The Secret Lives of Color

by Kassia St. Clair

  Kassia St. Clair is a freelance writer and a former assistant books and arts editor at The Economist, and writes regularly for Elle Decoration. Her popular column on color there sparked the idea for this book.

  www.kassiastclair.com

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  First published in Great Britain by John Murray (Publishers), an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.

  Published by arrangement with Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.

  Published in Penguin Books 2017

  Copyright © 2016 by Kassia St. Clair

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: St. Clair, Kassia, author.

  Title: The secret lives of color / Kassia St. Clair.

  Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017014300 | ISBN 9780143131144 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Color—Psychological aspects—History. | Color—Social aspects—History. | Symbolism of colors—History. | BISAC: ART / History / General. | ART / Color Theory. | ART / Techniques / Color.

  Classification: LCC BF789.C7 S64 2017 | DDC 155.9/1145—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014300

  Version_1

  For Fallulah

  The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.

  John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (1851–3)

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Color vision

  How we see

  Simple arithmetic

  On light

  Building the palette

  Artists and their pigments

  Vintage paint charts

  Mapping color

  Chromophilia, chromophobia

  Politics of color

  Colorful language

  Do words shape the shades we see?

  Lead white

  Ivory

  Silver

  Whitewash

  Isabelline

  Chalk

  Beige

  Blonde

  Lead-tin yellow

  Indian yellow

  Acid yellow

  Naples yellow

  Chrome yellow

  Gamboge

  Orpiment

  Imperial yellow

  Gold

  Dutch orange

  Saffron

  Amber

  Ginger

  Minium

  Nude

  Baker-Miller pink

  Mountbatten pink

  Puce

  Fuchsia

  Shocking pink

  Fluorescent pink

  Amaranth

  Scarlet

  Cochineal

  Vermilion

  Rosso corsa

  Hematite

  Madder

  Dragon’s blood

  Tyrian purple

  Archil

  Magenta

  Mauve

  Heliotrope

  Violet

  Ultramarine

  Cobalt

  Indigo

  Prussian blue

  Egyptian blue

  Woad

  Electric blue

  Cerulean

  Verdigris

  Absinthe

  Emerald

  Kelly green

  Scheele’s green

  Terre verte

  Avocado

  Celadon

  Khaki

  Buff

  Fallow

  Russet

  Sepia

  Umber

  Mummy

  Taupe

  Kohl

  Payne’s gray

  Obsidian

  Ink

  Charcoal

  Jet

  Melanin

  Pitch black

  Glossary of other interesting colors

  Notes

  Bibliography and suggested further reading

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Preface

  I fell in love with colors in the way most people fall in love: while concentrating on something else. Ten years ago, while researching eighteenth-century women’s fashions, I would drive down to London to gaze at yellowing copies of Ackermann’s Repository, one of the world’s oldest lifestyle magazines, in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s wood-clad archive. To me, the descriptions of the latest fashions of the 1790s were as mouthwatering and bewildering as the tasting menu of a Michelin-starred restaurant. One issue described “[a] Scotch bonnet of garnet-colored satin, the ends trimmed with a gold fringe.” Another recommended a gown of “puce-colored satin” to be worn with a “Roman mantle of scarlet kerseymere.” At other times, the well-dressed woman would be nothing without a pelisse in hair brown, a bonnet trimmed with coquelicot-colored feathers or lemon-colored sarcenet silk. Sometimes there were colored plates accompanying the descriptions to help me decipher what hair brown could possibly look like, but often there were not. It was like listening to a conversation in a language I only half understood. I was hooked.

  That worst and vilest of all colors, pea-green!

  Arbiter Elegantiarum, 1809

  Years later, I had an idea that would allow me to write about my passion month in, month out, turning it into a regular magazine feature. Each issue I would take a different shade and pull it apart at the seams to discover its hidden mysteries. When was it fashionable? How and when was it made? Is it associated with a particular artist or designer or brand? What is its history? Michelle Ogundehin, the editor of the British Elle Decoration, commissioned my column and in the years since I have written about colors as ordinary as orange and as recherché as heliotrope. These columns provided the germ for this book and I am profoundly grateful.

  I don’t believe there are “off-putting” colors.

  David Hockney defending another shade of green—olive, 2015

  The Secret Lives of Color is not intended to be an exhaustive history. This book is broken down into broad color families and I have included some—black, brown, and white—that are not part of the spectrum as defined by Sir Isaac Newton.1 Within each family I have picked out individual shades with particularly fascinating, important, or disturbing histories. What I have tried to do is provide something between a potted history and a character sketch for the 75 shades that have intrigued me the most. Some are artists’ colors, some are dyes, and others are almost more akin to ideas or sociocultural creations. I hope you enjoy them. There are many wonderful stories that I didn’t have room for here, so I have included a glossary (or color swatch) of other interesting hues along with suggestions for further reading.

  • • •

  To view the colors featured in this book, access http://bit.ly/2ycmYgQ on a device that
displays color.

  Light is therefore color, and shadow the privation of it.

  J. M. W. Turner, 1818

  Color vision

  How we see

  Color is fundamental to our experience of the world around us. Think of hi-vis jackets, brand logos, and the hair, eyes, and skin of those we love. But how is it, precisely, that we see these things? What we are really seeing when we look at, say, a ripe tomato or green paint, is light being reflected off the surface of that object and into our eyes. The visible spectrum, as you can see from the diagram here, makes up only a small proportion of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Different things are different colors because they absorb some wavelengths of the visible light spectrum, while others bounce off. So the tomato’s skin is soaking up most of the short and medium wavelengths—blues and violets, greens, yellows and oranges. The remainder, the reds, hit our eyes and are processed by our brains. So, in a way, the color we perceive an object to be is precisely the color it isn’t: that is, the segment of the spectrum that is being reflected away.

  When light enters our eyes it passes through the lenses and hits the retinas. These are at the backs of our eyeballs and are stuffed with light-sensitive cells, called rods and cones because of their respective shapes. Rods do the heavy lifting of our vision. We have about 120 million in each eye; they are incredibly sensitive and principally distinguish between light and dark. But it is the cones that are most responsive to color. We have far fewer of these: around six million in each retina, the majority huddled together in a small, central spot called the macula. Most people have three different types of cone,2 each tuned to light of different wavelengths: 440 nm, 530 nm, and 560 nm. About two-thirds of these cells are sensitive to longer wavelengths, which means we see more of the warm colors—yellows, reds, and oranges—than the cooler colors in the spectrum. Around 4.5 percent of the world’s population are color-blind or deficient because of faults in their cone cells. The phenomenon is not completely understood, but it is usually genetic and is more prevalent in men: around 1 in 12 men are affected compared to 1 in 200 women. For people with “normal” color vision, when cone cells are activated by light, they relay the information through the nerve system to the brain, which in turn interprets this as color.

  This sounds straightforward, but the interpretation stage is perhaps the most confounding. A metaphysical debate over whether colors really, physically exist or are only internal manifestations has raged since the seventeenth century. The squall of dismay and confusion on social media over the blue and black (or was it white and gold?) dress in 2015 shows how uncomfortable we are with the ambiguity. This particular image made us acutely aware of our brain’s post-processing: half of us saw one thing, the other half something completely different. This happened because our brains normally collect and apply cues about the ambient light—whether we are in full daylight or under an LED bulb, for example—and texture. We use these cues to adjust our perception, like applying a filter over a stage light. The poor quality and lack of visual clues like skin color in the dress image meant that our brains had to guess at the quality of the ambient light. Some intuited that the dress was being washed out by strong light and therefore their minds tuned the colors to darken them; others believed the dress to be in shadow, so their minds adjusted what they were seeing to brighten it and remove the shadowy blue cast. That is how an Internet full of people looking at the same image saw very different things.

  Whiteness and all gray Colors between white and black, may be compounded of Colors, and the whiteness of the Sun’s Light is compounded of all the primary Colors mix’d in a due Proportion.

  Sir Isaac Newton, 1704

  Simple arithmetic

  On light

  In 1666, the same year that the Great Fire of London consumed the city, a 24-year-old Isaac Newton began experimenting with prisms and beams of sunlight. He used a prism to prize apart a ray of white light to reveal its constituent wavelengths. This was not revolutionary in itself—it was something of a parlor trick that had been done many times before. Newton, however, went a step further, and in doing so changed the way we think about color forever: he used another prism to put the wavelengths back together again. Until then it had been assumed that the rainbow that pours out of a prism in the path of a beam of light was created by impurities in the glass. Pure white sunlight was considered a gift from God; it was unthinkable that it could be broken down or, worse still, created by mixing colored lights together. During the Middle Ages mixing colors at all was a taboo, believed to be against the natural order; even during Newton’s lifetime, the idea that a mixture of colors could create white light was anathema.

  Artists would also have been puzzled by the idea that white is made up of lots of different colors, but for different reasons. As anyone who has ever had access to a paint set knows, the more colors you mix together, the closer you approach to black, not white. It has been suggested that Rembrandt created the complex, dark, chocolaty shadows in his paintings simply by scraping together whatever happened to remain on his palette and blending that directly onto the canvas, because so many different pigments have been found within their depths.3

  The explanation for the fact that mixing colored light makes white, while mixing colored paint makes black, lies in the science of optics. Essentially, there are two different types of color mixing: additive and subtractive. With additive mixing, different light wavelengths are combined to create different colors, and when added together the result is white light. This is what Newton demonstrated with his prisms. However, the opposite happens when paints are mixed. Since each pigment only reflects back to the eye a proportion of the available light, when several are mixed together more and more wavelengths are subtracted. Mix enough together and very little of the visible spectrum is reflected, so we will perceive the mixture to be black, or very close to it.

  Additive Color Mixing

  Colors are created by mixing different colored lights. Combining the three primaries produces white.

  For painters with a limited range of impure pigments at their disposal, this is a problem. If they want to create a pale purple, for example, they have to mix together at least three—a red, a blue, and a white—but they might have to add even more to get the precise violet they’re after. The more colors they blend, the more likely it is that the end result will be murky. But the same is true even for simple colors like green and orange: it’s better to use a single pigment rather than mixtures that will inevitably absorb more of the available light wavelengths, sucking the luminosity from the painting. The search for more and brighter colors is fundamental to the story of art, from prehistory to today.

  Without paint in tubes there would have been . . .nothing of what the journalists were later to call impressionists.

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir, date unknown

  Building the palette

  Artists and their pigments

  Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist writing in the first century A.D., claimed that painters in classical Greece used only four colors: black, white, red, and yellow. He was almost certainly exaggerating—the Egyptians had discovered a way of manufacturing a bright, clear blue [here] at least as early as 2500 B.C. But it is true that early artists were restricted, for the most part, to a small range of pigments they could extract from the ground or from plants and insects.

  Humanity has been well served with earthy red- and yellow-toned browns from the beginning. The earliest pigment use that we know of is from the Lower Paleolithic period, about 350,000 years ago. Prehistoric peoples could render a deep black from the ashes from fires [here]. Some whites could be found in the ground; another was produced by early chemists from around 2300 b.c. [here]. Although pigments had been discovered, traded, and synthesized throughout recorded history, the process accelerated dramatically in the nineteenth century due to the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. More and more chemicals were being produced as b
y-products of industrial processes, and some made excellent pigments and dyes. William Perkin, for example, stumbled across the purple dye mauveine [here] while trying to synthesize a cure for malaria in 1856.

  The availability of some pigments and the introduction of others has helped to shape the history of art. The palm prints and bison on the walls of prehistoric caves owed their somber palette to the pigments that the earliest artists could find in the world around them. Fast-forward several thousand years to illuminated medieval manuscripts, and the black and white remained unchanged, but flat fields of gold and several brilliant colors like red and blue had been added. Centuries later, the paintings of Renaissance artists or old masters benefited as much from a broader range of pigments as they did from realistic representations of perspective and sophisticated ways of dealing with light and shade. Some works from this time remain unfinished, with a single figure left as a simple sketch, because the artist couldn’t afford the expensive pigments needed to complete the canvas. The clear blue ultramarine [here], for example, was so dear that the commissioning patrons often had to buy it themselves: the artists couldn’t afford it. And customers often felt the need to specify, in written contracts, how much of the expensive paints they expected artists to use in the finished work, and which figures should be clothed in which colors, fearful that hard-up painters would use a cheaper alternative.4

  Subtractive Color Mixing

  By mixing a limited set of colors, many others can be created. A perfect mixture of primaries will yield black.