- Shagreen
Shagreen is a type of roughened untanned
leather , formerly made from a horse's back, or that of anonager (wild ass), and typically dyed green. Shagreen is now commonly made of the skins ofshark s and rays. The word derives from the French "chagrin" (anxiety, annoyance – a reference to the rasping surface of the leather) which in turn is said to have developed from the Turkish [ [http://www.answers.com/topic/shagreen Answers.com - Definition of Shagreen] ] [ [http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/shagreen Shagreen in Merriam-Webster Online] ] "sağrı", literally, the back of a horse. Shagreen has an unusually rough and granular surface, and is sometimes used as a fancy leather for book bindings, pocket-books and small cases, as well as its more utilitarian uses in the handles ofsword s anddagger s, where slipperiness is a positive disadvantage.Shagreen was traditionally prepared by embedding plant seeds (often "
Chenopodium ") in the untreated skin while soft, covering the skin with a cloth, and trampling them into the skin. When the skin was dry the seeds were shaken off, leaving the surface of the leather covered with small indentations.In the 17th and early 18th centuries, however, the term "shagreen" began to be applied to a leather made from sharkskin or the skin of a rayfish (probably the pearl ray, "
Hypolophus sephen"). This form is also termed sharkskin or galuchat. Such skins are naturally covered with round, closely set, calcified papillae called placoid scales, whose size is chiefly dependent on the age and size of the animal. These scales are ground down to give a roughened surface of rounded pale protrusions, between which the dye (again, typically green vegetable dye) shows when the material is coloured from the other side. This latter form of shagreen was first popularised by Jean-Claude Galluchat (d. 1774), a master leatherworker in the court ofLouis XV of France . It quickly became a fashion amongst the French aristocracy, and appears to have migrated throughout Europe by the mid-18th century.In medicine, a shagreen patch is a patch of shagreen-like rough skin, often on the lower back, found in some people with the genetic condition
tuberous sclerosis .ee also
*
La Peau de chagrin Further reading
* Jean Perfettini - "Le galuchat" (Henri Vial, 1989) ISBN 2-85101-021-2
References
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