J. F. Roux
Roux thought that the act of artistic creation resides in the decisions that the artist makes about what to leave out from the represented world, so that a painting is the product of the artist’s considered choices about what forms and colours to emphasise. There are some early paintings at Langebaan of fishing boats and later, from a trip with Margot to Sicily, of dwellings. Roux was also commissioned on occasion to paint pictures of farm houses. But on the whole, his landscapes represent nature in all its timelessness, stripped of any trace of human intervention.
Royal Gold Cup
The enamel lies flush with the gold surfaces; it was a preparation of finely ground glass paste applied with great care to the prepared recessed areas, and then fired. Different colours of enamel meet each other with a neat boundary, which was achieved by firing one colour with a retaining border of gum tragacanth before adding the next. The difficulty was increased by the application of tints of a different colour to a base shade of enamel before firing, so that the added colour blends gradually into the background colour around the edges of the tinted area. This is especially used on "flux", or colourless enamel, as in the ground areas, rocks and trees. Flux was also used for flesh areas as on a gold background it darkens slightly when fired to a suitable colour for skin. The "rouge clair" or "ruby glass" red, used so effectively here, was made by adding tiny particles of copper, silver and gold to the glass; here scientific tests have shown that copper was used. After firing the enamel was polished flush with the surrounding metal. The technique had been known to the Ancient Romans (see the Lycurgus Cup, also in the British Museum), but was lost at the end of the Middle Ages until the 17th century. The added cylinders use opaque enamel, except for the red on the Tudor roses, which is translucent "rouge clair", of a similar composition to the original reds. Translucent enamel is more fragile than opaque, and medieval survivals in good condition are very rare.