The Secret Lives of Color

by Kassia St. Clair

  Kandinsky also described orange as “red brought nearer to humanity by yellow.”10 And indeed it does seem to be forever in danger of sliding into another color category: red and yellow on either side, brown below. This was even true of the shades featured in this book. Several destined for orange—chrome and ocher to take just two—ended up elsewhere upon further research. In part this is because orange wasn’t seen as a separate color in its own right until relatively recently and so even colors that now seem obviously orange—minium [here] is a good example—were once thought of as red or yellow.

  It was the impressionists who convincingly illustrated orange’s power. The painting that gave the movement its name, Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, has, at its center, a bright orange sun. This new school of artists, fired up on new optical theories of color contrasts, made extensive use of orange. Paired with blues (its opposite on the color wheel) the super-bright chrome and cadmium pigments produced zinging contrasts that were deployed again and again by artists including Toulouse-Lautrec, Munch, Gauguin, and Van Gogh.

  Whatever the medium, there is no denying orange’s air of braggadocio. Godey’s Lady’s Book pronounced it “too brilliant to be elegant” in 1855.11 Anthony Burgess might have been thinking the same thing when he named his dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange in 1962. (He gave several different explanations for the title during his lifetime: once saying he had overheard the phrase “as queer as a clockwork orange” in an East End pub; on another occasion implying it was a metaphor of his own making.) Neon-lit signs, invented in 1912 and originally orange, are still perhaps the loudest and brightest form of advertising, and the color remains popular for billboards and storefronts. Many brands, including Nickelodeon, easyJet, and Hooters, have made use of its vibrancy and visibility. With apologies to Kandinsky, perhaps a better summation of the color would be: “Orange is like a man, desperately seeking to convince others of his powers.”

  Dutch orange

  Balthasar Gérard was the Lee Harvey Oswald of his day. On July 10, 1584, he entered the Prinsenhof, the royal residence of the Dutch rulers, and fired his pistol three times into the chest of William I, Prince of Orange, who prayed for mercy for the Dutch people and then died.

  To the Dutch, William I (William the Silent) is the father of their nation—and it was an exceedingly tricky birth. In the middle of the sixteenth century the northern Low Countries were not independent, but a largely Protestant region under the rule of the fanatically Catholic King Philip II of Spain. William I, a Catholic himself but a strong believer in religious freedom, led the rebellion against Spain. The House of Orange continued to exert huge influence on European politics for several centuries, and William’s descendants remain the Dutch royal family to this day.1 Centuries of turbulence have left their mark, however: the Dutch have fierce pride in their history, their nation, and the signature color of their ruling family.

  The House of Orange is proof that personal branding isn’t new. In portrait after portrait, its members are gilded in shades of orange. It begins subtly enough: in a study by Adriaen Thomasz Key painted in 1579, William I wears a fine brocade suit in a fashionable shade of black, trimmed with fine embroidery in orange and gold.2 A portrait of King William III of England and Dutch Stadtholder (the honorific the Oranges were given in the Low Countries), attributed to Thomas Murray, is less subtle. Here, backed by a swathe of rust brocade, the king wears a voluminous cloak in flame-colored velvet trimmed with ermine and secured at the front with two vast silk tassels in an eye-catching shade of pumpkin.

  The Dutch, in gratitude to William I, took to the color with gusto. (The exact shade favored by the Dutch has shifted over the years. In contemporary paintings, the orange worn by the members of the House of Orange is almost a burnt amber shade; the one favored today is a sunny mandarin.) Take the humble carrot, for example. Originally a tough and rather bitter tuber from South America, prior to the seventeenth century it was usually purple or yellow. Over the next 100 years, however, Dutch famers selectively bred carrots to produce orange varieties.3 The Dutch flag—today blue, white, and red—was originally striped in blue, white, and orange to match the livery of William I, but, try as they might, no one could find a dye sufficiently colorfast: the orange stripe would either fade to yellow or deepen to red. By the 1660s the Dutch gave up and began using red instead.4

  Perhaps the best, if most short-lived, instance of the Netherlanders’ affinity with this fiery hue occurred on July 20, 1673. On that day Dutch soldiers captured the city of New York, marching up Broadway to take it back from the British.5 In triumph they immediately rechristened the city New Orange, a name it bore for less than 12 months. The Dutch, who were fighting several wars simultaneously, had neither the cash nor the stomach to begin another one on yet another front. In 1674 a treaty was signed ceding the city—and its name—to the British. (The New York flag, unlike that of the Netherlands, still bears an orange stripe, betraying its Dutch origins.)

  The legacy of William I may not have given the Dutch a permanent foothold in the New World, but it has given them the gift of visibility. At sporting events, they are unmistakable: a heaving block of joyous orange. And each April they gather like a flock of exotic birds to celebrate Koningsdag (King’s Day), many dressed from head to heels in luminous tangerine, and singing Oranje boven! Orange boven! (“Orange on top! Orange on top!”) at the top of their lungs.

  Saffron

  Imagine a field in the predawn blue haze of an autumn morning. The field is small, and probably in Iran, although it could also be in Spain, Macedonia, Kashmir, France, or Morocco. As the sun rises it shows that the field, which had been bare earth the night before, is carpeted with small violet blooms: thousands of Crocus sativus. At the center of each, lasciviously prominent against the purple of the petals, are three crimson stigmas, part of the flower’s female sex organs, better known (once removed and dried) as the spice saffron. Before becoming saffron, however, the crocuses need to be harvested, and there isn’t much time: by the heat of the day the blooms will have begun to wilt; by the evening they will have withered completely.

  No one knows quite when or where C. sativus was first cultivated—the flowers are actually sterile and so can’t grow in the wild—but there are a few tantalizing hints. Some cave paintings in Iraq made 50,000 years ago were found to contain traces of saffron. The ancient Greeks used it to dye their clothes, and we know it was traded across the Red Sea, from Egypt to southern Arabia, during the first century A.D.1 It was being grown in Spain from at least A.D. 9612 and was even grown in England for centuries. Tradition has it that a pilgrim returned from the Levant during the reign of Edward III (1312–77) smuggling a single bulb hidden either in the brim of his hat or in a hollow in his staff—the legends differ. This bulb must have been peculiarly fecund, because several British towns soon became saffron-producing powerhouses. The most famous of these changed its name during the sixteenth century to Saffron Walden, in celebration of its star produce. (The town changed its coat of arms too, adopting a rather charming visual pun: three crocuses surrounded by a stout set of walls, or “saffron walled-in.”)3 The plant, though, had a rather stormy relationship with its civic namesake. In 1540 and 1681 demand plummeted and in 1571 the soil became overworked and the crop sickly. Even in the good years—such as the bumper harvest of 1556 when the saffron farmers, or “crokers,” crowed that “God did shite saffron”—C. sativus wasn’t an unalloyed boon. In 1575 a royal decree stipulated that the crokers could no longer throw discarded flowers in the river, on pain of two days and nights in the stocks.4

  Saffron is, measure for measure, the most expensive spice in the world. In 2013 one ounce of saffron cost $364, while the same quantity of vanilla cost $8 and cardamom a paltry $3.75.5 This is partly because the flowers are so demanding: according to one sixteenth-century account, C. sativus prefers “warme nights, sweete dewes, fat grounde, and misty mornings.” As well as the brief flowering of the individual b
looms, the entire crop comes and goes in a fortnight.6 The blooms need to be picked and the stigmas removed entirely by hand; all attempts to mechanize the process have failed, as the flowers are too delicate. It takes between 31,800 and 45,500 flowers to produce one pound of the spice.7 For those prepared to bear with saffron’s peccadilloes, however, the rewards are great. It has been used as an aphrodisiac and a cure for everything from toothache to plague. In food it lends a beautiful color, and is also prized for its aroma and flavor, which is unlike anything else: simultaneously sweet, bitter, and pungent, with a wisp of a taste that at one moment might be reminiscent of hay, and the next something rather more bosky, like mushroom.

  At the noon of his power, wealth, and influence, Cardinal Wolsey scattered rushes impregnated with the spice on the floor of his rooms at Hampton Court to scent the air.8 Cleopatra, who has over the centuries been accused of any number of extravagant follies, was said to bathe in it. It was so costly that there have been many reports of forgery and other crimes. In 1374 the hijacking of 800 pounds of saffron en route to Basel resulted in the 14-month Saffron War. While in Nuremberg in 1444 a man called Jobst Finderlers was burned alive for the crime of adulterating his saffron with marigold.9

  As a color, teetering between yellow and orange, saffron is similarly in demand. Its most famous use is for Buddhist robes. Buddha himself stipulated that the robes could only be dyed using vegetable dye, but of course saffron itself was much too expensive, and either turmeric or jackfruit are used as a substitute (although now many are dyed synthetically).10 When used as a dye, the spice imparts an intense color to clothes (although it is not particularly colorfast) and hair—Alexander the Great reputedly used it to make his locks look like gold.11 Zoroastrian priests used saffron to make a sunny ink, with which they wrote special prayers to ward off evil. Later it was used by monastic book illuminators as a cheaper (and presumably unconvincing) alternative to gold. According to one early seventeenth-century recipe, it was made into a pigment by being mixed with glair, an egg-white concoction, and left for a day and a half.12

  The color saffron is also present in the national flag of India. Today it is said to stand for “courage, sacrifice, and the spirit of renunciation.” When the flag was adopted in 1947, however, the meaning was a little different. As Dr. S. Radhakrishnan explained at the time, “the saffron color denotes renunciation or disinterestedness. Our leaders must be indifferent to material gains and dedicate themselves to their work.”13 Sadly for the idealists of 1947, corruption scandals continue to plague India. Perhaps, though, that is not entirely surprising: saffron has seldom brought out the best in people.

  Amber

  In June 1941 Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union had been grimly making peace for two years. War, though, was coming. Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion, began on June 22, when around 3 million German soldiers poured into Soviet territory.1 As ever, the invading army was keen to seize valuable treasures as it went. One of the things that the Nazis were keenest to find was holed up in the palace at Tsarskoye Selo, the Russians having plastered over it with thin wallpaper in a desperate attempt to prevent it from being looted. This was the Amber Room, also known as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”

  The room was, properly speaking, a series of intricately carved panels and mosaics made of glowing honeyed amber, studded with semiprecious stones and backed by gold leaf. It had been designed by a German, the seventeenth-century baroque sculptor Andreas Schlüter, and made in 1701 by a Danish craftsman, Gottfried Wolfram. In 1716 Frederick I of Prussia gave the room to Peter the Great in celebration of the alliance between Prussia and Russia against Sweden. The panels—carefully packed into 18 large boxes—were promptly shipped from Frederick I’s seat at the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin to St. Petersburg. They were moved again 40 years later, just a few miles south to Tsarskoye Selo, where they were reconfigured and expanded to fit a new, larger space. The panels—now measuring over 180 square feet, weighing around 6 tons, and costing, it has been estimated, $142 million in today’s money—became the pride of Russia’s royalty. Czarina Elizabeth used the Amber Room as a meditation space; Catherine the Great entertained guests there; Alexander II used it as a backdrop for his trophies.2 In 1941, however, wallpaper proved insufficient cover for such a famous treasure, and the Amber Room was packed up in a bare 36 hours and shipped to Königsberg.

  One of the few organic gemstones, true amber is extremely old. It is made of fossilized tree resin that once oozed from species of cedar and other conifers long since extinct.3 (Young amber, not yet fully fossilized, is known as copal.) For many, amber conjures up the scene from the film Jurassic Park, where a scientist extracts DNA from an insect that has been trapped and preserved in a sticky drop of resin. Insect occlusions in amber aren’t all that rare, probably because amber is a wonderful natural preservative. (The ancient Egyptians, noticing this quality, used it in their embalming rituals.) In 2012 researchers discovered a spider entombed in the act of attacking its prey, a miniature dramatic tableau that has remained frozen at the moment of crisis for 100 million years. Earlier the same year scientists photographed the oldest parasitic mite ever discovered, trapped in an amber droplet from northern Italy 230 million years ago.4

  Amber is most commonly found around the Baltic, where vast forests of conifers once grew; it still washes up on beaches there after storms. Elsewhere, though, amber is rare and consequently treasured. It can be set on fire and used to scent the air with an aroma like burning pinewood. And its clarity and colors—most often palest honey to smoldering ember, but occasionally black, red, or even blue—have made it valuable for jewelry and decoration.

  The Etruscans and Romans loved it, despite the belief of one Roman historian that amber, which he called lyncurius, was made from dried lynx urine. Pieces of amber, intricately carved to resemble the heads of rams, monkeys, or bees, have been found at many ancient burial sites. A dark hunk that was sculpted in the first century A.D. to resemble the head of Medusa is now part of the J. Paul Getty Collection.5 The Greeks called the gemstone elektron, associating it with light from the sun. (This is the origin of the English words electric and electron.) In a famous myth, Phaeton, the bastard son of Helios, god of the sun, borrows the chariot his father uses to pull the sun across the sky and, desperate to prove himself, sets off to do his father’s duty for a single day. Phaeton—young, vain, rash, and ambitious—fatally lacks his father’s strength and horsemanship. The horses sense his weakness and begin to plunge closer and closer to the earth, scorching it, laying waste to fertile land. Seeing the plumes of black smoke, Zeus strikes down Phaeton with a thunderbolt, and Helios resumes control. Less well known is the fate of Phaeton’s sisters, the Heliades, whose grief over the death of their brother is so fierce that they are turned into poplar trees, their cascading tears transfigured into droplets of golden amber.6

  Some believe that amber, like opal, brings bad luck, and the ultimate fate of the Amber Room remains fittingly murky. The trail goes cold in 1943, when panels were still installed in Königsberg; a year later, the city was bombed by Allied troops and the museum where the room had been held was decimated. Some believe that the panels were moved before the bombing. Optimists argue the room is still hidden somewhere in the city. In a book published in 2004 Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark claimed that it was the Red Army itself that wrecked the treasured Russian artwork, either through ill-discipline or ignorance, and that the Soviets hushed the matter up out of shame. In the late 1970s the Russians began working on a reconstruction; 25 years and $11 million later, the replica can now be seen at the restored Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg, freezing history in place.

  Ginger

  The Zingiberaceae plant family is an industrious one. Among its members are Curcuma longa (turmeric), Elettaria cardamomum (cardamom), and Zingiber officinale, a perennial with long narrow leaves, yellow flowers, and, hidden from view beneath the soil, a pale dun rhizome known, simply, as g
inger. Originating in the tropical forests of south Asia, ginger was among the first spices traded to the West (from around the first century A.D.), and our appetite for it has yet to wane. It is used to enliven all manner of foods from stir-fries to sticky loaves of gingerbread. To taste, it is hot and pungent, insistent and exotic. And, somewhere along the way, it was these qualities that led to its association with a particular group of people: redheads.

  Like blondes, redheads are in the minority (which probably explains the string of evocative if unflattering names that have been bestowed on them: carrot-top, copperknob, piss-brindle, ginger, and red). They make up less than 2 percent of the global population, although there are a few more—around 6 percent—in northern and western Europe, and up to 13 percent of the population of Scotland have red hair.1 Those with red hair are stereotyped as fiery and intense—just like the ginger root. Jacky Colliss Harvey, the author of Red, and a redhead herself, remembers being told by her grandmother that God gave women red hair for the same reason he gave wasps stripes.

  This myth certainly seems to have found expression in some famous British royals. Dio Cassius described Boudicca, the ruler who for a short time terrorized the Roman invaders, as having a flowing mass of red hair. (Although, as he was writing nearly a hundred years after her death, he may have been saying this purely to make her sound even more fearsome and exotic to his dark-haired Greek and Roman readers.)