Color

by Victoria Finlay

  http://www.tintometer.com/history.htm

  Charles Darwin wrote about his interest in seeing cuttlefish at Quasil Island—not only the way they “darted tail first, with the rapidity of an arrow, from one side of the pool to the other, at the same time discolouring the water with a dark chestnut-brown ink,” but also their chameleon-like ability to change their color. In deep water they became brownish purple, he noted, but in the shallows they became yellowish green—or rather “French gray, with numerous minute spots of bright yellow.” Darwin, Beagle Diary, p. 31.

  Hunt, Journal of the Society of Arts, 23 April 1880, pp. 485–99. Maximilian Toch was also rude about Reynolds’s carelessness. “During three years of his career, he painted on an average one portrait every three days. He was just as careless at times in his imitative style as he was in the selection of his pigments, for many of his clients refused to accept the pictures because they did not resemble the sitter.” Toch, Materials for Permanent Painting, p. 188.

  Cumming, Art, p. 228.

  Bomford, Kirby, Leighton and Roy, op. cit., p. 33.

  Salmon, The New London Dispensatory, 1691.

  WHITE

  Kemp, Leonardo on Painting, p. 71.

  For information on this painting I consulted Dorment and MacDonald, James McNeill Whistler; Bendix, Diabolical Designs; paintings, interiors and exhibitions of James McNeill Whistler; Taylor, James McNeill Whistler ; and Joyce Townsend, senior conservation scientist at Tate Britain.

  Merrifield, Medieval and Renaissance Treatises on the Arts of Painting, p. cli, and Albus, The Art of Arts, p. 294.

  Johannes Vermeer: Young Woman at a Virginal. Information from Langmuir, National Gallery Companion Guide.

  The Dutch call this paint scheel (scale) white; the English often call it flake white.

  Winsor & Newton, Product Information: Health & Safety Leaflet, 1996.

  The cartoon is reproduced in Angeloglou, A History of Makeup .

  Downer, Geisha, p. 95.

  Glaser, Poison, the history, constitution, uses and abuses of poisonous substances.

  Petit, The Manufacture and Comparative Merits of White Lead and Zinc White Paints.

  Joyce Townsend. Private correspondence.

  The Chinese alchemical writer Ko Hung wrote in A.D. 320 that ignorant people could not believe that red lead and lead white were products of the transformation of lead, just as they could not believe that a mule was born of a donkey and a horse. Fitzhugh, “Red Lead and Minium,” p. 111.

  Ironically, according to British colorman George Field lead white is more likely to be affected by sulphur when it is not exposed to light, so cave paintings are particularly vulnerable. Field, Chromatography, p. 99.

  Both red lead and white lead have changed color in the Dunhuang caves. Gettens describes how red lead will turn chocolate brown in color, especially when exposed to light. Out of doors it may also turn pink or white because of the formation of (white) lead sulphate. Gettens and Stout, Painting Materials: a short encyclopaedia, p. 153. Conservators at the British Museum describe how lead white becomes black when it reacts with hydrogen sulphide, an air pollutant. The black can be removed by treating it with a solution of hydrogen peroxide in ether. (www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/conservation/ cleaning3.htm)

  On May 30, 1925 Chinese and Indian police under British command fired on demonstrators in Shanghai: they killed eleven people and the deaths kindled anti-foreigner sentiments all over China. It was, in a way, the Tiananmen Square massacre of its time, although on that occasion it was the British who had given the command to shoot.

  Warner, The Long Old Road in China.

  Gettens also identified carbon black, kaolin, red ochre, red cinnabar, blue azurite, red lead, indigo, green malachite, a kind of safflower and an organic dye that was probably gamboge. Many were not local. “It is only by far-reaching trade intercourse that these substances can be assembled in any one place or even in any one country today,” Gettens wrote with some excitement.

  One of the first X-ray images ever made was of a woman called Berthe Roentgen. In 1895 her husband Wilhelm had just discovered the existence of X rays and to celebrate the occasion he took a picture of his wife’s hand. The radiation passed through her skin but was absorbed by the much more dense bones and her wedding ring, which appear as white blocks.

  The x-radiograph of The Death of Actaeon is reproduced in Januszczak, Techniques of th World’s Gr at st Painters, p. 36.

  Before the 1920s, paint-makers experimented with a mixture of zinc white and lead white to reduce the toxicity, yet still give good covering power in oil. Between the 1920s (when titanium paint was in commercial production) and the 1970s (when lead white stopped being used on a large scale on buildings) you could find white house paints that included zinc, titanium and lead. Norman Weiss, University of Columbia, New York. Private conversation.

  G. K. Chesterton told the story of how he once went out sketching the cliffs of the English Channel. He realized he had used up his most important chalk—the white one. He was just about to return to town, cursing, when he began to laugh, because below him were tons of white chalk. He only had to pull up a bit of grass and cut out what he needed for his art. Hebborn, The Art Forger’s Handbook, p. 32.

  The other options were whites made of tin and silver. Medieval scribes had used both of these for manuscripts, but they were scarcely worth the metal they were made from—they tended to perform badly in oil, had very little body and blackened in sunlight. Tin and silver whites were rarely used after the printing press arrived in 1456 and were generally abandoned after the seventeenth century.

  Winsor & Newton, letter to G. H. Bachhoffner, 1937. Microfiche, New York Public Library.

  Kuhn, “Zinc White,” p. 170.

  In order to turn the blood-like ore into the snow-like oxide the French developed a system of purifying the ore and then oxidizing it. But in 1854—according to legend—the Americans devised a quicker, cheaper method. One night, the story goes, a nightwatchman called Burrows was walking round the factory of the Passaic Chemical Company in Newark, New Jersey, when he noticed that one of the fire flues was leaking. He was not unduly worried and casually stopped up the hole with an old fire grate. It wasn’t heavy enough for his purpose so he took some bits of ore and coal from the zinc refining company next door, piled it on top, and went back to his patrol. A few hours later he was astonished—and probably horrified—to see white clouds of zinc oxide hovering above the grate. He told the story to his bosses; they investigated and the following year they took out a patent on the American “direct” process, which was so much more efficient than the French method that by 1892 all American zinc paint was being made that way. History does not relate whether Mr. Burrows profited from his discovery. New Jersey certainly did: many of the first paint manufacturers in the United States were located near Newark, which benefited from its proximity to the Franklin Mine—a source of many useful minerals for paint—and to the port of New York.

  Scholars are divided on whether the White House was white from the beginning. Paint analysis has not been conclusive. It was certainly white by 1814.

  Birren, Color; a survey in words and pictures, from ancient mysticism to modern science.

  Seale, The President’s House: A History.

  It was not only white paint which gave Whistler trouble. Gold and black proved to be even worse. When you stand in front of Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket today, it is hard to imagine that this scene of fireworks cascading above a misty Battersea Bridge should have caused pyrotechnics to explode in the British art world. But in 1878 the painting inspired John Ruskin—who once commented that the duty of a critic was “to distinguish the artist’s work from the upholsterer’s”—to write a scathing review. “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now,” he wrote. “But I never expected to hear a coxcomb ask 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler took exception and sued, resulting in the notorious “pot
of paint” trial.

  As Eric Hebborn noted with admiration, masters like Rubens, Velázquez and Rembrandt made their works more luminous by generous use of this heavy white ground. Hebborn, op. cit., p. 94.

  Elkins, What Painting Is, p. 9.

  RED

  I am indebted to Townsend, Turner’s Painting Techniques, for this section on Turner.

  Joyce Townsend, Interview.

  ibid.

  Comanche Language Book, Comanche Language and Cultural Preservation Committee, 1995.

  Alum is also, apparently, an effective natural underarm deodorant.

  Ciba Review, 1,430.

  Aleppo was Muslim from the seventh century, while Izmir was captured from the Byzantines by Tamerlane in 1402; Castile was under Arab control until 1223.

  Originally the term “lake” referred to lac, which is a sticky resin exuded by an Asian insect called Laccifer lacca, and from which we get the word “lacquer.” Now it refers to any pigment made from a dye. Dyes like kermes or cochineal are not strong enough on their own to color wood or canvas, so they need to be made into something that can. Early methods of making carmine lake involved dyeing cloth, boiling it in alkaline solution and adding alum. When it dried out, the color would have attached itself to the metal salt and artists could mix the resulting powdery pigments with oils or egg. Lakes are more translucent than many other paints, so are traditionally used as the top layer—because they allow other colors to show through.

  On February 15, 1541 the Venetian artist Lorenzo Lotto recorded in his expenses book that he took 6 ounces of kermes, worth 6 ducats an ounce (total 37 lire, 4 solti), from the Bolognese architect Sebastiano Serlio, “on account of certain credit that I have with him.” This was more than thirty times more expensive than employing a nude model for the day (1 lira, 4 solti). Chambers and Pullan, Venice, A Documentary History, p. 439.

  Rudenko, Frozen Tombs of Siberia, p. 62.

  Donkin, Spanish Red: an ethnogeographical study of cochineal and the opuntia cactus.

  Edmonds, The History and Practice of 18th Century Dyeing.

  There is a small plantation called Tlappanocochli—meaning “color” in Mixtec—in the Oaxaca Valley in central Mexico. I visited it one Sunday when it was closed—but from outside it was evident that this was a cottage industry, and nothing like the scale of the operation I had seen in Chile. It was started recently, as a revival.

  Anderson, Correspondence for the Introduction of Cochineal Insects from America.

  Pliny, The Natural History, p. 33.

  Gettens observed that natural cinnabar was less likely to darken than artificially created “wet-process” vermilion. Gettens and Stout, Painting Materials: a short encyclopaedia, p. 172.

  It is this reputation for reliability which, according to Michael Skalka at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., may explain a small mystery about one particular cinnabar that is not red but green, and which is made of neither mercury nor sulphur. “Green cinnabar” or “zinnobar” is a synthetic mixture of chrome yellow (which is no longer produced) and Prussian blue, sometimes mixed with white. According to Maximilian Toch, when chrome green was first made, one manufacturer called his product cinnabar green, “intending to convey the idea that [it] was as permanent as cinnabar red or native vermilion. The name has stuck to it in the trade.” Toch did not recommend it, supposing that the color had all the defects of both of its ingredients. Toch, Materials for Permanent Painting, p. 110.

  Egerton, et al. Turner, The Fighting Téméraire .

  Field, Chromatography.

  ORANGE

  Stradivari often Latinized his own name to Antonius Stradivarius and labelled his violins accordingly.

  The Red Violin directed by François Girard, 1998.

  Claudio Rampini in The Strad, March 1995.

  Beare, Antonio Stradivari, The Cremona Exhibition of 1987.

  During the Spanish Inquisition many marranos, or forced converts, were put on trial. If they were found guilty of practicing Judaism in secret they were given the option of confessing. Those who did not confess were burned at the stake; those who did confess were strangled first, before being burned.

  Smith, Safflower.

  Poppy seed oil is made from the seeds of Papaver somniferum , the opium poppy, but it does not have the same intoxicating properties as the milky sap of the seed pods. Poppy oil production is a byproduct of the pharmaceutical industry. In most countries it is strictly controlled.

  Today tragacanth (named from the Greek word for goat’s horn because of its appearance) is used in cosmetics and to give prepared foods like ice cream and pies more body.

  Perilla, Chio L’lle Heureuse.

  Hackney, Jones and Townsend, Paint and Purpose, p. 13.

  The original painting is in the Huntington Art Collections in San Marino, California.

  Private correspondence, Ian Dejardin, Dulwich Picture Gallery.

  In 1217, just two years after the Pope’s announcement that Jews should wear patches, King Henry III of England ordered Jews to wear white linen or parchment badges representing the tablets of the Ten Commandments.

  Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan. Japan Society, New York, March 2001.

  Gage, George Field and His Circle, p. 29.

  The French cloth-makers hired some Greeks from Salonica to help them with the recipe. Salonica had been a major center of dyeing and cloth-making since the time of Martinengo: it was a place where Sephardim settled, and established their businesses.

  The Death of Nelson, at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.

  The Color Museum in Bradford quotes a worker in the early nineteenth century describing the Turkey Red Dyers: “I always remember the water side from Bonhill Bridge to the Craft Mill. It was a seething mass of humanity. People walking four and five across, to and from work. You could smell the Craft when it closed at night, off the workers walking by.”

  It is basically madder with a little lemon juice, mixed with alum and left overnight. Conversation with Harald Boehmer, November 2001.

  In the thirteenth century the terrifyingly named Teutonic Knights killed anyone who picked up amber without permission.

  Reade, Cremona Violins.

  G nuine r ceipt for making the famous vernis Martin. Paris, 1773, held in the British Library.

  Information from the Sibelius Museum website.

  Both Newton and Field ascribed colors to musical notes (Dreyfuss, Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols). But it is not known whether they were synaesthetic. Indeed, the concept of synaesthesia was not known when they were alive.

  YELLOW

  Field, Chromatography, p. 83.

  Baer, “Indian Yellow,” pp. 17–21.

  Gega Lama, Principles of Tibetan Art.

  Captain Sherwill, Statistics of the District of Behar, 1845. Held in the British Library.

  Brian Lisus. Personal correspondence.

  George Field did not believe that the mango theory was true: “It has also been ascribed, in like manner, to the buffalo, or Indian cow, after feeding on mangoes; but the latter statement is incorrect. However produced, it appears to be a urio-phosphate of lime, of a beautiful pure yellow colour, and light powdery texture; of greater body and depth than gamboge, but inferior in these respects to gall-stone.” Field, op. cit., p. 83. Winsor & Newton likewise do not subscribe to the theory that this paint was made from urine that had been evaporated and formed into balls. Instead the museum (at Winsor & Newton’s factory in Harrow) describes it as the earth on which cows fed with mangoes or mango leaves have urinated.

  Man Luen Choon is at 27–35 Wing Kut Street, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong.

  According to Eric Hebborn, Van Dyck used orpiment with enthusiasm but his secret was to apply it on areas that had been underpainted with other yellows. “It is amazing how a whole area of relatively dull yellow such as yellow ochre can be made brilliant with just a well-placed touch or two of brighter yellow.” Hebborn did not,
incidentally, know about the easy availability of orpiment in Chinese shops. He recommended not even trying to forge a painting that contains it: “If you really can’t finish your painting without a bright yellow, damage the area where the orpiment should be and then skillfully retouch the damage with the modern chrome yellow and zinc- or flake-white mixture.” Hebborn, The Art Forger’s Handbook, p. 98.

  The formula for realgar is AsS while orpiment is As2S 3. This effectively means that, of the two, realgar contains more arsenic.

  By 1758, when Dossie wrote his book The Handmaid to the Arts , both orpiment and realgar had been banished completely from artists’ palettes. If they were used at all it was “to color the matted bottoms of chairs, or other such coarse work.”

  Rumphius, The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet.

  Winter, “Gamboge,” p. 144.

  van Gulik, The Chinese Maze Murders.

  I am indebted to saffron consultant Ellen Szita, who has helped with this section.

  Herbert, A History of the Species of Crocus, p. 21.

  Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, p. 20.

  Thompson, The Materials of Medieval Painting.

  These jokes or rebuses were common in coats of arms. The city of Oxford, for example, is represented by a picture of an ox crossing a river.

  Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Home, Work and Land.

  www.uttlesford.gov.uk/saffire/history/history.htm

  In a good year the field could produce 5 kilos of saffron, although 2000 had not been good.

  Willard, Secrets of Saffron, pp. 98–101.

  The practice of painting houses with red or yellow continues, although today Zoroastrian priests tend to use red paint or ink rather than saffron.

  GREEN

  The Chinese term is porcelain; Western terminology tends to call it “stoneware.”

  Celadon includes those pieces with green glazes that owe their colors to reduced iron oxide, rather than those owing their colors to oxidized copper, which are much brighter green than true celadon-ware.

  A Chinese scholar, Dr. Chen, has suggested that the mythical Chai ware is in fact mi se, after Shizong was given this precious imperial ware as a royal gift. In which case the poem would be more important for its mention of the clouds than that of the peeping blue sky.