The Secret Lives of Color

by Kassia St. Clair

  The artistic period most associated with browns, and which valued them most for their own sake, came after the first flush of the Renaissance. The principal figures in the works of artists like Correggio, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt stand out like bright islands in spaces full of capacious shadow. So much shadow demanded an extraordinary array of brown pigments—some translucent, others opaque; some warm, others cool—to prevent the works from looking featureless and flat. Anthony van Dyck, a Dutch artist active in the first half of the seventeenth century, was so skilled with one pigment—cassel earth, a kind of peat—that it later became known as “Vandyke brown.”6

  In an echo of what happened in art, bright, colorfast dyes for cloth, such as scarlet [here], were difficult and expensive to come by, and therefore remained the preserve of the wealthy and powerful. This left brown for the poor. Fourteenth-century sumptuary laws reserved russet [here]—back then a duller brown-gray shade—for those in the meanest occupations like carters and oxherds. Over time, though, probably in reaction to conspicuous displays of wealth, humbler cloth in humbler colors gained favor. This was helped by both an increased interest among the wealthy in sporting pursuits and soldiers’ uniforms. Buff [here] leather coats, for example, were worn by cavalry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and by the mid-1700s buff breeches were an essential part of the well-dressed European gentleman’s wardrobe.

  Although light tans continued to be a part of military uniform through the nineteenth century, it was usually only as a facing to bolder colors like emerald greens and Prussian blues [here]. These helped comrades find each other in battle, and also served to intimidate the enemy. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, however, the limitation of these uniforms began taking its toll. After a series of humiliating military setbacks in its colonies, the British army slowly became more responsive to innovation.7 One example of this shift was the adoption of khaki [here] and, later, camouflage, which helped fighters disappear into their surroundings. By clothing soldiers in brown, thousands were saved from a premature return to the earth.

  Khaki

  On August 5, 1914, Lord Kitchener became Britain’s secretary of state for war. It must have been a daunting prospect. The day before, Britain had declared war on Germany, a country far larger and better equipped;1 at the time, Britain’s Expeditionary Force consisted of just six infantry divisions and four cavalry brigades. Over the next four years much of the government’s time and energy was expended persuading, cajoling, and finally making millions of British men swap their civvies for khakis in the effort to provide men for the front.

  At the outbreak of the First World War, though, khaki was only a relatively recent recruit itself. It is said that when the two sides encountered each other on the field at the Battle of Mons, some Germans expected their enemy to be wearing red coats and bearskins; they were very taken aback to see the new khaki uniforms, which they thought looked rather like golfing tweeds.2 The word is borrowed from Urdu—khaki means “dusty”—and was used to refer to cloth, usually for military clothing, that was dust-colored. It is thought to have been invented by Sir Harry Lumsden, who raised a Corps of Guides at Peshawar, in what is now Pakistan, in 1846. Wanting to give them a suitable uniform, he bought up yards of white cotton cloth at a bazaar in Lahore and ordered it to be soaked and rubbed with mud from the local river, before being cut into loose tunics and trousers.3 This would, he hoped “make them invisible in a land of dust.”4 It was revolutionary: for the first time in organized military history, an official uniform had been devised that, rather than calling attention to itself, blended into the landscape.

  It soon caught on, helped in large part by the Indian Mutiny of 1857, which broke out during the summer, making the usual kit even more impractical than usual. Dusty brown uniforms—dyed, when muddy riverbeds weren’t to hand, with coffee, teas, soil, and curry powders—spread in fits and starts through the Indian army between 1860 and 1870, and then to the rest of the British army and on to the armed forces of other countries.5 Changes in warfare, military tactics, and technology meant that camouflaged troops had an advantage. For thousands of years prior to this, warriors had decked themselves out in eye-catching styles to intimidate opponents. Bright colors, such as the red cloaks of Roman legions and the emerald-and-silver jackets of the Russian Imperial Guard, could make individuals and forces look larger than they really were, and served as easy identification of friend or foe on smoke-filled battlefields. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, increasingly sophisticated use of planes for reconnaissance, coupled with the invention of the smokeless gun, meant that the risks of being visible seriously outweighed the advantages.6

  By the end of the First World War, four blood- and mud-stained years later, khaki had become synonymous with soldiery. Men who had enlisted, or had been rejected from military service, were given khaki brassards or armbands with small red crowns sewn onto them. And when, in the excitement of the first few months of the war, young working-class women were deemed too aggressively susceptible to the soldiers’ charms, they were accused of “khaki fever.”7 From posters demanding “WHY AREN’T YOU IN KHAKI?,” to music hall songs and uniforms,8 this determinedly inconspicuous color was continuously pressed into service. On November 11, 1918, four years after Lord Kitchener’s first day on the job, the war ended. At 9.30 a.m., 90 minutes before the silence of peace rang out at 11 o’clock, private George Edwin Ellison was shot just outside Mons in Belgium, the Great War’s final khaki-clad victim.

  Buff

  To do something “in the buff,” as everyone knows, is to do it naked, but this idiom has an unlikely origin. The word buff is itself slang: a shortened form of buffalo. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the word was generally used for a kind of buttery tanned ox leather—a thicker and more robust form of the kind now known as chamois.1 While the material was sometimes used to make fashionable and decorative jerkins and doublets, it was most commonly associated with fighting.2 Long heavy coats of buff were part of European soldiers’ standard kit during this era, often worn in place of proper metal armor (although the material was sometimes worn underneath chain mail for added protection and padding).3 Even after fashions and military technology had moved on, the color—by this time also known as buff—remained a staple of men’s wardrobes and military uniforms.

  Its most memorable turn was during the American Revolutionary War in the late eighteenth century when the colonies of North America fought against Britain and King George III for their independence. George Washington, later to become the first president of the United States of America, came to the cause as a veteran of the Seven Years’ War, in which he’d fought for the British in their traditional scarlet. As a savvy politician, he knew a change of political allegiance necessitated a change of colors. When representatives from the fledging United States met at the Second Continental Congress in the summer of 1775, Washington was wearing a new uniform: the buff and blue of the homegrown Fairfax Independent Company of Volunteers. It had the desired effect. John Adams, a Founding Father who later became the second president of the United States, wrote to his wife Abigail that “Coll. Washington appears at Congress in his Uniform, and by his great Experience and Abilities in military Matters, is of much service to Us. Oh that I was a Soldier!”4 Washington was commissioned there and then as the commander in chief of the Continental Army and thereafter, where possible, clothed his soldiers in buff and blue.5 In a letter dated April 22, 1777, Washington wrote to Captain Caleb Gibbs to specify the uniform he desired for his personal guard:

  Provide for four sergeants, four corporals, a drum and fife, and fifty rank and file. If blue and buff can be had I should prefer that uniform, as it is the one I wear myself. If it can not, Mr. Mease and you may fix on any other color, red excepted.6

  From its appointment as one of the colors of the new United States of America, buff graduated to a symbol of liberty. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Whig Party, under the
influence of Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, adopted Washington’s colors to show their support for American independence. Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire and a prominent Foxite, campaigned for the Whigs wearing buff and blue, and chose the combination for the livery of her footmen at Chatsworth. Two centuries later, when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan met John F. Kennedy at a summit in Bermuda in 1961, Macmillan presented Kennedy with a set of silver buttons taken from the Devonshire livery as a token of Britain’s enduring friendship with the United States.7

  Fallow

  Sometime in the tenth century, around 90 handwritten Anglo-Saxon riddles were collected into the back of a book known as the Codex exoniensis. Its origins are murky: we only know for certain that it was owned by Leofric, the first bishop of Exeter, who died in 1072, and who donated the manuscript to his cathedral library.1 It is also a mystery why the riddles—which range from the whimsical to the filthy2—are there at all. They are huddled at the back after pages of serious, Christian content more befitting reading matter for a man of the cloth. While most of the riddles have been solved, with answers ranging from an iceberg to a one-eyed garlic seller, a definitive answer to the fifteenth still proves elusive.3 It begins:

  Hals is min hwit—heafod fealo

  Sidan swa some—swift ic eom on feþe . . .

  beadowæpen bere—me on bæce standað . . .

  [My neck is white, my head is fallow

  And so are my sides. I am swift in my stride . . .

  I bear weapons of battle. On my back there is hair . . . ]4

  Fallow is a faded, caramel-tawny color, the tint of withered leaves or grass, and one of the oldest color names in the English language.5 From the 1300s the word has been applied to farmland resting between seasons of use to replenish the soil—we still speak of fields lying fallow—but it has also been used to describe animals with coats that help them melt into their surroundings. An early debut was in Beowulf, where it’s used to describe horses; Shakespeare mentions a “fallow Greyhound” in The Merry Wives of Windsor. The best example, however, is the coquettishly white-rumped, dapple-bodied fallow deer, the forebears of which have been common over Europe and the Middle East for millennia. Hunting them was a favorite pastime of the Norman nobility after the conquest of England in 1066, and special parks were created to close the deer off from wolves and Britons alike. So seriously did the hunters take their sport that under William the Conqueror the punishment for killing such deer was equal to that for killing a man—even centuries later, if you were caught poaching one you might find yourself being deported.6

  A deer, however, is not the answer to riddle 15—that would be too easy. This animal, the riddler tells us, walks on her toes on the grass but also burrows, “with both hands and feet . . . through the high hill” to escape the “hateful foe” that means to kill her and her children.7 Guesses as to the mystery creature’s identity have included badger, porcupine, hedgehog, fox, and weasel, with no one animal quite fitting exactly.8 The answer, it seems, may remain hidden forever, while the hunters keep on hunting.

  Russet

  Russet is a reminder that a color lives more in the imagination of a generation than bound into a neat color reference. Say the word now and it might call to mind the ruddy color of leaves in autumn, or the hair of a Pre-Raphaelite muse, but this was not the case even as recently as 1930. In A. Maerz and M. R. Paul’s influential Dictionary of Color it is a more orange- than reddish-brown, and has pronounced ashy gray undertones.1

  Part of the reason for this is that, like scarlet [here], the word russet used to denote a type of cloth rather than a color. While scarlet was luxurious to the touch, beloved by the rich, and so usually dyed bright red, russet cloth was for the poor. In 1363—the thirty-seventh year of the reign of Edward III, King of England—Parliament introduced a new statute to regulate the diets and apparel of English subjects. After dealing summarily with lords, knights, clergymen, and merchants, the gaze of the law passed down to the lowest of the low:

  Carters, Ploughmen, Drivers of the Plough, Oxherds, Cowherds, Shephards . . . and all other Keepers of Beasts, Threshers of Corn, and all Manner of People of the Estate, and all other People, that have not Forty Shillings of Goods . . . shall not take nor wear no Manner of Cloth, but Blanket, and Russet of Twelve-pence.2

  To the medieval mind, the closer a cloth was to the color of the raw materials, the cheaper and meaner it was. Russet, a very coarse woolen cloth, was usually just dipped into weak solutions of first blue woad [here] and then red madder [here] left over from dyeing the clothes of those further up the social scale.3 Because the end result depended on the qualities of the dyes used and the color of the undyed wool, russet cloth could be any color ranging from dun through to brown or gray.4

  The skill and honesty of the dyer were other important factors. Surviving records from Blackwell Market in the City of London, where merchants’ goods were checked over to ensure they were of acceptable quality, show that there was a good deal of defective material going to market. (Kentish russets were, with 25 entries, second only to whites from Gloucester—50 entries—and Wiltshire—41 entries—in their shoddy quality.) On April 13, 1562, William Dowtheman from Tonbridge, and William Watts and Elizabeth Statie, both from Benenden, were all fined for their inferior russets. Watts, apparently, was not a man to learn from his mistakes: he’d been fined for precisely the same reason on November 17 the previous year.5

  Just as the precise color of russet has refused to remain stable, shifting significantly over time, so has its symbolism. From being a byword for the poor, after the violent social changes brought about by the Black Death, russet gradually gained a reputation as betokening honesty, humility, and manliness. In Piers Plowman, William Langland’s fourteenth-century allegorical poem about good and evil, charity “is as gladde of a goune of a graye russet / As of a tunicle of tarse [silk].”6 It was no doubt this double meaning that Oliver Cromwell was using when he wrote to his Civil War associates in the autumn of 1643: “I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else.”7

  Sepia

  If you were to surprise a Sepia officinalis, or common cuttlefish—and finding one would be the first challenge, as their camouflage is superb—it would respond in one of two ways. You might find yourself suddenly enveloped in a dense smokescreen of dark liquid, or confronted with a host of decoy cuttlefish—dark blobs formed out of a mixture of the same ink and mucus. The S. officinalis, meanwhile, would have made a dash for it, leaving you empty-handed.

  Almost all cephalopods—a group that includes octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish—can produce ink. This burnt coffee-brown liquid is made up almost entirely of melanin [here] and has tremendous tinting strength.1 Although now squid ink is most often found lending seafood risotto the glossy black luster of a raven’s wing, sepia (the ink of the cuttlefish) has long been used as a pigment for writers and artists. Recipes and methods for separating cephalopods from their ink abound, but a common procedure involved removing the sac, drying and powdering it, and then boiling the extract with a strong alkali to extract the pigment. Once neutralized, it could then be washed, dried, ground up, and made into cakes to be sold.2

  The Roman writers Cicero and Persius both mention, and probably used, sepia as ink, and it is likely the poet Marcus Valerius Martialis did too.3 Martial was born in the city of Bilbilis, around 150 miles northeast of where Madrid now stands, sometime between A.D. 38 and a.d. 41.4 His epigrams skewer the pretensions of his fellow city dwellers in Rome, and satirize stingy patrons and fellow poets. (“‘Write shorter epigrams’ is your advice. / Yet you write nothing, Velox. How concise!,” is one such witticism.5) Martial’s bravado, though, must have been, at least in part, a ruse to conceal all the usual writer’s insecurities. Once, when sending out his latest collection—probably written in sepia ink—he included a sponge in the package,
so that his words could be wiped away if they did not please the recipient.6 Leonardo da Vinci was fond of using the warm-toned sepia in his sketches, many of which still survive. The colorist George Field described it in 1835 as “a powerful dusky brown color, of a fine texture” and recommended its use as a watercolor.7

  Today, although artists still value sepia ink for its foxy red undertones, the word is more likely to be used in the context of photography. Originally images were chemically toned to replace the silver in the silver-based prints with a more stable compound, making them longer lasting and a symphony of warm ochers. Now, of course, technology has rendered this unnecessary, but the tones have taken on the mantle of romance and nostalgia. Digital photography tools mean that, with just a few clicks of a button, photographers can disguise their new, fresh images, making them look a century old.