Arsenic, Sheep's Dung, and a Yellow called Pink*

 

From top: Ignaz Schiffermüller's chart of blue color samples, Vienna, 1772.

Moses Harris's Natural System of Colours, London, 1766 

Richard Waller, "A Catalogue of Simple and Mixt Colours with a Specimen of Each Colour Prefixt Its Properties," in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 6 for the years 1686 and 1687  

Tray of jasper trials, ca. 1773-76, Josiah Wedgwood

I'm surprised the Church never outlawed color. Not only because of its sensual enticements and potentially corrupting power but because pigments seem to have been so unnaturally poisonous. There is something almost allegorical going on there. The toxicity of these precious distillations was astonishing: the rich golden yellow called orpiment, and the pure brilliant orange, realgar, prompted early 15th century painter and writer Cennino Cennini to write "Beware...lest you suffer personal injury...look out for yourself." In the 19th century Carl Wilhelm Scheele tinkered with compounds of arsenic and devised what would become an enormously popular green. Unfortunately, Scheele's green and a similar "emerald green" proved potentially poisonous: if exposed to dampness, it decomposed into arsine, a toxic gas. It was said Napoleon may have died in part because of the exhalations of his green wallpaper.

All of the incredible images here are from a stunningly detailed monograph The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe by Sarah Lowengard, online in its entirety through Columbia University Press and Gutenberg-e. Lowengard examines the scientific experimentation which led to color discovery and the subsequent implementation. In the Age of Empiricism optics, physics, chemistry, taxonomy and naming, diagramming all came into play in the creation of color. Taste, of course, was also a motivating factor. Demand for popular colors such as pompadour, Saxon green and nankeen were offered by the dyehouse (textile), pottery and pigment (paint, ink) workshops. Thus there were the different characteristics each color took on in the different media, and each creation's fugitive or stable nature to consider.

Another color text to consult is a lecture given by Phillip Ball, a noted English science writer, author of Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (which I have not yet read), among other books. This is a far broader and briefer work. Ball skips lightly and effortlessly from the earliest color designations to Medieval minium to William Perkin's creation of Mauve from coal tar. Ball cites the science of color and each pigment's chemical properties but raises many philosophical points as well. The progression of Medieval religious art, for instance, was in some ways motivated by the creation of vermilion. The product of yellow sulphur and silvery mercury, the brilliance of this red automatically called for other colors in the palette to follow suit and match intensity. Another fact to consider: the switch to an oil base paint from the quick-drying egg tempera allowed the softer modelling and shadows of Renaissance art. It is quite interesting to think that the extreme cost of, or arduous labor involved in, one pigment versus another, or the xenophobic response to a color's origins (ie "The East") could sway taste, commerce, and art itself.

* In the 17th century, the word pink was used to describe a shade rather than a color and often meant a greenish or yellowish color.

The creation of pigments and dyes proves ceaselessly interesting to me. The ingredient lists, the labor, the outlandish processes are a fascinating window into an age when people had a different conception of time...

Dye process for Turkey red on cotton
John Wilson An Essay on Light and Colours, 1786

1. Boil cotton in lye of Barilla or wood ash.
2. Wash and dry
3. Steep in a liquor of Barilla ash or soda plus sheep's dung and olive oil
4. Rinse, let stand 12 hours, dry
5. Repeat steps 3– 4 three times.
6. Steep in a fresh liquor of Barilla ash or soda plus sheep's dung, olive oil and white argol.
7. Rinse and dry
8. Repeat steps 6–7 three times.
9. Treat with gall nut solution
10. Wash and dry.
11. Repeat steps 9 – 10 once.
12. Treat with a solution of alum, or alum mixed with ashes and Saccharum Saturni (lead acetate).
13. Dry, wash, dry.
14. Madder once or twice with Turkey madder to which a little sheep's blood is added.
15. Wash
16. Boil in a lye made of soda ash or the dung liquor
17. Wash and dry.

a bit of tonic

 

Cup of Tea, 1905

Bonne Fille, 1906

Helen Carte, 1885

 

Les Petites Belges (Young Belgian Women), 1907

La Hollandaise, c. 1906

Mornington Crescent nude, contre jour, 1907

 2 versions of Ennui, c. 1914

 

La Giuseppina, 1903-1904

A painter I've always liked from afar is Walter Sickert. I say from afar because I never sought out a biography or treatise on him, it was simply that each time I came across one of his works I took note. I am always drawn to his colors: smokey, tenebrous, sharp, acidic. In my mental storehouse of aesthetics, mood and color, however, his choices were always relegated to the appealing but problematic section. His subjects lay in the working classes, the music hall stage, the decadent and alien exoticism of Venice, and most notoriously, in the seamy bed-sit flats of Camden Town and the prostitutes who toiled in them. The moods he captured ranged from the cheerfully tawdry to quiet grimness to the palpably brooding. It wasnt his subject choice that I found problematic, it was something about the atmosphere he conjured up—insistently and consistently—in each work. Is it the sense of remove? Is it the voyeurism? Airlessness? A bit of Sickert is tonic, dwell too long in those visual spaces and one feels a creeping discomfort.

Sickert was born in Munich to a Danish father and an English mother, but grew up in England. After a brief career on the stage, he became an assistant to James MacNeill Whistler. After 1890 he went to Paris and studied with Degas. Sickert's return to London in 1905 was followed up with a series of nudes that have become inextricably linked with the Camden Town Murder mystery. These paintings and Sickert's perverse sense of self-promotion (calling, for instance, a very equivocal scene of a weary clothed man and sleeping(?) naked woman alternately "What shall we do for the rent?" and "Camden Town Murder") ultimately led to the preposterous theorizing of author Patricia Cornwall that Sickert was Jack the Ripper.

Recently I read a brief but brilliantly written essay about Sickert by Max Kozloff*. In it is one of the most expertly evocative descriptions of color:

...It would be hard to imagine a more distraught monochrome a more neurasthenic sobriety. Whether in its resiny or vaporous distillation, the paint molds into umber purple, degraded violets, emaciated brownish greens, diseased oranges, prussic, somewhat mildewed blues, the whole occasionally enlivened with little splutters of toned-down white, cream or mustard.

Somehow I find degraded violets incredibly enticing. Perhaps this speaks to my fascination with Farrow and Ball color charts and my longstanding wish to be paid to research and name colors.

* update: I should note that this essay is in an obscure and out of print book, The Grand Eccentrics (From Medieval to Contemporary: the eccentric in painting, sculpture and architecture). Many thanks to Malcolm Enright who pointed me to this fascinating collection of essays. An uneven, and in some ways flawed, book it is never the less a terrific storehouse of some great writing and invaluable facts about some of the most riveting figures in art. The book deserves its own post and I will try to collect my thoughts and write one asap.