Gamboge
When William Winsor and Henry C. Newton first started selling artists’ pigments from a small shop at 38 Rathbone Place in London in 1832, gamboge, one of their principal pigments, would have arrived in regular packages from the offices of the East India Company. Each package contained a few thin cylinders, about the circumference of a quarter and the color of old earwax, wrapped in leaves.1 Winsor & Newton’s workers would have broken up these pipelike lumps using a metal anvil and a hammer. Once crushed, the pigment would be made up into small, brownish cakes. Experienced artists, though, would have been in on the secret: when touched with a drop of water, these toffee-brown blocks yielded a yellow paint so bright and luminous it almost seemed fluorescent.
Although by this time gamboge had been a fixture on palettes for two centuries—the East India Company first imported it in 1615—little was known of its origins.2 In his 1835 treatise on pigments, George Field waxed evasive: “[It] is brought principally, it is said, from Cambaja in India, and is, we are told, the produce of several trees.”3 He was right about the trees. Gamboge is the solidified sap of Garcinia trees, and comes principally from Cambodia—or Camboja, as it was once known, which is how Gamboge got its name.4 Milking the trees requires patience. When they are at least a decade old, deep gouges can be cut into their trunks. Hollow lengths of bamboo are used to catch the sap as it trickles out. It takes over a year for the bamboo to fill up and the sap to harden. When some unprocessed resinous clots were broken open during the rule of the Khmer Rouge, it was discovered that they contained stray bullets, trapped like ancient insects in amber.
Artists in Japan, China, and India had used it on scroll paintings, illustrated capitals, and ancient miniatures for centuries, but when the pigment first made its way into Europe—in the hull of a Dutch trading galley in 1603—color-starved Western painters fell hungrily on the new sun-bright yellow.5 Rembrandt favored it in oils, where it took on the golden hue that often haloes the figures in his paintings.6 It has also been found in the work and palettes of J. M. W. Turner and Sir Joshua Reynolds.7 William Hooker, the Royal Horticultural Society’s botanical artist, mixed it with a little Prussian blue to produce Hooker’s green: the perfect color for painting leaves.8
Like many early pigments, gamboge was as at home on the shelves of the apothecary as on an artist’s palette. In a lecture given on March 7, 1836, Dr. Robert Christison, MD, described it as “an excellent and powerful purgative.” Just a small amount could produce “profuse watery discharges”; larger doses could be fatal.9 Workers who crushed gamboge at Winsor & Newton would have to rush to the toilet once an hour while working with it. It is hardly an illustrious side effect for a pigment, yet perhaps it was the scientific community’s familiarity with gamboge that led French physicist Jean Perrin to use it in 1908 in his experiments to prove the theory of Brownian motion,10 an idea Einstein posited three years earlier. Using tiny puddles of gamboge solution, just 0.005 in. deep, Perrin showed that, even days after being left untouched, the little yellow particles still jiggled around as if they were alive. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1926.11 By this time gamboge had mostly been replaced in artists’ palettes by aureolin, an artificial yellow that, though slightly less bright and translucent, was less prone to fading. Winsor & Newton continued to receive packages of raw gamboge until 2005, when the company finally stopped selling it; a great relief, no doubt, for the workers, if not for the artists.
Orpiment
In his Il Libro dell’arte, Cennino Cennini writes that orpiment is “made by alchemy.”1 It is true that by the early Renaissance most of the pigment that artists were using was manufactured, but orpiment is actually a naturally occurring mineral: a canary-yellow sulfide of arsenic (As2S3) that is around 60 percent arsenic.2
In its glittering natural form, which was thought to resemble gold, it was one of the mineral pigments (like azurite and the green copper ore malachite) and one of two yellows, along with ocher, used in ancient Egyptian art. It appears on papyrus scrolls and decorates the walls of Tutankhamen’s tomb, where a small bag of it was discovered on the floor.3 The intense yellow can also be found illuminating the ninth-century Book of Kells, the walls of the Taj Mahal, and the medieval text the Mappae clavicula. The Romans, who called it auripigmentum, “golden,” were much enamored with it too. As well as using orpiment as a pigment, they believed gold could be extracted from it using a mysterious method. Pliny recounts a story about the emperor Caligula, who, greedy for riches, smelted a vast quantity of raw orpiment, with little success. Not only were such experiments futile—orpiment does not really contain any trace of the precious metal—it could also prove fatal for the slaves who mined it.
Cennini warned his readers: “Beware of soiling your mouth with it, lest you suffer personal injury.”4 In fact, orpiment is deadly. Although it was occasionally taken in minute amounts as a purgative in Java, Bali, and China, where it occurs naturally and was popular as a pigment until the nineteenth century, the risks of abusing it were well known.5 A delightfully named German merchant called Georg Eberhard Rumphius recalled seeing a woman who had taken too much in Batavia (now Jakarta), in 1660, in his book The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet. She had become mad, “and climbed up the walls like a cat.”6
Even as a paint orpiment was not without its drawbacks. It dried badly in oils and could not be used in frescoes. It also reacted with a host of other pigments, particularly those that contained copper or lead. Prudent artists could make use of it, as the Venice-based Renaissance colorist Paolo Veronese did in his The Dream of St. Helena (c. 1570), only if they made sure it was carefully removed from other pigments it might discolor.7 Orpiment really had only one thing going for it: its color. It was, in the words of Cennini, “a handsome yellow more closely resembling gold than any other color.”8 And that, it seems, was enough.
Imperial yellow
Katharine Augusta Carl probably thought of herself as imperturbable: she was born in New Orleans two months before the end of the Civil War, and unrest had seasoned her childhood. Thereafter she had been a wanderer, first leaving America to study art in Paris and later traveling through Europe and the Middle East. It was on a visit to China, though, that a life-defining opportunity presented itself when she was asked to paint the portrait of the empress dowager Cixi, the feared former concubine who had ruled China for over 40 years. This was how Katharine found herself, just before 11 a.m. on August 5, 1903, standing in the throne room in the heart of the Forbidden City, contemplating the world’s most powerful woman.1
Heightening the sense of intimidation was the liberal use of the red-gold yellow fiercely reserved for royalty. While most Chinese roof tiles, for example, were gray, those of the royal palaces were golden.2 Cixi’s gown was of imperial yellow silk. Stiffly brocaded with wisteria and decorated with strings of pear-shaped pearls and tassels,it seemed more to encase than clothe her. Her right hand, with its clawlike two-inch nail protectors, lay in her lap. At precisely 11 a.m., the time the royal augurs had prescribed as the most auspicious for portrait painting, each of the 85 clocks in the throne room began to chime simultaneously; shakily, Katharine reached forward and began to sketch the empress’s likeness.3
In China even regular yellow had been special for over a thousand years. Together with red, blue-green, black, and white, it was one of the five colors of the five- element theory. Each color corresponded with a season, direction, element, planet, and animal. Yellow was allied with the element of earth—an ancient Chinese saying is “The sky is blackish blue and the earth is yellow”—the center, Saturn, late or long summer, and the dragon. The Chur Qiu Fan Lu (Rich Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals), written sometime in the second century B.C., describes yellow as “the color of rulers.” They soon began to jealously guard its use, particularly this one shade: the first law that mentions it was passed in A.D. 618 at the very beginning of the Tang dynasty. “Common people and officials,” it read, “are forbidden to wear c
lothes or accessories in reddish yellow.”4
Even by ancient standards, the dyeing method was labor-intensive. The key ingredient was the Rehmannia glutinosa, or Chinese foxglove, a plant with trumpet-shaped flowers and roots that look like elongated golden beetroot. To achieve the precise color desired, the tubers were harvested at the end of the eighth lunar month, and then pounded by hand into a smooth paste. It took around 1.7 quarts of root paste to dye a 50-square-foot piece of silk.5 The mordant, a substance that helps a color bite into a fabric so it doesn’t wash away, had to be made from the ashes of oak, mulberry, or beach wormwood; the cauldron had to be rustproof; each piece of silk went through two slightly different dyeing vats.
Although neither woman in the throne room knew it, imperial yellow’s days were numbered. Its prestige had begun to wane during the previous decades. Initially reserved for royals, it was first granted to household bodyguards and, in a few instances, as an honor to commoners. In one scandalous instance, the empress herself had rewarded a humble train driver with an imperial yellow jacket. Just a few short years after Katharine painted China’s last empress, the Xinhai Revolution would topple the Qing dynasty, China’s last. With the fall of imperial power, the talismanic color was shorn of the symbolic significance it had possessed for a millennium.
Gold
Anyone who requires proof that gold is the color of desire need only see the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, immortalized by Gustav Klimt in 1907. It is so ardent and adoring that when it first arrived at the Belvedere Palace gallery in Vienna, people speculated that subject and painter were having an affair. While proof of a liaison has never emerged, there is no doubt that the painting is an expression of reverence. In the work, the last of Klimt’s “Golden Phase,” Adele sits in a field of the precious metal, some of it plain and flat, some worked into a pattern of symbols and tessellations. Her dress is also a complex swirl of gold. Only the hands, hair, and face—lips slightly parted, eyes intense—portray a living, breathing woman; the setting and clothing are those of a goddess.
Gold has always been both the color of reverence and revered itself. Part of its allure lies in the mineral’s scarcity and uneven distribution. Although mines have been discovered all over the world, gold rushes mean that they are quickly exhausted and abandoned in favor of those that have been newly uncovered. Europe has relatively few gold deposits and has historically relied on gold traded from Africa and the East.1 The Carthaginians, whose empire ringed the Mediterranean in the millennia before the birth of Christ, were for many years the principal conduit for African gold into Europe, a right that they defended vigorously.2 (Even their supplies, though, were limited. After a serious military defeat in 202 B.C. they were unable to pay reparations in gold. Instead they paid in silver—a little under 360 tons over the next 50 years.)3
Gold has also been used to inspire awe. When the pious Mansa Musa, the emperor of Mali, traveled through Cairo on his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, European and Arabic traders saw for themselves the glittering wealth of the African continent. The emperor traveled with a caravan of 60,000 men; 500 slaves walked before him, each carrying a gold staff weighing four pounds; his baggage train of 80 camels carried another 300 pounds of gold. His legendary journey and generosity left the price of gold in the region artificially low for over a decade.4
Cloth of gold—fabric woven from threads with a core of silk or linen wrapped in gold—had been around since Roman times and was beloved by European royalty. The famous meeting in 1520 of Europe’s two youngest, lustiest, and most glittering monarchs, Kings Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France, is known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, after the pair vied to outdo each other with the splendor of their retinues. Henry arguably won: his marquee was made entirely from golden cloth.
Like its sister metals iron, copper, and silver, gold has a structure that contains mobile electrons that strongly reflect light. It is this that gives these metals their distinctive sheen.5 Gold’s rich glimmer, coupled with its resistance to tarnishing, makes it an easy emblem for divinity. The medieval Christian Church binged on the metal. The Uffizi Gallery in Florence, for example, has a room dedicated to three vast altarpieces, all depicting the Virgin and Child. The last of the three, created by Giotto around 1310, was painted for the Ognissanti Chapel, a few blocks upriver from the gallery. Just as in the other altarpieces, Giotto’s figures are not shown in a room or landscape but lie on a smooth golden ground. The frame too is gold, as are the saints’ halos (the halos of the saints in front obscure the faces of those behind them, a great scandal at the time because it was thought to be impious) and the decorative border on the Virgin’s deep blue robe.
Gilding such panels was painstaking work. The gold came in gossamer-thin sheets, each about 11.5 inches square, which had been hammered from coins; a good goldbeater could pound as many as a hundred leaves from a single ducat. Each leaf would be taken up with tweezers and pressed onto the panel, molding, or frame. The sheets were so thin that almost any glue could be used—honey, gum arabic, and glair, made from egg white, were all popular. At this point the gold would still be a bit dull, its sheen unfocused by imperfections underneath; to really shine it had to be burnished. Cennini recommends using either hematite [here] (probably because of the medieval association between red and gold), a precious stone like a sapphire or an emerald (“the choicer the stone, the better it is”), or the tooth of a lion, wolf, dog, or “any animal which feeds decently upon flesh.”6
Objects, when rendered in flat gold leaf, do not look real; the light falls across them evenly rather than glinting white off the highlights and falling blackly into the shadowed areas as it would do naturally. Artists used gold not for realistic effect, but because of its intrinsic value, and even once Renaissance artists began placing their figures in more natural settings and mastering perspective, they still liked to make use of rich gold paint.7 It could indicate wealth if used to pick out decorative trimmings in rich fabrics, or it could represent divinity. In The Birth of Venus (c. 1484–6), Botticelli wove it through Venus’s hair.
The natural counterpoint to our desire for and devotion to gold is its tendency to bring out our baser instincts: greed, envy, and avarice. This ambivalence is evident in the myth of King Midas, who is granted his foolish wish of being able to turn anything into solid gold just by touching it, only to find that this means he kills anything he touches, and cannot eat. Disgust at the human preoccupation with gold can be found in Pliny’s Natural History: “We probe her [Mother Earth’s] entrails, digging into veins of gold and silver . . . we drag out her entrails . . . to be worn upon a finger.”8 Today, those who binge on gold are looked down upon as tacky and tasteless. Klimt’s golden painting was seized by the Nazis during the annexation of Austria and later spent half a century in a gallery there, despite the wishes expressed in the will of its last owner that it should pass to his heirs. After a prolonged legal battle with the Austrian government it was returned to Adele’s niece. Bloch-Bauer now gazes out from her precious golden shroud at visitors to the Neue Galerie in Manhattan.
Dutch orange
Saffron
Amber
Ginger
Minium
Nude
Orange
Those who have ever wondered which orange referred to first, the color or the fruit, need wonder no longer. The fruit was probably first cultivated in China, and then gradually spread west, leaving its name scattered in its wake like a carelessly discarded whorl of peel: from nārang in Persian to nāranj in Arabic; then nāranga (Sanskrit), naranja (Spanish), orenge (French), and finally orange in English. Orange as a name for a color only emerged during the sixteenth century; before that English speakers had used the cumbersome portmanteau giolureade or yellow-red.1 One of the word’s first-recorded adjectival outings was in 1502, when Elizabeth of York bought “slevys of orenge color sarsenet” for Margaret Tudor.2
In his book Concerning the Spiritual i
n Art (1912), Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian abstract artist, wrote, “Orange is like a man, convinced of his own powers.”3 There is no doubt that orange has a confidence to it. If blue is a stand-in for the hazy unknown, its color-wheel opposite has urgency. It’s used to draw attention to potential danger.4 It is the color of Guantánamo Bay jumpsuits, Agent Orange, and, since 9/11, the second-highest terror-threat level in the United States. Orange is used in traffic signage and warning symbols on roads, in part because it forms a high contrast against the blue-gray asphalt, even in low light.5 And the black boxes on aircraft, which record flight information, are, in fact, orange, in the hope this will make them easier to find in the event of a crash.
Thanks to the influence of the House of Orange on early modern Europe, its heraldic color [here] has had a wide geographical reach. Its most obvious association is with the Netherlands: Dutch teams play in oranje, and a Boer-controlled region in South Africa was known as the Orange Free State—with a flag to match, naturally. The color is also linked with Protestantism and protest, particularly in Ireland, where Protestants are known as Orangemen.6
When the architect Irving Morrow was deciding in 1935 what color to paint the Golden Gate Bridge that spans from San Francisco to Marin County, he settled on a rusty shade, now called GGB international orange, which would blend in with the hills but pop against the sea and sky.7 Occasionally, orange also pops in fashion too. The wonderfully flamboyant art deco cover illustrations for Vogue by Helen Dryden show orange as a permanent fixture of 1920s fashion, and it also had a moment in the late 1960s and ’70s.8 It was expedience, though, that helped it become the signature color of one of the world’s most successful luxury brands, Hermès. Prior to the Second World War the company’s packaging was cream; it was wartime shortages that forced them to switch to mustard until, finally, they had no choice but to use the last paperboard color available: orange.9
The Secret Lives of Color Page 6