TRIAL BY FIRE: THE DANGEROUS ART OF ENAMEL

Enameling is an art fraught with dangers.

The process itself is an ancient one –enamelware is nearly as old as human civilization itself –and the finished product, while virtually immune to the passage of time, is one of fine art’s most challenging to produce successfully.

Since the colors (created through the use of metal oxides) generally change during firing the enamellist must be able to visualize the finished product ahead of time. In all but the simplest enamelware, perhaps dozens of successive firings must be performed as multiple layers and areas are built up.

During each stage disaster may strike and destroy countless hours of painstaking work (often done under a binocular microscope) at a single stroke. The slightest impurity in the water, a speck of unnoticed dust, or a seemingly insignificant error in heating or cooling may cause discoloration, cracking, or bubbling and the entire piece is ruined.

Masters of the art are few, and it is taught only rarely and generally incompletely in arts schools when it is taught at all.

Most enamellists today who are at the peak of their profession are the products of a lifelong, driven search for not only teachers but also materials –certain colors, for instance, have not been made in decades.

The small specialist company of Donzé Cadrans is one of a very few firms which still make vitreous enamel dials, and independent or brand associated artisans such as Anita Porchet, Miklos Merczel and Sophie Roche, and Suzanne Rohr are as much household names among cognoscenti as they are obscure to the general public.

TYPES OF ENAMEL TECHNIQUES

The range of possibilities in how enamel is applied and how the underlying metal is worked has given rise over the centuries to different major varieties of enameling. Here are some of the best known and most revered.

• Cloisonné –the creation of cloisons, or “cells” made out of wire (usually gold or silver) bent to form a design. The cloisons are filled with enamel and then fired.
• Champlevé –the “raised field” technique, in which the metal substrate is hollowed out to create a design. The hollows are filled with enamel and fired leaving adjacent metal areas exposed.
• Basse-taille –the metal surface is decorated with a low relief engraving, which can be seen through a translucent enamel overlay
• Plique-a-jour –similar to stained glass. The metal surface is carved out to let light through. More fragile than other forms of enameling, as the enamel is not supported from behind.
• Paillonnee –the technique of setting miniature cut-outs, usually of gold leaf. Nearly extinct as the “paillons” are no longer made.
• Flinqué –guilloché ( engine turning) overlaid with translucent colored enamel.
• Miniature painting –the creation of tiny paintings with colored enamels. Usually the enamel powder is mixed with water before applying but for miniature painting oil is used as a vehicle.

Watchmaker artisans today can draw on a wide range of traditional and modern techniques and materials, but which is which? The names are, confusingly, sometimes used interchangeably but each means a particular method and medium.

• Enamel –true enamel is also known as “vitreous” (glassy) enamel. An extremely ancient technique dating back to ancient Egypt, vitreous enamel uses finely powdered colored glass, which is applied to a metal backing. The enamel is then fired in an oven hot enough to melt the glass, producing an even, transparent or translucent surface.
• Porcelain –a ceramic medium. Porcelain, like enamel, undergoes some vitrification when fired, but the material itself usually contains a significant percentage of clay and other materials, unlike vitreous enamel which is pure glass. Must be fired at a much higher temperature than most other ceramics to achieve vitrification (the formation of glass in the ceramic body.)
• Cold Enamel –epoxy resins, which can be produced in a tremendous range of colors and transparencies. Much used in horology in the production of fine art painted dials as well as translucent colored surface treatments. Much less brittle than vitreous enamels and do not require firing to harden.

The most straightforward of these is the creation of a single color dial –white enamel dials of course were used in innumerable watches in past centuries, but today have become a rarity.

Jaquet Droz specializes in ceramic dials and not only creates white fired enamel dials but also, more recently, have created a black enamel dial as well, a rarity in this or any century.

Since then, Ulysse Nardin has made a specialty of enamel dials in general and cloisonné in particular, especially in the San Marco Cloisonné watches which have included nautical and architectural motifs.

Cloisonné presents the enameller not only with the challenge of placing the enamel in the wire cells (done traditionally with a goose quill pen) but also with the hurdle of bending the wire for the cells by hand –a step which ensures that cloisonné watches even in the same series are all individual works of art.

Flinque enameling is the technique of placing enamel over guilloché (or in some cases engraved metal) surfaces, which both increases the difficulty as well as the risk of the enameling process.

The execution of the guilloche, needless to say, must be flawless, and rejection of the dial due to firing problems means not only a loss of the enamel work but also of the guilloché as well.

Champlevé enameling capitalizes on the affinity of enamel work for clean, clearly delineated geometric areas, giving a pronounced visual strength in contrast to the delicacy of cloisonné.

The “Paon” (Peacock) tourbillon is a shimmering paragon of the method, transcending the sometimes heavy quality that pailloné can have; the metal remaining between the depressions in the gold is so thin as to rival the paper thin walls of a honeycomb.

Undoubtedly the rarest of the great traditional enameling techniques is that of paillonneé. The method takes its name from the decorative gold foil motif elements, or paillons, which the enamellist lays over an enameled dial base and then immures in further layers of translucent enamel.

The simple description belies the complexity of the technique. A specialty of Jaquet Droz, the paillonneé dial requires the preparation of a flinqué base over which a polychromed enamel surface in royal blue is created.

The individual gold paillons are then laid one by one onto the surface and covered with further successive firings of translucent blue. The result is a radiant evocation of distant time past, in which artistry and mechanics had not yet gone their separate ways, but were still in the first ecstasies of the consummation of their marriage.

The two greatest challenges in painting in vitreous enamel are the need for successive firings, and the fact that colors cannot be mixed to create new ones.

The former is an aspect, of course, of all enamel work but the number of firings increases as the depth and variety of colors achieved increases.

The latter presents a great challenge to the enamellist –the fact that colors cannot be mixed means that variation and gradation in color have to be achieved through the careful use of layered firings as well as exquisitely challenging control of the distribution of individual granules of enamel (rather like Pointillist painting.)

Vacheron’s most recent foray into this demanding technique are the “Metiers d’Art” Explorers series of watches.

The huge treasure ship, armed warrior, and coastlines and islands of the South China Sea are all picked out in almost unbelievable detail, with the subtle gradation of color lending a wonderful three dimensional quality to the topography of the landscape.

The “wandering hours” complication of the series necessitates a double level dial and it is here that another opportunity to demonstrate master in enameling, as it was necessary to match exactly the not only the outlines of the islands and map lines on the upper and lower parts of the dial, but the colors as well.

The creation of such dials is a multistep process as well, requiring the application of the resin in repeated layers which are dried between applications in a low temperature oven.

The vibrant “celestial blue” is a color traditionally used in representations of the Madonna in religious iconography.

The two progenitors of humanity stand flanking the movement, which does double duty as the mechanism of the watch and as a representation of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, a lovely evocation of the relationship between Time and Mortality. (As we shall see, the creation of horological mementos mori –reminders of death –is something of a preoccupation for Corum.)

Perhaps no other modern watch so elegantly integrates the arts of painting and horology. Naturally, the state of dress, poses, and expressions of the First Couple clearly demonstrate that the Apple has already been eaten, and the balance of the movement is located exactly where traditional composition would have placed the Serpent.

While white vitreous enamel dials are sometimes erroneously referred to as “porcelain,” true porcelain is distinct from vitreous enamel, as well as rarer. Porcelain proper is a ceramic, which however shares some chemical properties with vitreous enamel in that it is fired at a much higher temperature than many other ceramics –so high (1400 degrees Celcius) that in fact, vitrification (the formation of glass) within the ceramic body is a significant contributor to the translucence of true porcelain.

The Senator Meissen wristwatch, with its porcelain dial of the purest white, the product of the fiercest fire, is a fitting conclusion to our journey through the colorful world of enamel and its cousins.

Horological enameling is an expression of the art which reaches far back into the history of watchmaking, and represents the intersection of high art and high craftsmanship at its most refined.

We are fortunate today that the renaissance of mechanical watchmaking has produced, not only a conservation and evolution of the techniques of watchmaking itself, but also a renewed interest in the decorative techniques ancillary to watchmaking proper.

Enameling, guilloche, gem setting, marquetry, and other decorative arts would of course continue to find their particular venues in the absence of modern haute horlogerie, but there is no doubt also that they find genuinely unique expression in watchmaking, and the particularly evocative flavor of combining these arts with the recollection of the passage of time evoked by horology gives artisans a canvas upon which to express their art like no other.