"There is no surer way of evading the world than by Art; and no surer way of uniting with it than by Art"
Goethe

Andrea Rozenberszki

Enamel Artist

About the Technique

Vitreous enamel, also porcelain enamel in US English, is a material made by fusing powdered glass to a substrate by firing, usually between 850 and 900 °C. The powder melts, flows, and then hardens to a smooth, durablevitreous coating on metal, or on glass or ceramics. The term "enamel" is most often restricted to work on metal, which is the subject of this article. Enameled glass is also called "painted". Fired enamelware is an integrated layered composite of glass and metal.

The word enamel comes from the Old High German word smelzan (to smelt) via the Old French esmail. Used as a noun, "an enamel" is a usually small decorative object, coated with enamel coating. Enameling is an old and widely-adopted technology, for most of its history mainly used in jewelry and decorative art. Since the 19th century the term applies also to industrial materials and many metal consumer objects, such as some cooking vessels, dishwashers, laundry machines, sinks and tubs, etc.


Short History of Enameling

The ancient Egyptians applied enamels to pottery and stone objects, and sometimes jewelry, though the last less often than other ancient Middle Eastern cultures. The ancient Greeks, Celts, Georgians, and Chinese also used enamel on metal objects. Enamel was also used to decorate glass vessels during the Roman period, and there is evidence of this as early as the late Republican and early Imperial periods in the Levantine, Egypt, Britain and the Black Sea.

From more recent history, the bright, jewel-like colors have made enamel a favored choice for designers of jewelry and bibelots, such as the eggs of Peter Carl Fabergé, enameled copper boxes of Battersea enamellers, and artists such as George Stubbs and other painters of portrait miniatures. Enameling was a favorite technique of the Art Nouveau jewelers. A resurgence in enamel-based art took place near the end of the 20th Century in the Soviet Union led by artists like Alexei Maximov and Leonid Efros. In Australia, abstract artist Bernard Hesling brought the style into prominence with his variously sized steel plates.

Enamel was first applied commercially to sheet iron and steel in Austria and Germany in about 1850. Industrialization increased as the purity of raw materials increased and costs decreased. The wet application process started with the discovery of the use of clay to suspend frit in water. Developments that followed during the 20th Century include enameling-grade steel, cleaned-only surface preparation, automation, and ongoing improvements in efficiency, performance, and quality.