Color: A Natural History of the Palette (57 page)

Bomford, Kirby, Leighton and Roy,
Impressionism
, pp. 169 and 71.

Julian Bell,
What Is Painting?
, p. 11.

Bahn,
The Cambridge Illustrated History of Prehistoric Art
, p. 144.

ibid., p. 109.

Chauvet, Deschamps and Hillaire,
Chauvet Cave, the Discovery of the World’s Oldest Paintings
, p. 57.

Bahn, op. cit., p. ix.

The Coate family grows about 1.5 million willow stems a year on 85 acres. Half are burned into charcoal, the rest are used for baskets, picnic hampers and (for old times’ sake) a few traditional lobster pots.

For this section on graphite I am indebted to Petroski,
The Pencil
; Dave Bridge, “Wad”; Carvalho,
Forty Centuries of Ink
; and information from the Keswick Pencil Museum.

The den of the graphite thieves was the George Hotel in Keswick. The pub is still there: you can sit by the fire on an old panelled settle marked 1737—as I did, to thaw out—and imagine the smugglers plotting how to get their stolen haul to Flanders while the King’s red-coated soldiers tried to catch them red- (or black-) handed. The George is a good bar for such subversion: it has three exits apart from the front door. One exit passes through a Jacobean doorway into the kitchens, and there are two different doors through which to escape from the stable-yard at the back.

The United States started its own pencil industry in 1821 when Henry David Thoreau’s brother-in-law Charles Dunbar found a graphite deposit in New England. The Germans had a small graphite industry from at least the early eighteenth century—a church register at Stein near Nuremberg mentions a marriage between two “black-lead pencil makers” in 1726—but they did not introduce Conté’s French process until 1816, when a Royal Lead Pencil Manufactory was established in Bavaria.

CIBA Review, 1963 (I).

These fountain-pen inks are made with dark petrochemical dyes— which do not provide a true black. Instead they work by adding “opposite” colors as a disguise. So dark aniline green is matched with a red, and dark aniline purple is matched with a yellow. This gives the appearance of being black, but the trick is revealed when you drop the “black” ink onto wet blotting paper and see it separating into its constituent colors.

The artist was also known as Hsia Kuei; notes for this painting are from the National Palace Museum.

Hebborn,
The Art Forger’s Handbook
, p. 22.

Carvalho, op. cit.

There is another curious ingredient in almost every ink made today, an ingredient which is rarely advertised, but which, like the oxidizing chemicals in registrars’ ink, is also present for legal reasons. Every year a different tracer is put into commercial ink batches. It is a tool for forensic experts to determine when the ink was made. A document dated 1998 would be rather suspicious if the signature was written in ink that was manufactured in 2002.

Edmonds,
The History and Practice of 18th century Dyeing
.

Schama,
Rembrandt’s Eyes
, p. 216.

The most controversial black paint—to our modern thinking, at least—was probably ivory black. It is hard to verify how much of the pigment was actually sourced from elephant tusks and how much from ordinary animal bones.

When social anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay were researching color terminology in different cultures (in a controversial 1969 study that has nevertheless been quoted in almost every work on color ever since), they found that every human society distinguished between light and dark, but that there were some (they named one in Papua New Guinea and one in Australia) who did not appear to have words for any of what we call “colors” at all. They then found a curious consistency. Those languages with just three colors inevitably had black, white and red; the fourth and fifth colors to be added were green and yellow in either order, and the sixth color would always be blue. But not until then, according to their report, would there ever be any linguistic acknowledgment of brown, which was inevitably seventh—even in those agricultural societies where one might imagine the colors of the earth were more significant than those of the sky.

http://
www.tintometer.com/history.htm

Charles Darwin wrote about his interest in seeing cuttlefish at Quasil Island—not only the way they “darted tail first, with the rapidity of an arrow, from one side of the pool to the other, at the same time discolouring the water with a dark chestnut-brown ink,” but also their chameleon-like ability to change their color. In deep water they became brownish purple, he noted, but in the shallows they became yellowish green—or rather “French gray, with numerous minute spots of bright yellow.” Darwin,
Beagle Diary
, p. 31.

Hunt,
Journal of the Society of Arts
, 23 April 1880, pp. 485–99. Maximilian Toch was also rude about Reynolds’s carelessness. “During three years of his career, he painted on an average one portrait every three days. He was just as careless at times in his imitative style as he was in the selection of his pigments, for many of his clients refused to accept the pictures because they did not resemble the sitter.” Toch,
Materials for Permanent Painting
, p. 188.

Cumming,
Art
, p. 228.

Bomford, Kirby, Leighton and Roy, op. cit., p. 33.

Salmon,
The New London Dispensatory
, 1691.

WHITE

Kemp,
Leonardo on Painting
, p. 71.

For information on this painting I consulted Dorment and MacDonald,
James McNeill Whistler
; Bendix,
Diabolical Designs; paintings, interiors and exhibitions of James McNeill Whistler
; Taylor,
James McNeill Whistler
; and Joyce Townsend, senior conservation scientist at Tate Britain.

Merrifield,
Medieval and Renaissance Treatises on the Arts of Painting
, p. cli, and Albus,
The Art of Arts
, p. 294.

Johannes Vermeer:
Young Woman at a Virginal
. Information from Langmuir,
National Gallery Companion Guide
.

The Dutch call this paint
scheel
(scale) white; the English often call it flake white.

Winsor & Newton,
Product Information: Health & Safety Leaflet
, 1996.

The cartoon is reproduced in Angeloglou,
A History of Makeup
.

Downer,
Geisha
, p. 95.

Glaser,
Poison, the history, constitution, uses and abuses of poisonous substances
.

Petit,
The Manufacture and Comparative Merits of White Lead and Zinc White Paints
.

Joyce Townsend. Private correspondence.

The Chinese alchemical writer Ko Hung wrote in A.D. 320 that ignorant people could not believe that red lead and lead white were products of the transformation of lead, just as they could not believe that a mule was born of a donkey and a horse. Fitzhugh, “Red Lead and Minium,” p. 111.

Ironically, according to British colorman George Field lead white is more likely to be affected by sulphur when it is not exposed to light, so cave paintings are particularly vulnerable. Field,
Chromatography
, p. 99.

Both red lead and white lead have changed color in the Dunhuang caves. Gettens describes how red lead will turn chocolate brown in color, especially when exposed to light. Out of doors it may also turn pink or white because of the formation of (white) lead sulphate. Gettens and Stout,
Painting Materials: a short encyclopaedia
, p. 153. Conservators at the British Museum describe how lead white becomes black when it reacts with hydrogen sulphide, an air pollutant. The black can be removed by treating it with a solution of hydrogen peroxide in ether. (
www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/conservation/
cleaning3.htm)

On May 30, 1925 Chinese and Indian police under British command fired on demonstrators in Shanghai: they killed eleven people and the deaths kindled anti-foreigner sentiments all over China. It was, in a way, the Tiananmen Square massacre of its time, although on that occasion it was the British who had given the command to shoot.

Warner,
The Long Old Road in China
.

Gettens also identified carbon black, kaolin, red ochre, red cinnabar, blue azurite, red lead, indigo, green malachite, a kind of safflower and an organic dye that was probably gamboge. Many were not local. “It is only by far-reaching trade intercourse that these substances can be assembled in any one place or even in any one country today,” Gettens wrote with some excitement.

One of the first X-ray images ever made was of a woman called Berthe Roentgen. In 1895 her husband Wilhelm had just discovered the existence of X rays and to celebrate the occasion he took a picture of his wife’s hand. The radiation passed through her skin but was absorbed by the much more dense bones and her wedding ring, which appear as white blocks.

The x-radiograph of
The Death of Actaeon
is reproduced in Januszczak,
Techniques of th World’s Gr at st Painters
, p. 36.

Before the 1920s, paint-makers experimented with a mixture of zinc white and lead white to reduce the toxicity, yet still give good covering power in oil. Between the 1920s (when titanium paint was in commercial production) and the 1970s (when lead white stopped being used on a large scale on buildings) you could find white house paints that included zinc, titanium and lead. Norman Weiss, University of Columbia, New York. Private conversation.

G. K. Chesterton told the story of how he once went out sketching the cliffs of the English Channel. He realized he had used up his most important chalk—the white one. He was just about to return to town, cursing, when he began to laugh, because below him were tons of white chalk. He only had to pull up a bit of grass and cut out what he needed for his art. Hebborn,
The Art Forger’s Handbook
, p. 32.

The other options were whites made of tin and silver. Medieval scribes had used both of these for manuscripts, but they were scarcely worth the metal they were made from—they tended to perform badly in oil, had very little body and blackened in sunlight. Tin and silver whites were rarely used after the printing press arrived in 1456 and were generally abandoned after the seventeenth century.

Winsor & Newton, letter to G. H. Bachhoffner, 1937. Microfiche, New York Public Library.

Kuhn, “Zinc White,” p. 170.

In order to turn the blood-like ore into the snow-like oxide the French developed a system of purifying the ore and then oxidizing it. But in 1854—according to legend—the Americans devised a quicker, cheaper method. One night, the story goes, a nightwatchman called Burrows was walking round the factory of the Passaic Chemical Company in Newark, New Jersey, when he noticed that one of the fire flues was leaking. He was not unduly worried and casually stopped up the hole with an old fire grate. It wasn’t heavy enough for his purpose so he took some bits of ore and coal from the zinc refining company next door, piled it on top, and went back to his patrol. A few hours later he was astonished—and probably horrified—to see white clouds of zinc oxide hovering above the grate. He told the story to his bosses; they investigated and the following year they took out a patent on the American “direct” process, which was so much more efficient than the French method that by 1892 all American zinc paint was being made that way. History does not relate whether Mr. Burrows profited from his discovery. New Jersey certainly did: many of the first paint manufacturers in the United States were located near Newark, which benefited from its proximity to the Franklin Mine—a source of many useful minerals for paint—and to the port of New York.

Scholars are divided on whether the White House was white from the beginning. Paint analysis has not been conclusive. It was certainly white by 1814.

Birren,
Color; a survey in words and pictures, from ancient mysticism to modern science
.

Seale,
The President’s House: A History
.

It was not only white paint which gave Whistler trouble. Gold and black proved to be even worse. When you stand in front of
Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket
today, it is hard to imagine that this scene of fireworks cascading above a misty Battersea Bridge should have caused pyrotechnics to explode in the British art world. But in 1878 the painting inspired John Ruskin—who once commented that the duty of a critic was “to distinguish the artist’s work from the upholsterer’s”—to write a scathing review. “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now,” he wrote. “But I never expected to hear a coxcomb ask 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler took exception and sued, resulting in the notorious “pot of paint” trial.

As Eric Hebborn noted with admiration, masters like Rubens, Velázquez and Rembrandt made their works more luminous by generous use of this heavy white ground. Hebborn, op. cit., p. 94.

Elkins,
What Painting Is
, p. 9.