Metal and glass: the hours you cannot see in a photograph
Filigree, cloisonné and inside-painted bottles share one property: the labour disappears at any size you would actually print. Forty hours and four hours photograph the same.
Why this family behaves differently
Filigree is drawn, not carved. Silver or gold is pulled down to wire around 0.2mm thick, then bent into shapes, filled and soldered. Every soldering pass anneals the metal — it softens and loses strength — so the number of passes has to be controlled, which is why a complex piece is planned before it is made rather than assembled as it goes. A single flower can be hours of work that reads, in a photograph, as a small decorative element.
Cloisonné is fired repeatedly, and each firing can fail. Wire is bent into cells, the cells are filled with enamel paste, and the piece goes into the kiln. It comes out, is ground back, and goes in again — typically five to seven times. Enamel can crack, run or pull away from the wire at any of those passes, and the failure is not repairable without stripping the piece. The yield is low, and the price carries it.
Inside-painting is done through the neck. The artist works on the inner wall of a bottle with a bent brush, in reverse, unable to see the whole composition at once. The smaller the bottle, the harder it is — which is the opposite of how most materials behave. A snuff bottle can take days to weeks, and the finished work is invisible until you hold it up to the light.
Where the hours sit
| Stage | Time per piece | Can it be mechanised |
|---|---|---|
| Drawing the wire | Metres of 0.2mm wire | Yes — drawing is a machine process |
| Bending and laying the wire | Hours | No — this is the trade |
| Soldering | Hours, and the passes must be limited | Partly — spot welding helps, but not on fine work |
| Filling the enamel | Hours | No |
| Firing | Five to seven firings | No — and each one can ruin the piece |
| Grinding and polishing | Hours | Partly |
| One mid-size cloisonné piece | Several days to two weeks |
Typical ranges for hand-worked pieces. Casting and stamping reproduce the shapes at a fraction of the time, which is exactly why the substitution is common.
Three traditions
Gold leaf and filigree
Nanjing for beaten gold leaf; Beijing for filigree inlay. Gold leaf is hammered to a fraction of a micron and applied with a brush — the skill is in the handling, since the leaf will tear in a draught. Filigree is the wirework described above.
Cloisonné and bronze
Beijing for cloisonné; Suzhou and Hangzhou for cast and patinated bronze. On bronze, the patina is the product — a chemically induced finish that is stable looks different from one that will keep changing on a shelf.
Inside-painted bottles
Hengshui, Zibo, Shantou. Painted from the inside through the neck with a bent brush. Printed decals exist that reproduce the look from outside the bottle, and they are convincing in every photograph.
What goes wrong
Cast filigree sold as hand-bent. Casting reproduces the outline and loses the undercuts — the places where wire passes over and under itself. A macro photograph of a crossing point answers it in seconds.
Printed cells on cloisonné. The wire pattern can be printed and enamelled over, which removes most of the labour. The tell is that the “wire” is flat and sits at the same level as the enamel instead of standing proud of it.
Decal inside-painting. The image is applied to the inner wall as a printed transfer. It looks right from a metre away and wrong from ten centimetres, because a decal has no variation in stroke weight.
Plating described as solid. “Gold” on a quotation is a word until someone tests it. On anything of value, a composition test is trivial next to the goods.
Ask for a macro photograph of the hardest part, not the whole object. A crossing point in filigree, a cell wall in cloisonné, the shoulder of an inside-painted bottle. Whole-object photographs are designed to be looked at. Close-ups are where the process shows.
Sourcing metalwork or enamelling?
Send the piece and the quantity. If the answer depends on whether it is cast or hand-worked, we will say so before quoting, because those are two different products at two different prices.
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