PLATE XXXII,
In our notice of Plate II. we gave a short description of lac, and the various processes of its applicationto purposes of commerce, reserving for the present article a few observations on the knowledge of art displayedby the Oriental designers of objects in that material.
A pattern in which two colours only are employed to contrast with one another, affords a more readyillustration of the principle upon which such compositions should be based than one in which the combinationsare complicated by the graduated intensity of several tints. It was for this reason that we preferred toillustrate the artistic principles applicable to our present subject by a simple object, such as that engravedin the accompanying Plate, rather than by the more complicated scales of form and colour displayed in thepatterns given in Plate II.
In the box-top figured in our present illustration, even the uninitiated must appreciate the judgmentwith which the designer has contrived to balance the areas destined to be tinted with the different coloursemployed. Among the most remarkable peculiarities of Indian ornamentation, as applied to plane surfaces,are the flatness exhibited by the leaves, flowers, &c., of which it is composed, and the general appearance ofequal surface which its various parts present. In too many patterns of European design the eye is drawnto one particular portion of an object which should retain the uniform aspect of a flat surface; and accordingto the amount or quality of the light or colour at that point, so does that portion of the surface appear eitherto advance towards or retire from the spectator. Thus, a shawl upon a lady’s back may frequently appear toprotrude or recede, in other parts than those which the form of its wearer may account for.
In Indian designs, the happy effect of flatness is obtained partly by the judicious balance of quantity betweenthe area of the field and that of the pattern, and partly by a careful preservation of the same ratio in everyportion over which the pattern may extend. So skilfully is this balance maintained, that we have remarkedin many Indian patterns, that if the whole of the ground stand to the pattern in the ratio of three to one, one-sixteenth of the whole surface measured, in any part, will be found to contain three of ground to one of pattern.It is scarcely to be supposed, that the Indian artists are guided by laws so mechanical as those to which weallude, but rather that the refinement of taste, engendered by their traditional education, precludes their tolerationof any departure from those harmonious proportions which the practice of ages has sanctioned as most pleasingand agreeable.
In the “Journal of Design” (vol. v. p. 92 ) Mr. Owen Jones has made some valuable remarks on theprinciples which should govern the distribution of plane surfaces in decoration. In defining some abstractprinciples, applicable in their fullest extent to the artistic productions contributed from India to the GreatExhibition , that gentleman observes, that “ one guiding principle of the ornamentation of the Orientals appearsto have been, that their decoration was always what may be called surface decoration. Their general guidingforms were first considered, and those forms decorated. Their flowers are not natural flowers; but conven-tionalized by the materials in which they worked. We do not see, as in European works, a highly-wroughtimitation of a natural flower, with its light and shade, struggling to stand out from the surface on which it isworked, but a conventional representation, sufficiently near to suggest an image to the mind, without destroyingthe unity of the object it is intended to decorate. There is a total absence of shadow. The patterns of theirshawls and carpets are harmonious and effective, from the proper distribution of form and colour, and do not