Color

by Victoria Finlay

  One of the miracles of celadon is that it all comes from the mountains—from their earth and their forests. The wood was used for firing, of course, and the clay was used for the body of the porcelain. But the two together—as wood ash and kaolin—were also used for the glaze that makes up its delicate skin and jade-like color. A few days after leaving Famen, I realized what the relic and its offering were about. The finger—of a man who taught about the impermanence of things—was a reminder of the nature of illusion. And the olive green of mi se was (rather as in the story I learned about the first Buddhist art during my quest for yellow) a reminder of the illusion of nature.

  THE SECRETS OF CELADON

  There was “secret celadon” but there were also the secrets of celadon. Perhaps it was nothing more than an astonishingly successful early advertising campaign, or perhaps the market genuinely believed it; either way, celadon was for centuries thought to have secret, almost magical powers. In Southeast Asia, for example, the best Chinese jars were believed to be sorcerers—nature embodied in clay to the extent that it could be tempted out as a djinn. The best jars had to be able to “talk,” or at least to give a clear ringing sound when struck, and if they gave a good tone then people would consider them to be the homes of gods. In Borneo a jar owned by the Sultan was supposed to have the power of prophecy, and to have “howled dolefully” on the night before his wife died. And on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, there were famous talking jars with their own names and characters. The most famous was called Magsawi and was believed to go off on long journeys on its own, particularly to see its girlfriend, a female talking jar on the island of Ilocos Norte. Legend had it that they had a baby together: a little talking jar, or perhaps at first a little screaming jar.6

  The Central Asian buyers had quite a different reason for wanting these bowls, and wanting them badly. It was nothing to do with djinns, but it was more pragmatically because celadon was believed to have the potential to save its owner’s life. The shelves of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul are full of hundreds of pieces of celadon collected by the Turkish rulers ever since they took Constantinople in 1453. According to Islamic expert Michael Rogers,7 the most likely explanation for this collecting mania is because the Muslims believed the bowls were “alexipharmic”—meaning that they acted as an antidote to poison. “Where the idea came from I do not know, but I am inclined to suspect that the Ottomans got the idea from Europe,” he told me. He had heard of an experiment conducted by the Mughal emperor Jahangir in the early 1700s. According to his memoirs, Jahangir arranged for two condemned criminals to be fed poisoned food: one ate off celadon and one off another kind of dish. “And of course both died,” Professor Rogers added.

  Interestingly, the mysterious myth of poison detection lives on, but with completely different-colored porcelain. A few months later I was browsing through the eclectic Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford when I came across a jolly reddish-brown teapot. It was just like ones I had seen being sold in antiques shops in Kabul and Peshawar, and had wondered about, because they looked so out of place. No wonder: it turned out they were made by an Englishman, living in Moscow. Francis Gardner had moved to Russia in 1766 and, finding his pots were much sought after by the Russian nobility, he stayed to make his fortune. After 1850 Gardner-ware was exported in huge quantities, especially to Asia, where it is still highly prized. According to the label: It is widely believed in Central Asia that this porcelain protects the family, as any poisoned food placed in a Gardner bowl will instantly break it.

  THE POISONER RETURNS

  Earlier that day in Oxford I had tried to find the oldest piece of porcelain recorded in the British Isles. It was owned by Archbishop Warham and was apparently held at his alma mater, New College. I learned about it from a book8 published in 1896, which had described the cup as the “sea green or celadon kind,” and I was curious to see it. It was the college holidays, but I paid a small entrance fee, and wandered in. William Warham was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1504 to 1532. There is a portrait of him in the New College dining room—a sad-looking man with bags under his eyes. Behind him are rich fabrics that seem to have been brought from the East; but there is no sign of a sea-green cup. I asked the friendly guardian at the college gate—who had been a porter for sixteen years and now was semiretired, he told me—whether he knew of the cup, and he said he did not. I admitted that the book in which I had read about it was more than a hundred years old. “I don’t think it matters,” he said. “Once we have something in the college we don’t let it go.” He gave me the address of the archivist, and I wrote to her.

  The porter had been right: they still had the Warham cup, she confirmed, and sent a photograph that had been taken recently for insurance purposes. It was exquisite: so marine green that it was almost the color of seaweed, although it was mounted in a rather elaborate late medieval gold support which made it seem slightly clumsy. The compiler of the original inventory that had recorded it in 1516 had no idea how to categorize it—he had never seen anything like it before—and eventually settled on describing it as “lapis,” the Latin for stone.

  As for Archbishop Warham, he was a leading British diplomat, negotiating such tricky matters as the marriage of Catherine of Aragon to Prince Arthur. With the Medicis in Italy and the Ottoman Empire rising on the ashes of the Byzantines, it was an alarming, exciting time for negotiators in Europe: indeed, it was the most corrupt, murderous time that Europe has probably ever seen. No wonder Warham looked worn out in his portrait. As a diplomat in those difficult times he would certainly have had a taster for official dinners, and it was plausible that someone, having heard the alexipharmic story, would one day have given the good clergyman a celadon cup out of gratitude for diplomatic services rendered. The New College “legend” suggests that person may have been Archduke Ferdinand, who was supported by Warham after being shipwrecked off Dorset in 1506. If the Archduke believed the stories about celadon he may well have heard from farther east, then the modern equivalent of his gift would perhaps be an exquisitely tailored, almost invisible, bullet-proof vest.

  Asian art objects had begun to arrive in Europe much earlier than Warham’s cup—at least since the Crusaders began bringing them home in the Middle Ages, and perhaps even since the Vikings. But when the trade routes began to really open up in the early 1600s, the “Orient” soon became the rage among the drawing rooms of Paris, London and Moscow. It didn’t seem to matter whether fabrics and objects and patterns came from India or Persia, China or Japan. The difference between Asian cultures was somewhat of a blur anyway and, on European-made chinoiserie wallpapers, it was common to see Islamic trees of life with Chinese birds perching colorfully in their branches.

  Green was associated with Indian mysticism, Persian poems and Buddhist paintings, and became even more popular after the Romantic period began in the 1790s, with poets like William Wordsworth reflecting the general feeling that nature was suddenly something wondrous rather than dangerous, and that, in all ways, Green was Good. But in terms of paint at least, this sentiment was to prove fatally wrong.

  Chatsworth House in Derbyshire contains a striking example of how popular the color was—in a suite named after a doomed celebrity royal who stayed there seven times while under house arrest. The “Mary Queen of Scots” rooms were last seriously decorated in the 1830s by the 6th Duke of Devonshire, remembered as “the bachelor Duke” and known not only for his foppish obsession with things being stylish but for his tireless energy in making them so. One of the leading architects of the day, Sir Jeffrey Wyattville, oversaw the redecoration, and the result showcased very late Regency fashion. All but one of the seven rooms are green, which gives the sense of walking through an exotic forest: boudoirs in the wilderness. The most striking are the hand-painted Chinese wallpapers—green tendrils creeping up the walls with extra birds, flowers and even a special banana tree pasted on top. Wallpapers from China had first been pressed onto English walls in 1650: it is extraordinary that they were still
sufficiently in vogue 180 years later to suit the tastes of the fussy bachelor duke—although his timing was impeccable. In 1712 Parliament had introduced a tax on wallpapers, intending to use the money for the War of the Spanish Succession. It was not repealed until 1836—just when the duke began redecorating. 9

  These were the Duke of Wellington’s rooms when he stayed as a houseguest, and they contain a portrait of Wellington’s arch-rival Napoleon, painted by Benjamin Haydon. We see Bonaparte from behind, his hands clasped behind his back in agitation as he gazes out to sea. No wonder he was upset: he had just lost an empire. His mood would not have been helped at all by the interior decoration in his own house on St. Helena in the remote Atlantic, where he died. It may not have killed him—quite—but the green wallpaper in Napoleon’s bedroom at Longwood House certainly helped to drive him to his deathbed.

  The rules of relics are perplexing. It is, for example, perfectly acceptable to lop off a digit from the Buddha’s dead body, and even to pass what is claimed to be the Messiah’s foreskin down generations of Church elders. Yet to consider doing anything like that with the mortal remains of those whom we have loved more closely would be seen in most of the world as barbaric: fingers and skulls of ancestors have to be kept with the rest of them. But there is one very acceptable relic that in the nineteenth century anyone could usually claim from the body of the deceased: a lock of hair, to keep in a little box and look at sometimes, wondering whether the person’s charisma might be lingering in the keratin.

  Within a few years of Napoleon Bonaparte’s death in 1821 (at the age of fifty-one) locks labelled “Bonaparte’s hair” (which his doctor incidentally reported at the time of his death as “thin, fine and silky”) commanded quite a price on the open market. But it was not until 140 years later that one of them caused a mild sensation. After being bought at auction in 1960 it was chemically analyzed. The new owners were looking for any clue to greatness, perhaps. But what they found instead was a clue to the fall of greatness. They found arsenic, and in substantial quantities. Which led to a spate of questions. Did the ex-emperor really die of cancer, as his doctors had declared, or did something more sinister happen during his six years of exile after he lost at Waterloo?

  The diaries from St. Helena were consulted for clues. Napoleon hated the weather, and was constantly pointing out how many wet days there were. He also despised the new governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, posted there soon after he arrived. “The pity of it,” wrote his biographer J. M. Thompson,10 “was that one who knew only how to command should be the prisoner of one who knew only how to obey.” Lowe knew this, and hated Napoleon in return. But did he hate him enough to kill him?

  There was another possible answer to the arsenic question, and it was connected to paint. Carl Wilhelm Scheele was a chemist working in Sweden at the end of the eighteenth century. In the 1770s, when he was scarcely in his thirties, he isolated chlorine and oxygen, invented a bright yellow paint (which would be named Turner’s Patent Yellow after the British manufacturer who stole the patent) and then—almost accidentally, while he was in the middle of experiments with arsenic in 1775—produced a most astonishing green. He was not going to repeat his mistake on the patent front, and very soon he was manufacturing this copper arsenite paint under the name of Scheele’s Green. There was, however, something that troubled him, which he confided to a scientist friend in a letter in 1777, a year before the color went into production. He was worried about the paint, he wrote. He felt users should be warned of its poisonous nature. But what’s a little arsenic when you’ve got a great new color to sell? Soon manufacturers were using it in a range of paints and papers and for years people happily pasted poison onto the walls.

  Perhaps, historians began to think, this might explain the mystery of St. Helena’s poisoner. Then in 1980 a British chemistry professor signed off his science program on BBC Radio with a little teaser.11 If only we could see the color of Napoleon’s wallpaper we might know whether this was the cause of the poison, he said. And to Dr. David Jones’s astonishment he received a letter from a woman who by astonishing coincidence had a sample of the wallpaper from Longwood. An ancestor who had visited the house had stealthily torn a strip off the wall of the room where Napoleon died, and stuck it in a scrapbook. Dr. Jones tested it, and to his excitement found traces of Scheele’s arsenite in its pattern, which was of green and gold fleurs-de-lis on a white background. When he learned of how wet St. Helena was he became more excited: the mold reacting to the arsenic would have made the whole atmosphere poisonous. The Scheele’s Green theory explained the arsenic, and the possibility of fumes in the air gave a clue as to why the formerly active soldier spent so many of his last months lying on one of his two camp beds (he never could decide between them) inside the house. But perhaps there was not enough green there to explain the final cause of Napoleon’s death. His doctors said that it was cancer of the stomach. But others said it was simply sadness.

  It took the medical world a long time to react to cases of wallpaper poisoning. As late as January 1880, more than a hundred years after Scheele invented his green, a researcher called Henry Carr stood in front of the assembled members of the Society of Arts in London and held up a sample of cute nursery wallpaper. It was printed with pictures of boys playing cricket on a village green. This innocent-looking paper, he told them,12 had recently killed one of his young relatives, and had made three of the child’s siblings seriously ill. He then went on to give other horrifying examples of arsenic poisoning—an invalid who went to the seaside for a cure, and ended up almost dying from the paint in her hotel; a team of decorators who developed convulsions; even a Persian cat that became covered with pustules after being locked in a green room.

  It wasn’t just green which contained arsenic either, he told his audience. Some blues, yellows and especially the newly invented magenta also carried poison. As well as in paint and wallpaper, he had found arsenic on artificial flowers, on carpets and on dress fabrics, where it had been used to remove chemicals involved in the dyeing process. “The production of arsenic in this country is on a scale that will surprise most people,” he told the Society. “When it is borne in mind that two to three grains will destroy the life of a healthy man, an output of 4,809 tons . . . in one year, does seem a large quantity to be dealt with.”

  Most of his listeners were shocked and agreed with his call for an investigation. But a statement from a Dr. Thudichum13 gave everyone else in the hall that evening an insight into why, despite all the dangers, and even despite its inventor’s warning, arsenic paint had continued to be used for a hundred years. Thudichum said Carr was being alarmist. He said his eyes rejoiced at the “beautiful bright arsenical paper,” and when he looked at the “abominable grays, hideous browns and dreadful yellows made without arsenic,” he could not help thinking that this would be the paper he should like to have in his room.

  This love of green, so tastelessly expressed by Dr. Thudichum, was one shared by many artists—for, of course, green is in many ways the most “natural” color in the world. After all, most of the world (the bits that are not covered by sea, at least) is green. Yet for artists it has long been a difficult color to reproduce, and this most “organic” of colors—the color of grass and trees and fields—has in fact often been made traditionally from metal, or, to be more accurate, from the corrosion of metal.

  Cennino had four suggestions in his Handbook for a lively spring-oniony green to reflect the bright Tuscan light. As well as recipes for mixing various yellows with various blues, he had one natural, one “half natural” and one manufactured green on his palette, and they all—like Scheele’s disastrous recipe—contained copper. They may not have been poisonous, but none of them was quite perfect either.

  The natural earth color was called “terre-verte,” and was particularly good for underpainting European flesh14—with lime white and vermilion layered over it.15 The “half natural” green on Cennino’s palette was malachite, a mineral found in copper mines alo
ng with its cousin blue azurite and called verde azzurro or blue-green. It seems strange to call this basic copper carbonate “half” natural: after all, it can be found fully formed in the earth if you know where to look. But Cennino lived in a world of alchemists’ taxonomies, and to him malachite was an alchemical rock. It had been cooked by the explosions of the earth, and was therefore not in a strictly “natural” state. It had to be coarsely powdered, warned Cennino, “for if you were to grind it too much, it would come out a dingy and ashy color.” Pliny thought it was wonderful—because it could protect against evil spirits—and even until the late eighteenth century in Germany it was called a Schreckstein or scary stone, and was used to frighten demons. The Ancient Egyptians were probably the first to use malachite as a pigment—on their paintings and also on their eyelids. It made a pretty pale green eye shadow (as long as it wasn’t ground too much), but was also—along with black kohl—believed to protect the lids against the glare of the sun. Thus malachite provided the earliest “sunglasses” for a civilization so cool that its people would have just loved to have worn shades.

  Eighth-century Chinese artists used to grind malachite— coarsely—for the haloes of their Buddhas, and from Japan through to Tibet it was a popular pigment for hundreds of years. The best paint comes from stone the “color of a frog’s back,” according to the Chinese authors of the seventeenth-century Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, “and it should be ground and dissolved in water.” Actually, in its uncut form, the malachite stone itself has something approaching the texture of a frog’s back anyway—or perhaps a toad’s. It is full of warty excrescences that, when sliced into a cross-section, create the pretty circle patterns for which the stone is famous.16

  Cennino’s third green was verdigris, which was “very lovely to the eye but it does not last.” Leonardo da Vinci was equally worried about it a century later, warning that it “vanishes into thin air if not varnished quickly.” There was another problem with this paint. Verdigris was “very green by itself,” Cennino noted, but on no account should it even touch white lead, “for they are mortal enemies in every respect.” The paint was usually made, rather as white lead was made, by suspending metal—in this case copper—over a bath of vinegar. After a few hours the orange metal and red wine would combine to leave a green deposit. It was sometimes called van Eyck Green17 because the Flemish master used it so often and so successfully—unlike the Italians,18 whose verdigris tended to blacken as Leonardo and Cennino had warned. The Flemish artists found the secret of locking the green by using a preserving varnish, and it has therefore, for the most part, lasted the centuries.