A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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oxblood
Oxblood is a deep dark red with brown in it, the color of dried blood rather than fresh. It is a standard term in three separate trades: leather, where oxblood is a classic shoe color and a traditional polish; ceramics, where oxblood is a copper-red glaze; and paint, where it names a dark red used on doors, barns, and ironwork.
Etymology
The English name is a plain compound and it translates the French sang-de-boeuf, which is the term the ceramics trade uses and which came into English attached to Chinese porcelain. The Chinese term for the glaze is different and older, and translates roughly as sacrificial red, from its use on vessels made for ritual offerings.
Notes
The glaze is difficult and was for a long time a lost technique. It is copper fired in a reducing atmosphere, meaning the kiln is starved of oxygen at the right moment, and it turns green if the timing is wrong, so the results were unpredictable and highly valued. Chinese potters achieved it in the Ming period, lost it, and recovered it under the Qing, and European potteries spent much of the nineteenth century trying to work out how.