For those engaged in fighting epidemics, though, blotting out the pestilence using a pail of milky, disinfectant lime must have been profoundly comforting, even ritualistic. Is it a coincidence that it was around this time that white coats were adopted by doctors, and would become a visual symbol of the medical profession?
Isabelline
Isabella Clara Eugenia was, by the standards of her day, exceedingly beautiful. Like her English near contemporary, Queen Elizabeth I, she was very pale, with fine, marmalade-colored hair, only the merest suggestion of the Hapsburg lip, and a high, wide forehead. She was also powerful, ruling a large tract of northern Europe called the Spanish Netherlands.1 This makes it seem all the more unfair that her namesake in the color world is a dingy yellow-white. As the author of A History of Handmade Lace described it in 1900: “a grayish coffee color, or in plain English, the color of dirt.”2
The story goes that in 1601 Isabella’s husband, Archduke Albert VII of Austria, began the siege of Ostend. Isabella, believing the siege would be short-lived, vowed she would not change or wash her underwear until he won Isabelline is the color the queen’s linens had become when the siege finally ended three years later.3 Luckily for the poor queen, proof that this story is nonsense isn’t difficult to find. The tale only appeared in print in the nineteenth century—an aeon in Chinese-whisper years—and two exculpatory dresses in the hue crop up in the wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth I. Inventories, one taken a year before the start of the siege, show she owned both an isabelline kirtell (a long dress or tunic; she had 126 in total) and a “rounde gowne of Isabella-color satten . . . set with silver spangles.”4
Mud, however, sticks, so despite royal endorsement, the color’s fashionable career was short-lived. But it has managed to carve out another niche in the natural sciences, particularly in descriptions of animals. Pale palomino horses and Himalayan brown bears are isabelline, and there are several species of bird, including the Oenanthe isabellina or isabelline wheatear, that owe their names to the color of their pale dun plumage.
“Isabellinism” is also the name of a genetic mutation that renders feathers that ought to be black, gray, or dark brown a pallid yellowish color instead. A handful of the king penguins on Marion Island in the Antarctic make up one prominent group of sufferers.5 Among the huddled ranks on the island, the wan mutants are the highly visible odd men out, the weaklings, and anyone who has ever watched natural-history documentaries knows what usually happens to them. A dubious legacy indeed for the poor Archduchess Isabella.
Chalk
If you were to view a minute paint sample from an Old Master painting under a microscope, you would likely see something wholly unexpected and far older than the paint itself: nannofossils, the ancient remains of one-celled sea creatures called coccolithophores. How on earth did they get there? Chalk.
Chalk is formed from marine ooze, largely consisting of single-celled algae, that formed a sediment on the ocean floor and was then compounded over millions of years to create a soft, calcium carbonate rock.1 There is a vast deposit over the south and east of England—responsible for the white cliffs of Dover—and northwestern Europe. It is quarried in great blocks that are left to weather, which helps to separate out any chips of flint. The stone is then ground under water, washed, and left to settle in large vats. When drained and dried, the chalk is separated into layers. The top layer, the finest and whitest, is sold as Paris white; the one beneath, slightly less fine, is extra gilder’s white. Both are used as artists’ pigments. The coarsest grade, used in cheaper paints and building materials, is sold as commercial white.2
The chemist and colorist George Field was rather sniffy about chalk. It is “used by the artist only as a crayon,” he wrote in his Chromatography of 1835.3 Others were less supercilious. Arnold Houbraken, a Dutch artist and biographer, wrote in 1718: “It is said that Rembrandt once painted a picture in which the colors were so heavily loaded that you could lift it from the floor by the nose.”4 This was thanks to the chalk, which the artist used to make his paints go further, to thicken them so that they stood off the canvas, and to make glazing layers more transparent—because it has a low refractive index, chalk is almost completely translucent in oils.5 It was also frequently used as the base layer either by itself or as part of a gesso mixture, a kind of plaster of Paris.6 Although the grounds were hidden underneath the finished product, they helped ensure the artwork, particularly murals, did not degrade so fast the patron could demand his money back. The fifteenth-century writer Cennino Cennini dedicates many pages of his Il libro dell’arte to lovingly detailing the preparation of different grades of gesso. One, gesso sottile, took over a month of daily stirrings to prepare, but, as he assured his readers, the effort was well worth it: “it will come out as soft as silk.”7
Even without such loving preparation, chalk has a long history of use in art. The Uffington White Horse, for example, is one of the stylized chalk figures created in Europe during the Late Bronze Age. It still prances high on a hillside on the edge of the Berkshire Downs in southern England. Amid fears that it might be used for target practice by the Luftwaffe, the horse was covered up during the Second World War. When the war was over, William Francis Grimes, a Welsh archaeology professor, was charged with disinterring it.8 Grimes had believed, as many still do, that the figure was carved directly into the hillside. Instead he discovered that it had been painstakingly constructed by cutting shallow trenches and filling them with chalk. (This had actually been described in great detail by Daniel Defoe in the seventeenth century, but everyone had ignored him.)9
There is much that is still unknown about the White Horse. Why, for example, did the people who made it go to so much trouble to do so? And why, while so much else has changed, has it been “scoured,” or cleaned and rechalked, by the local population at least once every generation in the intervening three millennia?10 Microscopes may have revealed the preferred fundament of the Old Masters, but chalk still has hidden depths.
Beige
Dulux sells a Brobdingnagian array of paint colors to its nontrade customers. Beige lovers riffling through the thick color-card wads are in for a treat. If “Rope Swing,” “Leather Satchel,” “Evening Barley,” or “Ancient Artifact” doesn’t appeal, “Brushed Fossil,” “Natural Hessian,” “Trench Coat,” “Nordic Sails,” or any of several hundred others may well do. Those who are in a rush, however, and who don’t want to trawl through lists of evocative names, may find themselves a little stuck: not one of these pale yellow-grays is actually called “beige.”
Is this because the word, with its glutinous-voweled center, is unappealing? (Marketers have an ear for that kind of thing.) The word was loaned in the mid-nineteenth century from French, where it referred to a kind of cloth made from undyed sheep’s wool. As has often happened, “beige” attached itself to the color too. It rarely seems to have incited strong passions. It was mentioned in London Society magazine as being in vogue in the late autumn of 1889, though this was only because it “combines pleasantly with the fashionable tones of brown and gold.”1 Nowadays it is rarely mentioned in fashion, having been cast aside by more glamorous synonyms.
It was the favorite tint of Elsie de Wolfe, the 1920s interior designer who is credited with inventing the profession. Upon seeing the Parthenon in Athens for the first time, she was enchanted, exclaiming: “It’s beige! My color!” But while she was clearly not alone—it crops up in many of the twentieth century’s key palettes—beige has chiefly been used as a foil for colors with more character.2 When two scientists surveyed over 200,000 galaxies and discovered that the universe, taken as a whole, is a shade of beige, they immediately sought a sexier name. Suggestions included “big bang buff” and “skyvory,” but in the end they settled on “cosmic latte.”3
There is the nub of beige’s image problem: it is unassuming and safe, but deeply dull. Anyone who has ever spent any time visiting rental properties soon comes to loathe it—a few hours in a
nd all the properties seem to be merging together into a sea of determined inoffensiveness. A recent book about how best to sell your home goes so far as to advise against it completely. The chapter on color opens with a diatribe against its tyrannical hold over the property market. “It seems,” the author concludes, “that somehow beige is interpreted as a neutral—an ambiguous color that everyone will like.”4 In fact the situation is even worse than that: the hope is not that everyone will like it, but that it won’t offend anyone. It could be the concept-color of the bourgeoisie: conventional, sanctimonious, and materialistic. It seems strangely apposite, then, that beige has evolved from being sheep-colored to being the color adopted by the sheeplike. Is any other hue so redolent of our flock instincts for tasteful, bland consumerism? No wonder Dulux’s color-namers wanted to shun it: beige is boring.
Blonde
Lead-tin yellow
Indian yellow
Acid yellow
Naples yellow
Chrome yellow
Gamboge
Orpiment
Imperial yellow
Gold
Yellow
Oscar Wilde was arrested outside the Cadogan Hotel in London in April 1895. The following day the Westminster Gazette ran the headline “Arrest of Oscar Wilde, Yellow Book Under His Arm.” Wilde would be found officially guilty of gross indecency in court a little over a month later, by which time the court of public opinion had long since hanged him. What decent man would be seen openly walking the streets with a yellow book?
The sinful implications of such books had come from France, where, from the mid-nineteenth century, sensationalist literature had been not-so-chastely pressed between vivid yellow covers. Publishers adopted this as a useful marketing tool, and soon yellow-backed books could be bought cheaply at every railway station. As early as 1846 the American author Edgar Allan Poe was scornfully writing of the “eternal insignificance of yellow-backed pamphleteering.” For others, the sunny covers were symbols of modernity and the aesthetic and decadent movements.1 Yellow books show up in two of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings from the 1880s, Still Life with Bible and, heaped in invitingly disheveled piles, Parisian Novels. For Van Gogh and many other artists and thinkers of the time, the color itself came to stand as the symbol of the age and their rejection of repressed Victorian values. “The Boom in Yellow,” an essay published in the late 1890s by Richard Le Gallienne, expends 2,000 words proselytizing on its behalf. “Till one comes to think of it,” he writes, “one hardly realizes how many important and pleasant things in life are yellow.” He was persuasive: the final decade of the nineteenth century later became known as the “Yellow Nineties.”
Traditionalists were less impressed. These yellow books gave off a strong whiff of transgression, and the avant-garde did little to calm their fears (for them the transgression was half the point). In Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1890, it is down the moral rabbit hole of such a novel that the eponymous antihero disappears, never to return. Just as the narrator reaches his defining ethical crossroads, a friend gives him a yellow-bound book, which opens his eyes to “the sins of the world,” corrupting and ultimately destroying him. Capitalizing on the association, the scandalous, avant-garde periodical The Yellow Book was launched in April 1894.2 Holbrook Jackson, a contemporary journalist, wrote that it “was newness in excelsis: novelty naked and unashamed . . . yellow became the color of the hour.”3 After Wilde’s arrest a mob stormed the publishers’ offices on Vigo Street, believing they were responsible for the “yellow book” mentioned by the Gazette.4 In fact, Wilde had been carrying a copy of Aphrodite by Pierre Louÿs and had never even contributed to the publication. The magazine’s art director and illustrator, Aubrey Beardsley, had barred Wilde after an argument—he responded by calling the periodical “dull,” and “not yellow at all.”
Wilde’s conviction (and the failure soon after of The Yellow Book) was not the first time the color had been associated with contamination, and was far from the last. Artists, for example, had numerous difficulties with it. Two pigments they relied on, orpiment [here] and gamboge [here], were highly poisonous. It was assumed Naples yellow [here] came from Mount Vesuvius’s sulfurous orifice well into the mid-twentieth century, and often turned black when used as a paint; gallstone yellow was made from ox gallstones, crushed and ground in gum water; and Indian yellow [here] was probably made from urine.5
In individuals, the color betokens illness: think of sallow skin, jaundice, or a bilious attack. When applied to mass phenomena or groups the connotations are worse still. Hitched to “journalism” it indicates rash sensationalism. The flow of immigrants into Europe and North America from the East and particularly China in the early twentieth century was dubbed the “yellow peril.” Contemporary accounts and images showed an unsuspecting West engulfed by a subhuman horde—Jack London called them the “chattering yellow populace.”6 And while the star the Nazis forced Jews to wear is the most notorious example of yellow as a symbol of stigma, other marginalized groups had been forced to wear yellow clothes or signs from the early Middle Ages.
Perversely, though, yellow has simultaneously been a color of value and beauty. In the West, for example, blonde hair [here] has long been held up as the ideal. Economists have shown that pale-haired prostitutes can demand a premium, and there are far more blondes in advertisements than is representative of their distribution among the population at large. Although in China “yellow” printed materials like books and images are often pornographic, a particular egg-yolk shade [here] was the favored color of their emperors. A text from the beginning of the Tang dynasty (a.d. 618–907) expressly forbids “common people and officials” from wearing “clothes or accessories in reddish yellow,” and royal palaces were marked out by their yellow roofs.7 In India the color’s power is more spiritual than temporal. It is symbolic of peace and knowledge, and is particularly associated with Krishna, who is generally depicted wearing a vivid yellow robe over his smoke-blue skin. The art historian and author B. N. Goswamy has described it as “the rich luminous color [that] holds things together, lifts the spirit and raises visions.”8
It is perhaps in its metallic incarnation, however, that yellow has been most coveted. Alchemists slaved for centuries to transmute other metals into gold, and recipes for counterfeiting the stuff are legion.9 Places of worship have made use of both its seemingly eternal high sheen and its material worth to inspire awe among their congregations. Medieval and early modern craftsmen, known as goldbeaters, were required to hammer golden coins into sheets as fine as cobwebs, which could be used to gild the backgrounds of paintings, a highly specialized and costly business.
Although coinage has lost its link with the gold standard, awards and medals are still usually gold (or gold-plated), and the color’s symbolic value has left its mark on language too: we talk of golden ages, golden boys and girls, and, in business, golden handshakes or goodbyes. In India, where gold is often part of dowries and has traditionally been used by the poor instead of a savings account, government attempts to stop people hoarding it have resulted in a healthy black market and an inventive line in smuggling. In November 2013, 24 gleaming bars, worth over $1 million, were found stuffed into an airplane toilet.10 Le Gallienne noted in his essay that “yellow leads a roving, versatile life”—it is hard to disagree, even if this is probably not what the writer had in mind.
Blonde
Rosalie Duthé, the first person known as a dumb blonde, was born in France in the mid-eighteenth century. Famously beautiful, even as a child, she was sent to a convent by her parents to keep her out of trouble. Before long, however, she somehow caught the eye of a rich English financier, the 3rd Earl of Egremont, and fled the convent under his protection. When his money ran out she became a courtesan as notorious for her stupidity as for her willingness to pose for nude portraits. In June 1775 she found herself skewered at the Theatre de l’Ambigu in Paris in a one-act satire ca
lled Les Curiosités de la foire. After seeing the performance, Rosalie was so mortified she is said to have offered a kiss to anyone who could restore her honor, but no one did.1
Although probably more fact than fiction, the legend of Rosalie illustrates the way that blondes, like most minorities—it has been estimated just 2 percent of the world’s population is naturally blonde—are both reviled and revered by society. In the mid-twentieth century, Nazis held up the ideal of the blue-eyed, pale-haired Aryan as the apogee of humanity. A chilling exhibit in the Stadtmuseum in Munich contains a hair-color chart, employed in one of the tests designed to help identify those with the Aryan physical characteristics the Führer wanted to propagate in his master race.
Blondes, particularly women, are often associated with lust. In ancient Greece, high-class prostitutes—hetairai—bleached their hair using noxious mixtures like potash water and the juice of yellow flowers.2 Roman prostitutes were also said to dye their hair pale or wear blonde wigs.3 More recently, a 2014 survey of the prices that female prostitutes charged per hour worldwide showed that those with natural, or natural-looking, blonde hair could command far more than those with any other hair color.4
In paintings of the Fall, Eve, the Bible’s original sinner, is more often than not depicted with flowing golden locks that conceal nothing; her counterpoint, the Virgin Mary, is usually a brunette, swaddled from throat to toe in rich fabric [here]. John Milton drew heavily on this symbolism in Paradise Lost, published in 1667. Eve’s “unadornèd golden tresses” lie in “wanton ringlets,” echoing the coils of the serpent lying in wait nearby.
The Secret Lives of Color Page 4