The Story Behind Moroccan Brasswork
Two days of chasing for one mirror, and why that is fair.
The metal souk in Marrakech is not somewhere you find, it is somewhere you hear. North of Place des Ferblantiers the noise starts — a fast, uneven, high tapping from thirty directions at once, like rain on a tin roof if the rain were being aimed. Each of those sounds is one man with a hammer and a punch. The alleys run about a metre and a half wide, the ceilings are covered with rush matting, and the light comes down in stripes. It is between forty and forty-four degrees in July and nobody stops. We went first at nine in the morning, which was a mistake. The right time is six in the evening, when the light is low and the men finishing pieces come out into the doorway to see better. There are perhaps two hundred workshops in the quarter and no map of them. We found ours by buying a glass of orange juice from a cart and asking the man with the cart, which remains our most reliable research method anywhere in the world.
The technique is chasing, and the thing to understand is that no metal is removed. A chaser works a flat sheet from the front with a blunt punch, pushing the metal down and displacing it sideways; repoussé does the same from the back to raise it. Together they let you make a relief out of a sheet without ever cutting into it. The sheet is bedded on pitch — tree resin, plaster and oil, warmed until it takes the shape — which supports the metal from behind and lets it move without tearing. A chaser owns perhaps sixty punches and has made most of them himself out of old files. The punches are the design. That is why two workshops fifty metres apart make things that do not look remotely alike. Hassan let one of us hold a tracer and make three marks on a scrap. All three were in the wrong place and one of them tore.
Our mirror frame took two days. Hassan is in his fifties, works in a room three metres square with his son and a nephew, and quoted 1,400 dirham — about thirteen thousand rupees — for a frame forty-five centimetres across. He started at seven on the Tuesday. The outline went on first, scored with a tracer; then the pitch was warmed and the sheet bedded; then eleven hours of tapping to raise the pattern; then the pitch off, the metal annealed over a burner because brass work-hardens as you strike it, and back down again. He finished at four on the Wednesday. Two days of a skilled man’s life, plus a nephew, plus the brass, for the price of a moderate dinner in Delhi. When people ask why we do not negotiate harder, that is the answer. We paid half up front, in cash, and the balance on collection, and there is no paperwork of any kind. The whole arrangement rests on the fact that we will be back in February and everybody in the alley knows it.
The brass itself is mostly recycled and mostly not Moroccan. Sheet comes into Casablanca from Europe and Turkey; the rest is remelted scrap — plumbing fittings, shell casings, old trays past repair. It runs around sixty-five to seventy per cent copper, which is soft enough to chase and yellow enough to be worth chasing. You can spot recycled stock by the small inclusions that surface as you work down, and a good chaser will design around one rather than start again. Our mirror has two. We were shown them before we paid, which nobody was obliged to do. The alternative — brass plate over pressed zinc — arrives by the container and fills the shops nearest the square. It weighs 1.6 kilos. The plated version of the same thing, four doors down, weighs 340 grams and costs a twelfth as much, and is sold to roughly nineteen out of twenty people who walk past.
Fez is the older tradition and the more conservative one. The workshops there sit around the Seffarine, which has been a copper and brass square since the fourteenth century, and the pieces are heavier, more geometric, and less inclined to flatter you. Marrakech, being a market town on a trade route, has always made what sells, which means more variety and more rubbish. Both run on the same apprenticeship: a boy starts at eleven or twelve doing nothing but polishing, moves to simple background texturing at fifteen, and is not allowed near a figure or an inscription until he is well into his twenties. The system is fraying — the boys go into tourism, which pays this week — and everyone we buy from is over forty. We were introduced in Fez by a leather dealer who vouched for us and then sat through the entire first meeting saying nothing, which we understood afterwards was the point of him being there.
There is a great deal of cheap brass in Morocco and it is not a fraud so much as a different product. A pressed tray stamped out in a factory in Casablanca costs sixty dirham, weighs almost nothing, and is finished with a lacquer that will yellow and flake within about three years. A chased tray costs fifteen times that and will outlive its owner. Both are sold three metres apart by people who will describe both as handmade, because a hand did operate the press. The test is weight first, then the back: a chased piece is a negative of the front, dimpled, faintly greasy from the pitch. A pressed piece has a smooth back with a single tooling ring. Neither of us can reliably tell the difference by eye in the dark of an alley, which is why we now buy nothing in the souk after sunset and go back the next morning instead.
Ours arrive unlacquered, which we get asked about. Lacquer keeps brass bright for two or three years and then fails unevenly, and stripping it is a miserable job. Left bare, brass oxidises to a soft brown over about eighteen months and then more or less stops changing. If you want it yellow again, half a lemon and a spoonful of salt will do it in five minutes; if you want it dark, do nothing at all. What you must not do is take a proprietary metal polish to a chased surface, because the abrasive collects in the recesses and dries chalky white, and getting it out involves a toothbrush and an entire afternoon. We know this because we did it, to a tray, in 2024. Wax is the middle path — a thin coat of microcrystalline wax slows the oxidation without sealing it — and it is what we do to the mirrors before they ship, so that they arrive the colour they were when we bought them.
