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 Turkish sagri, 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.
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 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.
