Color

by Victoria Finlay

  The earliest greenware was made two thousand years ago, although none of it survives. Then, in the late sixth century, it was reinvented, according to legend, by a civil servant called Ho Chou. He hadn’t wanted to make it for its own sake but had been trying to replicate green glass, the recipe for which had been lost two hundred years before. Within forty years the first Tang emperor was commissioning imperial celadon-makers to create bowls that were “thin in body, translucent and brilliant as white jade.” The rich Tangs loved it, and soon celadon kilns were opening up all over the country, wherever there was enough wood and good clay.

  The color of celadon depends partly on the atmosphere in the kiln: reduction leads to greenware like mi se, oxidation leads to brown-ware.

  Dawn Rooney. Personal correspondence.

  Michael Rogers. Personal correspondence.

  Bushell, Oriental Ceramic Art. Written by an Englishman who had worked for many years as the British legation’s doctor in Peking, and had become fascinated by oriental ceramics.

  The chinoiserie style was to last for a further decade or so until the Victorians wanted a change, and decided to revive Gothic, Greek, Pompeian, Egyptian, Byzantine, Baroque and indeed virtually everything but East Asian traditions instead.

  Thompson, Napoleon Bonaparte.

  www://grand-illusions.com/napoleon/napol1.htm

  Journal of the Society of Arts, 1880.

  It is likely that this was Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Thudichum, a controversial scientist in Victorian London, who at the time was researching the effect of cholera on the brain.

  Michelangelo’s Manchester Madonna in the National Gallery shows the underpainting of the flesh in terre verte, a practice that seems to have been popularized by Giotto and continued spasmodically until Tiepolo in the eighteenth century. Hebborn, The Art Forger’s Handbook , p. 105.

  Sometimes the pinkish pigments have faded from old paintings, leaving the faces a sickly green. Roman and Byzantine artists liked the effect, and their mosaics of people’s faces have green stones mixed up with the pink ones, to cool a ruddy complexion. Gage, Colour and Culture.

  In the nineteenth century the “Iron Tsar,” Nicholas I of Russia, had a monopoly on the world’s best malachite, which was found in the Urals. In the 1830s his wife Alexandra commissioned a room of green-veneered furniture in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg, which they called the Malachite Chamber and used as a formal drawing room.

  Gettens and Stout, Painting Materials: a short ncyclopaedia , p. 170.

  Cennino’s translator, Daniel Thompson, observed that verdigris in river landscapes by Baldovinetti and Domenico Veneziano must have been green once, but had now turned to a mahogany brown. Thompson, The Materials of Medieval Painting.

  The theory of the painting being an allegory seemed even more likely after it was discovered that the Arnolfinis didn’t actually get married until 1447: reported in BBC2’s documentary Mystery of a Marriage, November 1999. www.open2.net/renaissance/prog1/script/script1.htm

  The hall is lined with fake-grained wood—yellow pine dressed as red mahogany, which would have been fashionable in the 1790s and indeed the 1970s but looked much too faux for the 2000s. Washington would probably have seen it first in Philadelphia, and he evidently loved the fake graining technique, because he also had it in his study.

  The picture that probably caught his attention was Plate 51: it gives the precise proportions for the grand window he eventually chose for his dining room—a Palladian window, so named after the sixteenth-century Italian Andrea Palladio, who first created such a thing in memory of Ancient Rome.

  Letters from the collection of the library at Mount Vernon.

  Mosca, “Paint Decoration at Mount Vernon,” p. 105.

  Later, once she knew what to look for, Dr. Barkeshli not only discovered saffron mixed with verdigris in a real sixteenth-century paintbox, but she found other references. “The verdigris which is made out of yoghurt chars paper,” advised sixteenth-century artist Mir Ali Heravi. “To prevent this, add a small amount of saffron to make the pigment stable.”

  Harley, Artists’ Pigments.

  In Paris in 1845, according to Chris Cooksey, a British scientist who has studied Chinese Green, and who provided much of the information for this section, it cost 224F a kilo, rising to 500F a few years later. In London in 1858 it cost nearly 16 guineas a kilo. Its popularity increased when people realized how exciting it was to have a dye that gave a violet rather than a blue-yellow sheen, and yet which still looked green. It was warmer than the old woad-weld mixture. Dyes in History and Archaeology conference, Amsterdam, November 2001.

  BLUE

  John is often dressed in red, but rarely in such a vivid orange.

  Similar blackening of vermilion paint can be detected in the opaque red sash of the angel in the (also unfinished) Manchester Madonna, also held at the National Gallery in London. There is an apocryphal story that The Entombment may have been used as a fishmonger’s slab, in which case the salt water from the fish would have speeded the darkening of the vermilion. Private correspondence, National Gallery.

  Langmuir, National Gallery Companion Guide.

  Polo, The Adventures of Marco Polo, as dictated in prison to a scribe in the year 1298, chapter 29.

  Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Millennium Edition) suggests that the term “blue movie” is “fancifully derived from the custom of Chinese brothels being painted blue externally.” However, according to the Oxford English Dictionary “blue” has referred to indecent or smutty conversation since at least the early nineteenth century.

  In his Theory of Colour, Goethe wrote that “there is something contradictory in [blue’s] aspect, both stimulating and calming. Just as we wish to pursue a pleasant object that moves away from us we enjoy gazing upon blue—not because it forces itself upon us, but because it draws us after it.”

  Price from Kremer Pigmente in Germany.

  In 1347 an ounce of ultramarine, ordered for the Chapel of San Jacopo in Pistoia Cathedral, cost the equivalent of £4. On the same order form an ounce of azurite cost five shillings and sixpence: one-twelfth of the price. Italian Painting before 1400, Art in the Making.

  Hirst and Dunkerton, Making and Meaning: The Young Michelangelo .

  Eric Hebborn said the painting illustrated the care the Old Masters took in their underdrawing—not because they had time to waste; quite the opposite. The Entombment shows the stage after the preliminary drawing and before the final layer, which would probably have consisted mostly of oil glazes. Hebborn, The Art Forger’s Handbook, pp. 105–6.

  The Tate, Paint and Painting, an exhibition and working studio sponsored by Winsor & Newton to celebrate their 150th anniversary, p. 14.

  Gage, Colour and Culture.

  Gettens and Stout, Painting Materials: a short encyclopaedia .

  Byron, The Road to Oxiana. The author had perhaps not realized that Gowhar Shad was a woman.

  The best blues were from the Xvande reign (1426–35), followed closely by the Zhengde (1506–21) and Jiajing (1522–66) reigns, which both produced blue and white with a rich violet blue that was distinctive for its intensity. The worst were the Chenghua (1465–87) and Wanli (1573– 1619) reigns. Boger, The Dictionary of World Pottery and Porcelain.

  Rashid, Taliban, the story of the Afghan warlords, p. 7.

  Baker and Henry, The National Gallery Complete Illustrated Catalogue, pp. 97–8.

  Hebborn, The Art Forger’s Handbook, p. 106.

  Theophilus, On Divers Arts, p. 57.

  Vitruvius, book VII.

  Some accounts suggest the “veil” may actually have been the tunic Mary wore while giving birth.

  A study done by a textiles expert in 1927 confirmed that it could have been woven in the first century A.D. It is locked up for 364 days a year, and then every August 15, on the Feast of Our Lady, it is paraded around the town.

  INDIGO

  Morris, The Lesser Arts of Life, an address delivered before the
Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, London, 1882.

  One theory to account for the name of the town of Glastonbury in southwest England is that it was once a woad—or glaustum—dyeing center.

  Edmonds, The History of Woad and the Medieval Woad Vat.

  Turner and Scaife, Bog Bodies, new discoveries and new perspectives .

  Starzecka, Maori Art and Culture, p. 40.

  Tattoos are also restricted in the United States. According to Pat Fish, in L.A. County there is a law that all tattooing has to be done with FDA-approved ink. “Which is a problem because there is no FDA-APPROVED ink.”

  The Annals of Tacitus, chapter XIV, pp. 29–30.

  John Edmonds. Personal correspondence.

  Harley, Artists’ Pigments, p. 201.

  For the section on Eliza Lucas I consulted Morgan, Wilderness at Dawn, and Pinckney, The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney .

  Morgan, op. cit., p. 260.

  Professor Giacomo Chiari, Dyes in History and Archaeology conference, Amsterdam, November 2001.

  Balfour-Paul, Indigo. I am indebted to Jenny Balfour-Paul for many of the references in this chapter.

  Edmonds, op. cit.

  Balfour-Paul, op. cit., p. 125.

  Forcey, The Colors of Casa Cruz.

  ibid.

  ROY G BIV is probably the most common rainbow mnemonic among American and British schoolchildren. In Britain the other popular contender is “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain,” which describes how King Richard lost to the Tudors at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the white rose of the Yorks ceding to the red rose of the Lancastrians (white losing to color). Indian schoolchildren tend to learn it “backwards” as VIBGYOR, while my new personal favorite is “Rats of Yarmouth Go Bathing in Venice,” with its suggestion of subversive gray elements in the midst of a colorful carnival. Sarah Ballard. Personal correspondence.

  Since the Middle Ages, English-speakers have named turquoise after the country—Turkey—the stone was said to come from, even though it is more likely to have come from Persia, now Iran.

  Levi Strauss wanted to make the strongest possible overalls for the gold miners (who destroyed their clothes very quickly by filling the pockets with stones and, if they were lucky, nuggets), so he imported a blue cloth from the French town of Nîmes (it was called serge de Nîm s, hence denim). It was only many years later that the trousers were named “jeans” after the Genoese sailors who transported the cloth. Denim has been colored with aniline dyes since around 1900.

  Balfour-Paul, op. cit.

  An address delivered in the Indigo Hall, Georgetown, South Carolina, May 4, 1860, on the 105th anniversary of the Winyaw Indigo Society by Plowden C. J. Weston.

  While the English swung their indigo loyalties from one continent to another between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the Dutch were fairly consistent in their demand for Javanese blue. Throughout that time local chiefs were forced to grow indigo (as well as pepper and other spices) without receiving much in return. - England briefly took charge of Java between 1811 and 1816 during the Napoleonic Wars, and the Governor, Thomas Stamford Raffles, wrote a book describing his horror at the brutal system of enforced labor. But had he looked at his own country’s attitudes to indigo farmers he would have been equally shocked.

  Grant, Rural Life in Bengal.

  Grant was puzzled about what color the indigo liquid was—at first it was dark orange, then light green, then darker green, “so that I am puzzled to tell you what precise colour it really has, for being, like the sea, exposed to the sky . . . the light green, through a variety of beautiful changes, gradually darkens into a Prussian green, and from that—as the beating continues and the colouring matter more perfectly develops itself (the forth having almost entirely subsided) into the intense deep blue of the ocean in stormy weather.”

  In 1855 aboriginal tribal people in a different part of Bengal rebelled against moneylenders, landowners and the indigo planters in what was called the “Santal Rebellion.” So outside Mulnath the blue harvest was evidently not such a joyful occasion.

  A 1795 law stipulated that private entrepreneurs would hold no more than 50 bigahs of land (one bigah is 1,600 square feet and enough to grow eight cakes of indigo, or give eight rupees in profit at 1850s prices). At the time a European would expect to earn about 400 rupees per month.

  In 1860 William James was twenty-eight and a magistrate in the indigo-growing area of Nadia. He observed the unfairness of the indigo contracts—which were often forged—and developed an interest in devising a way for people to determine whether an illiterate person had or had not been present at the signing. It inspired him to investigate the possibilities of fingerprinting, and while his recommendations were eventually ignored, this was the first time fingerprints had been seriously offered as legally binding marks. Kling, The Blue Mutiny.

  ibid. I have used this book extensively in this section on Bengal indigo.

  Moorhouse, Calcutta, p. 67.

  The last commercial indigo in Bengal, before the recent resurgence, was in 1894. But the crop continued to grow, in very small quantities, in Bihar and in other parts of India.

  When tended carefully, Indigo tinctoria can grow into a bush of up to two meters in height.

  Since I visited Bengal I have learned of a scheme to grow indigo in Bangladesh to supply the increasing demand for natural dyes in Europe and America. The Aranya project was started by Ruby Ghuznavi in the 1990s. By 2002 it was cultivating 50 acres of indigo—not only a small but promising legacy of Bengal’s history, but also a hope for indigo’s future on the sub-continent—without forced labor and as a non-polluting alternative to synthetic dyes.

  VIOLET

  The Little Rock Gazette, quoted in Garfield, Mauve. I am indebted to Mauve and to Travis, The Rainbow Makers, for much of this section about Perkin.

  The name came from the French description of this color as being like the petals of the mallow plant. Curiously, while the English called it “mauve,” which in the nineteenth century they pronounced “morve,” the French tended to refer to it as “Perkin’s purple.” Both markets were evidently thought to want something exotic and foreign.

  Victoria & Albert Museum, Inventing New Britain: The Victorian Vision, April–July 2001.

  John Sutherland, Guardian, August 6, 2001, p. 7.

  Varley, Colour, p. 218.

  Gage, Colour and Culture, p. 27.

  Jidejian, Tyre through th Ages, p. 281.

  Lucan, Civil War, chapter 10, pp. 115ff.

  Pliny, The Natural History, 9, 63, p. 137.

  For the classical and dyeing references in this chapter I have made extensive use of Edmonds, The Mystery of Imperial Purple Dye; Bridgeman, “Purple Dye in Late Antiquity and Byzantium”; and Jidejian, op. cit.

  Justinian in the sixth century reinforced a ban on “forbidden silk”— which scholars take to mean that it was dyed with purple—and Constantine in the tenth century was so fond of the color that he was nicknamed Porphyrogenitus, meaning that he had been born “in the purple,” which perhaps referred to the color of the walls of the birthing room of the Byzantine emperors, but certainly signified immense privilege.

  Thompson, The Materials of Medieval Painting, p. 156.

  Sixth-century Christian artists used Tyrian purple for the most precious books. Cheaper documents used cheaper dyes, though, and one type of lichen became so popular for staining books that it is still called “folium,” from the same root as “folio,” meaning leaf of paper.

  Pliny, op. cit., 9, 34, p. 126.

  A third species, Thais haemastema, also gives a good purple dye, but it is found farther west in the Mediterranean, and probably was less important to the Phoenicians.

  Quoted in Jidejian, op. cit.

  Pliny, op. cit., 9, 62, p. 133.

  Edmonds, op. cit., p. 10.

  In 1685 a naturalist called William Cole found purple-giving shellfish on the shores of the Bristol Channel and made the observation that if the
dye was placed in the sun it changed color. “Next to the first light green will appear a deep green; and in a few minutes this will change into a dull sea green; after which, in a few minutes more, it will alter into a watchet [i.e. blue]; from that in a little time more it will be purplish red; after which, lying an hour or two (supposing the Sun still shining) it will be of a very deep purple red; beyond which the Sun can do no more.” Cole, “Purple Fish,” p. 1278.

  Pliny described how the blackness was achieved by dyers using two different types of shellfish: the small buccinum and the larger Murex brandaris, or purpura. The buccinum gave a crimson-like sheen to the purpura, as well as the “severity” which was in fashion. Their recipe involved steeping the wool in a raw, unheated vat of purpura extract and then transferring it to a buccine one. Op. cit., 9, 28, pp. 134–5. Pliny, after praising this velvety black effect of antique murex-dyed robes, noted that in his own time people seemed to favor a lighter shade of purple.

  Gage, op. cit., p. 25.

  Nuttall, “A curious survival in Mexico of the use of the Purpura shellfish for dyeing,” p. 368.

  Thompson, “Shellfish Purple: The Use of Purpura Patula Pansa on the Pacific Coast of Mexico,” pp. 3–6.

  Hibi, The Colors of Japan, pp. 60–2.

  Numbers (or Bümidbar), 15: 37–38.

  Rabbi Soloveitchik, “The Symbolism of Blue and White.” In Man of Faith in the Modern World. Ed. Abraham Besdin. Israel: Ktav, 1989. Quoted on the P’til Tekhelet website, www.tekhelet.com

  Elsner, “The Past and Present of Tekhelet,” p. 171.

  One of the problems is that the Hebrew word for this color— tekhelet—can mean both blue and violet; it was the metaphor of the sea and the sky which led to Jews believing it had been more blue than violet.

  Many years later, when Radzyn was destroyed by the Nazis, Herzog was the only person with the recipe, leading to the ironic circumstance that he was responsible for both discrediting and preserving Leiner’s process.

  A similar paradox can be seen in ancient Jewish sacred manuscripts. If the parchment is calf vellum then it must be made from the skin of an animal that has been killed in a kosher way—through being bled to death. But there appear to be no rules about whether the ink with which it is written should or should not be kosher.