose and the Ring" by heart, as you should, it will give you
quite a shock. It is the image of the Doorknocker into which the Fairy
Blackstick changed the wicked porter Gruffanuff! It is indeed!
You know, if all these toys should come to life some moonlit night
they would make quite a formidable array! Imagine the pirates and the
kicking mules and the cubist burglars all running wild together! And
there is something uncanny about them and their expressions that makes
one suspect that such an event is more than half likely.
Even the advertisements for such a shop could not be commonplace. The
artist in charge proclaims that: "Pirates are his specialty, and that
he will gladly furnish estimates on anything from the services of a
Pirate Crew to a Treasure Island or a Pirate Ship."
On Washington Square is another sort of workshop,--a place where
jewelry is made by hand. The girl who does this work draws her own
designs and executes them, and the results are infinitely quainter
and more beautiful than the things to be bought at jewelry shops. She
buys her copper and silver and the little gold she uses in bulk; her
jewels--semi-precious stones for the most part--come from all over the
world. In her cool, airy workroom with the green trees of the big
Square outside, this little woman heats and bends and bores her metals
and shines her stones in their quaint settings, with a rapt absorption
that is balanced by her steady skill. It is no light or easy work,
this making of hand-made jewelry, and it requires no inconsiderable
gift of delicate fancy and artistic judgment. This girl is an artist,
not the less so because she makes her flowers and dragons and symbolic
figures out of metal instead of canvas and paint; not the less so
because her colours do not come in tubes but imprisoned in the rare,
exotic tints of shimmering gems.
Here is a ring of slightly dulled silver--the design is of a water
lily, fragile and delicate. In the heart of it lies, like a dewdrop, a
pale-green jewel called peridot. Here is the soft, rich blue of _lapis
lazuli_--here the keener azure of turquoise matrix. Here is a Mexican
opal, full of fire, almost blood-red, glowing feverishly from its
burnished-copper setting. What a terrible, yet beautiful ornament!
One would be, I imagine, under a sort of fierce and splendid spell
while wearing it. Here, cool and pale and pure as a moonbeam, is a
little water opal,--set in silver of course. Here is an "abalone
blister," iridescent like mother-of-pearl, carrying in it something of
"the shade and the shine of the sea" from which the mother-shell
originally came. Here is matrix opal, and here are numbers of
strange-hued, crystalline gems with names all ending in "ite." To
model with metal for clay--to paint with jewels for colour! Does it
not sound like very real and very fascinating art?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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