Studio: international art (19.1900)

This is how most sportsmen would talk to you
about their cups, their trophies, and you would
find it hard to answer them without inviting a
repetition of the same arguments. The best thing
to do is to call attention to the fact that the most
popular trophies and cups happen to be those
which are so " loud," so ostentatious, as to be
un-English even in their defects. A faulty style
may have many merits, and there would be little
cause for complaint if the usual style of the modern
sporting cup were English enough to be strong,
simple, quiet, and unadorned. But, strange to say,
most sportsmen like in metal-work a pretentious
display of such tawdry and florid bad qualities
as would be hateful to them in a book or a poem,
This bad taste the manufacturing silversmiths do
their very best to gratify, taking infinite pains to be
sufficiently inartistic. Notice, for example, the
surfaces of their machine-made cups. All are
equally aggressive, equally self-assertive, in smooth-
164

ness and brilliancy of polish. There is no sign
of texture, no evidence of ingenious tooling, no
human interest at all. Some think that this result is
always obtained by machine-polishing. Very often
it is, no doubt, but many silver cups are actually
dipped in a vat and plated, this being a quick way
to produce the requisite kind of surface.

As a protest against this abuse of smoothness
and brilliancy, the metal-work of the Japanese may
be mentioned here, for its beauty and variety of
texture are admitted to be unrivalled. At South
Kensington may be found a collection of 57 oblong
plaques in bronze; it seems to be little known, yet
none can study it without gaining many invaluable
hints in the use of both patinas and tools. Some
plaques are smooth—smooth as the finest glazed
pottery ; others have a rugged texture resembling
the bark of pines; and between these extremes
there are marbled and honeycomb-like patterning,
waved lateral hammerwork, and surfaces grained