A series of effects in broken colour, delicate in marking and veined and mottled in most pleasing character, is being attempted in vases. We illustrate several types in whole and partial crystallization, which lose considerably by appearing as black-and-white illustrations. Such vases are conspicuous for their revelry in colour, not the hard, dense, opaque colours of the old Chinese single glazes, but the limpid, vibrating, restless subtleties of Nature's own play of pulsating colours in changeful mood—the dazzling and fairy-like opalescence of the frost and the deep blue of the ice cave, or the pale amber sand-dunes imperceptibly fading into a translucent green stretch of waters, with the vaporous haze of a violet sky. In the white heat of the modern furnace the flowers of a prehistoric day, which have lain buried in the coal seams of an alien land, transmute the dull clay and the mineral glaze under the hand of the modern magician into colour nocturnes.
VASES.
With Crystalline glazes by V. Engelhardt.