Enamelled Maternity Fired onto a Genevan Pocket-Watch

Begin where the workers began. A gold case not much wider than a florin was raised, scrolled, and engine-turned by hands you will never be told to name, its cartouche reserved as a window; into that window a miniaturist laid successive coats of ground vitreous enamel and returned the piece to the muffle furnace again and again, each firing risking the whole to fuse one more register of colour. Inside, a cylinder escapement—jewel-set, the movement itself a small commodity of congealed Genevan labour—ticks unseen beneath the picture. What you are meant to look at is the picture: a seated woman opening her bodice to a reaching infant, a man in red cap and sash standing guard above them, the little family sealed in a gold locket-frame. And it is, I will tell you plainly, finely done—the drapery folds, the flesh at coin scale, the tenderness of the child's reach are the work of a genuinely disciplined hand, a worker exercising real skill on a surface the width of a thumbnail.

Now see what that skill was hired to do. This mother nurses no observed child; she is stock pastoral staffage, a genre formula of maternal feeling selected from the pattern-book and fired onto a fashionable object so that the purchaser might pocket a warm moral sentiment together with the time of day. The moralism is the commodity's disguise: tenderness laminated over exchange-value, feeling sold as an accessory to status. Measure it, if you wish a maturity to measure against, by the meenakari gold-and-enamel of contemporary Jaipur, where jewelled ground and fired figuration served a symbolic order rather than decorating a luxury toy—there the enamel means something the wearer's culture holds; here it means only that the owner can afford to feel. The revolution art still awaits would keep the miniaturist's skill and dissolve the errand. A small aside from the paperwork: it entered the collection in memory of a titled lady, which is to say the sentiment found, in the end, exactly the class it was painted for. — CE