JAPAN
The characteristic productions of the third among the modern schools are monochromatic and translucid enamels. All students of the keramic art know that the monochrome porcelains of China owe their beauty chiefly to the fact that the colour is in the glaze, not under it. The keramist finds no difficulty in applying an uniform coat of pigment to porcelain biscuit and covering the whole with a diaphanous glaze. The colour is fixed and the glaze set by secondary firing at a lower temperature than that necessary for hardening the pâte. Such porcelains lack the velvet-like softness and depth of tone so justly prized in the genuine monochrome, where the glaze itself contains the colouring matter, pâte and glaze being fired simultaneously at the same high temperature. It is apparent that a vitrified enamel may be set to perform, in part at any rate, the function of a porcelain glaze. Acting upon that theory, the experts of Tōkyō and Nagoya have produced, during recent years, many very beautiful specimens of monochrome enamels,—yellow (canary or straw), rose du Barry, liquid-dawn red, aubergine purple, grass or leaf green, dove-grey, and lapis lazuli blue. These pieces do not quite reach the level of Chinese monochrome porcelains, but their inferiority is not marked. The artist's great difficulty is to hide the metal base completely. A monochrome loses much of its attractiveness when the colour merges into a metal rim, or when the interior of a specimen is covered with crude, unpolished paste. But to spread and fix the paste so that neither at the rim nor in the interior shall there be any break of continuity or any indication that the base is metal not porcelain, is a tour de force demanding extraordinary skill.
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