Featured CAMEOS: Show & Tell or Ask & Answer

"less than masterly execution" - not getting on him for hands. Every artist I've even known has had trouble with hands. That face...oh dear. Poor girl. It makes you wonder how much real training he had as an artist.

 

It does rather, & not just the face. But I think Picasso had complete control, while Schmoll seems never to have mastered perspective. Here the head, the shoulders & the arm could each belong to a different individual.

Now I can think of this one as Picasso-esque instead of just skewed:

 

It could be quite possible, Picasso saw Schmoll's cameos and it sparked his art.

That cameo is very pretty. I judge cameos by lines and degrees of carvings. Because I marvel at anyone who can carve something so small, and actually make it look detailed. In your cameo, a person would know what everything is. You can see detail in everything. It's actually is a nice capture, and quite unique. Well worth owning. I really like the one at auction now. I just can't afford it. The cameo will be ready this week, and I've bought a few other things.

 

I must once again ask the cosmos, Why?

18K (18-karat) Yellow Gold Ring with Shell Cameo

 

There are a lot of people with NO taste. They see 18k and are blind to beauty or talent. Also, things like this are probably a little cheaper, because the carving is awful. So, someone could wear this and brag it's 18k.

 

No question the world is full of people with more money than taste. But has the jeweller no shame?! Guess if it sells & you only paid 25 cents for the cameo...

 

That's exactly it.

Is this being sold at auction or is it in a store? If it's in an auction, someone did buy it at some point.

When I was younger (much younger), we'd go to the mall and walk through the jewelry shops. Mall jewelry shops are full of absolutely the worst jewelry ever made. Yet people were always in there buying this garbage. The only places that had some nice jewelry was Macys. They had a nice estate jewelry counter. Of course back then I had no money to buy anything.

 

It's an auction house auction.

 

Some person with extraordinarily bad taste wore that at some point. Now, either someone will buy and wear it, or buy it cheap and sell it for scrap gold.

 

Schmoll alert: eB # 900045698114

I have tipped off the seller, who is a friend. Also pointed out the incorrect titles.

 

Or it will be passed over, if they insist on a minimum that is too high.

 

That's the first one I'd pass on of his. Looking at that, the ads at the bottom brought me to this one and a dealer in Japan. This seller's cameos are ones that I would question whether they're hand carved or done by machine.

I think my main problem with ALL cameos are if it's being sold as a cameo, I consider the word cameo to mean hand carved when it's on shell. This is shell, and I doubt it's hand carved. But, I could be completely wrong.

Which brings me to the antique resellers, they also think cameos are hand carved, and many are wrong in their descriptions on what it's made out of, and how it's made. How many poured lava cameos are advertised as hand carved?

Then there are people like this seller, who know the truth, and word it so you think it's handcarved without actually writing it. In this case "Signed" would denote "it's signed because someone carved it." I don't think that's what it is. Again, I could be wrong.

https://www.ebay.com/str/kyotocoral?_trksid=p4429486.m3561.l170197

He does list some hand-carved, but he also lists them as vintage. They're not. They're new from Italy. His ones with Japanese designs are not listed as hand carved, mostly just signed.

Unless I see something spectacular located in Japan, and don't care how it was made, I wouldn't buy anything listed as a cameo out of Japan or China.

 

https://www.houjudo.co.jp/en/products/cameo_bx00239



They are not identical, but clearly something "Balzano" cuts repeatedly. I'm not sure what technology exists for cutting replica cameos in shell. Hardstone mass produced cameos are done ultrasonically. Not sure shell can stand up to anything mechanical, but a skilled cameist cutting the same design time and again can probably do it faster than we imagine. It is possible that apprentices do the scenery on something like this.

I find many, maybe most, contemporary cameos to have a cartoonish quality to them. Think I have called them camanga elsewhere. They do not appeal to me, but have found great favor in Japan, although it looks to me that increasing numbers of them are being dumped onto the secondary market.

 

the trees in this one............hardly even there !!!!

 

There is definitely more variability in the background than in the central figure, hence my suspicion that more than one hand is involved. The lady & her parasol probably exist as something like a stencil, keeping her more consistent from piece to piece.

 

I asked AI and this is what it said, and it makes sense.

In master workshops (such as those in Torre del Greco, Italy, or Japanese studio imports signed by artists like Balzano), a master carver produces a single "master model" or standard design.

Other skilled artisans or apprentices in the workshop then carve copies of that precise model using modern rotary dental-style flex-shaft drills and carbide micro-burs rather than traditional hand gravers. Because the carvers follow the exact same stencil and master design template using high-speed power tools, the resulting cameos look nearly indistinguishable to the naked eye. However, if you examine them under high magnification or compare minute line details (such as the folds of the kimono, the pleats of the parasol, or the letter height in the "BALZANO" signature), tiny hand variations will become apparent.

I think they were going for that look. All the cameos from this particular seller have those kinds of backgrounds. I kind of like it. I just don't like the way the cameo is made.

 

I have yet to see a listing that describes a lava cameo as being molded, so, among those that mention technique at all, the answer is, All of them.

 

Wonder whether, if in future AI is asked again, it will cite the AI reply in your post as a reference. Guess that wouldn't really be any different from a book citing another book. It will then be as liable to perpetuating error as any other secondary source.

 

I've read responses where I just shake my head. This one made perfect sense. It listed other ways. But, for these cameos, this is probably the route it goes. Because I've seen a unique look, go to the seller and there's five up for sale.

 

I suspect not any, that he was completely, or nearly so, self taught. The family had a shop in Paris selling things like bronze statuettes & lighting fixtures, so may have been raised with the expectation that he would continue in business.

Cutting shell cameos came to be seen as something anyone with an artistic bent & some facility at drawing could do reasonably well & encouraged as a respectable pastime for well brought up young women & men.