This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Shagreen is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
Shagreen is a type of roughened untanned leather, formerly made from a horse's back, or that of an onager (wild ass), and typically dyed green. Shagreen is now commonly made of the skins of sharks 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 Turkish12 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 of swords and daggers, where slipperiness is a positive disadvantage.In Asia, the Japanese Tachi, Katana, and Wakizashi swords had their hilts almost always covered in undyed untreated Shagreen, while in China shagreen was traditional used on Qing dynasty composite bows, typically the ears and the spaces above and beneath the grip were covered by polished shagreen (in which the calcified papillae are reduced to equal height and form uniform surface), sometimes with inlay work of different coloured shagreen.Shagreen was a very common cover for 19th century reading glasses containers as well as other utensil boxes from China.
The early horse skin variety of 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. Sources are not clear whether this was being done to imitate pearl ray skin shagreen from East Asia or if it developed on its own.
In the 17th and early 18th centuries, however, the term "shagreen" began to be applied to 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 in Europe by Jean-Claude Galluchat (d. 1774), a master leatherworker in the court of Louis 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.
See also
Further reading
- Jean Perfettini - Le galuchat (Henri Vial, 1989) ISBN 2-85101-021-2
References
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 20 November 2008, at 05:09.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Shagreen".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.