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EXPOSITION AT VIENNA.
Special products and industries are necessary conditions, appertaining to the commercial importance of a city. Even seaports, in which traffic and the forwarding trade predominate, require the support of productive territories, which, in at least one or more branches of industry, give it a particular excellence in the department especially cultivated by it. The Viennese cultivate so many that it is hard to select the few principal ones.
All the various trades are reached, in a greater or lesser degree, by the Museum of Arts as applied to Industry and the numerous Fine Art Museums and Industrial Schools existing in the city.
The workmen take the raw material brought to them, and, as an English artisan once said of the Parisian ouvriers , in comparing them with his own countrymen, they put a hundred dollars’ worth of work into it where w T e put one, before they permit it to pass from their hands.
Every one knows or has heard that Vienna is famous for its meerschaum trade. The raw material is brought thither, where the taste and skill to manipulate it is to be found. The cutting and carving of this " foam of the sea ” is here raised to a fine art, and the workmen produce the most marvellous results. The fine, soft nature of the material gives the carvers opportunity to produce elegant and tasteful effects, and this the artisans in meerschaum ware at Vienna fully improve; hence they supply all the known world, where smokers exist, with their goods, and everywhere, because they are Viennese, they command a higher price.
The bronze trade is another business carried on there, and bears quite a Viennese character—just as the French bronze work is Parisian. Austria used to purchase the bronze goods she needed from the French houses, until this trade was developed in Vienna, where, in the first place, bronze-work is applied to useful ornaments, such as lustres, candlesticks, chimney ornaments, etc.
The strict observance of the truest rules of Art is particularly remarkable, and is chiefly due to the Museum of Art* and Industry, where considerable pains is taken to collect and exhibit the best, most chaste and most useful models applicable to this special trade.