Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A deep blue paint and ceramic pigment produced by pulverizing a glass made of silica, potash, and cobalt oxide.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Common glass tinged of a fine deep blue by the protoxid of cobalt.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A deep blue pigment or coloring material used in various arts. It is a vitreous substance made of cobalt, potash, and calcined quartz fused, and reduced to a powder.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun a deep
blue pigment made from powderedglass mixed withcobalt oxide
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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The "variegated" colored soaps are produced by adding the various colors, such as smalt and vermilion, previously mixed with water, to the soap in a melted state; these colors are but slightly crutched in, hence the streaky appearance or party color of the soap; this kind is also termed "marbled" soap.
The Art of Perfumery And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants George William Septimus Piesse 1851
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"smalt" blue forget-me-not with large flowers were abundant, also an oxalis very like our own wood-sorrel.
A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil T. R. Swinburne
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From left to right at top, there are seven colors, all pure reference (i.e., unmixed), ranging from Spanish white through deeper blue colors — smalt and indigo — to atramentum siricum, a dark blue-black.
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For eighteenth-century painters, the mineral origins suggested that smalt would be an especially stable color.
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Colors grouped under smalt include hyacinth, sea green, leek color, ingrain purple, paonaceus, and iron gray.
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This was true in general, but smalt was known to discolor in oil media unless used with small amounts of white lead and, like any coloring material, if poorly made or inexpertly used, it lost color over time.
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Less-fine smalt was acceptable for coarse painting or industrial purposes.
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Here, quality of the coloring material was determined by the degree of fineness to which the smalt was ground.
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Ground zaffer was also the basis of the painters 'material smalt.
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For about two centuries before that determination, cobalt was prepared in Europe, converted to zaffer to make blue-colored glass and blue enamel, and from zaffer to smalt for painting.
reesetee commented on the word smalt
Colored glass, often deep blue. Smalts are finely ground to use as colorants for glass and enamel.
November 9, 2007