Color: A Natural History of the Palette (58 page)

RED

I am indebted to Townsend,
Turner’s Painting Techniques
, for this section on Turner.

Joyce Townsend, Interview.

ibid.

Comanche Language Book
, Comanche Language and Cultural Preservation Committee, 1995.

Alum is also, apparently, an effective natural underarm deodorant.

Ciba Review, 1,430.

Aleppo was Muslim from the seventh century, while Izmir was captured from the Byzantines by Tamerlane in 1402; Castile was under Arab control until 1223.

Originally the term “lake” referred to lac, which is a sticky resin exuded by an Asian insect called
Laccifer lacca
, and from which we get the word “lacquer.” Now it refers to any pigment made from a dye. Dyes like kermes or cochineal are not strong enough on their own to color wood or canvas, so they need to be made into something that can. Early methods of making carmine lake involved dyeing cloth, boiling it in alkaline solution and adding alum. When it dried out, the color would have attached itself to the metal salt and artists could mix the resulting powdery pigments with oils or egg. Lakes are more translucent than many other paints, so are traditionally used as the top layer—because they allow other colors to show through.

On February 15, 1541 the Venetian artist Lorenzo Lotto recorded in his expenses book that he took 6 ounces of kermes, worth 6 ducats an ounce (total 37 lire, 4 solti), from the Bolognese architect Sebastiano Serlio, “on account of certain credit that I have with him.” This was more than thirty times more expensive than employing a nude model for the day (1 lira, 4 solti). Chambers and Pullan,
Venice, A Documentary History
, p. 439.

Rudenko,
Frozen Tombs of Siberia
, p. 62.

Donkin,
Spanish Red: an ethnogeographical study of cochineal and the opuntia cactus
.

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

There is a small plantation called Tlappanocochli—meaning “color” in Mixtec—in the Oaxaca Valley in central Mexico. I visited it one Sunday when it was closed—but from outside it was evident that this was a cottage industry, and nothing like the scale of the operation I had seen in Chile. It was started recently, as a revival.

Anderson,
Correspondence for the Introduction of Cochineal Insects from America
.

Pliny,
The Natural History
, p. 33.

Gettens observed that natural cinnabar was less likely to darken than artificially created “wet-process” vermilion. Gettens and Stout,
Painting Materials: a short encyclopaedia
, p. 172.

It is this reputation for reliability which, according to Michael Skalka at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., may explain a small mystery about one particular cinnabar that is not red but green, and which is made of neither mercury nor sulphur. “Green cinnabar” or “zinnobar” is a synthetic mixture of chrome yellow (which is no longer produced) and Prussian blue, sometimes mixed with white. According to Maximilian Toch, when chrome green was first made, one manufacturer called his product cinnabar green, “intending to convey the idea that [it] was as permanent as cinnabar red or native vermilion. The name has stuck to it in the trade.” Toch did not recommend it, supposing that the color had all the defects of both of its ingredients. Toch,
Materials for Permanent Painting
, p. 110.

Egerton, et al.
Turner, The Fighting Téméraire
.

Field,
Chromatography
.

ORANGE

Stradivari often Latinized his own name to Antonius Stradivarius and labelled his violins accordingly.

The Red Violin
directed by François Girard, 1998.

Claudio Rampini in
The Strad
, March 1995.

Beare,
Antonio Stradivari, The Cremona Exhibition of 1987
.

During the Spanish Inquisition many
marranos
, or forced converts, were put on trial. If they were found guilty of practicing Judaism in secret they were given the option of confessing. Those who did not confess were burned at the stake; those who did confess were strangled first, before being burned.

Smith,
Safflower
.

Poppy seed oil is made from the seeds of
Papaver somniferum
, the opium poppy, but it does not have the same intoxicating properties as the milky sap of the seed pods. Poppy oil production is a byproduct of the pharmaceutical industry. In most countries it is strictly controlled.

Today tragacanth (named from the Greek word for goat’s horn because of its appearance) is used in cosmetics and to give prepared foods like ice cream and pies more body.

Perilla, Chio L’lle Heureuse.

Hackney, Jones and Townsend,
Paint and Purpose
, p. 13.

The original painting is in the Huntington Art Collections in San Marino, California.

Private correspondence, Ian Dejardin, Dulwich Picture Gallery.

In 1217, just two years after the Pope’s announcement that Jews should wear patches, King Henry III of England ordered Jews to wear white linen or parchment badges representing the tablets of the Ten Commandments.

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan
. Japan Society, New York, March 2001.

Gage,
George Field and His Circle
, p. 29.

The French cloth-makers hired some Greeks from Salonica to help them with the recipe. Salonica had been a major center of dyeing and cloth-making since the time of Martinengo: it was a place where Sephardim settled, and established their businesses.

The Death of Nelson
, at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.

The Color Museum in Bradford quotes a worker in the early nineteenth century describing the Turkey Red Dyers: “I always remember the water side from Bonhill Bridge to the Craft Mill. It was a seething mass of humanity. People walking four and five across, to and from work. You could smell the Craft when it closed at night, off the workers walking by.”

It is basically madder with a little lemon juice, mixed with alum and left overnight. Conversation with Harald Boehmer, November 2001.

In the thirteenth century the terrifyingly named Teutonic Knights killed anyone who picked up amber without permission.

Reade,
Cremona Violins
.

G nuine r ceipt for making the famous vernis Martin
. Paris, 1773, held in the British Library.

Information from the Sibelius Museum website.

Both Newton and Field ascribed colors to musical notes (Dreyfuss,
Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols
). But it is not known whether they were synaesthetic. Indeed, the concept of synaesthesia was not known when they were alive.

YELLOW

Field,
Chromatography
, p. 83.

Baer, “Indian Yellow,” pp. 17–21.

Gega Lama,
Principles of Tibetan Art
.

Captain Sherwill,
Statistics of the District of Behar
, 1845. Held in the British Library.

Brian Lisus. Personal correspondence.

George Field did not believe that the mango theory was true: “It has also been ascribed, in like manner, to the buffalo, or Indian cow, after feeding on mangoes; but the latter statement is incorrect. However produced, it appears to be a urio-phosphate of lime, of a beautiful pure yellow colour, and light powdery texture; of greater body and depth than gamboge, but inferior in these respects to gall-stone.” Field, op. cit., p. 83. Winsor & Newton likewise do not subscribe to the theory that this paint was made from urine that had been evaporated and formed into balls. Instead the museum (at Winsor & Newton’s factory in Harrow) describes it as the earth on which cows fed with mangoes or mango leaves have urinated.

Man Luen Choon is at 27–35 Wing Kut Street, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong.

According to Eric Hebborn, Van Dyck used orpiment with enthusiasm but his secret was to apply it on areas that had been underpainted with other yellows. “It is amazing how a whole area of relatively dull yellow such as yellow ochre can be made brilliant with just a well-placed touch or two of brighter yellow.” Hebborn did not, incidentally, know about the easy availability of orpiment in Chinese shops. He recommended not even trying to forge a painting that contains it: “If you really can’t finish your painting without a bright yellow, damage the area where the orpiment should be and then skillfully retouch the damage with the modern chrome yellow and zinc- or flake-white mixture.” Hebborn,
The Art Forger’s Handbook,
p. 98.

The formula for realgar is AsS while orpiment is As
₂
S
₃
. This effectively means that, of the two, realgar contains more arsenic.

By 1758, when Dossie wrote his book
The Handmaid to the Arts
, both orpiment and realgar had been banished completely from artists’ palettes. If they were used at all it was “to color the matted bottoms of chairs, or other such coarse work.”

Rumphius,
The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet
.

Winter, “Gamboge,” p. 144.

van Gulik,
The Chinese Maze Murders
.

I am indebted to saffron consultant Ellen Szita, who has helped with this section.

Herbert,
A History of the Species of Crocus
, p. 21.

Milton,
Nathaniel’s Nutmeg
, p. 20.

Thompson,
The Materials of Medieval Painting
.

These jokes or rebuses were common in coats of arms. The city of Oxford, for example, is represented by a picture of an ox crossing a river.

Emmison,
Elizabethan Life: Home, Work and Land
.

www.uttlesford.gov.uk/saffire/history/history.htm

In a good year the field could produce 5 kilos of saffron, although 2000 had not been good.

Willard,
Secrets of Saffron
, pp. 98–101.

The practice of painting houses with red or yellow continues, although today Zoroastrian priests tend to use red paint or ink rather than saffron.

GREEN

The Chinese term is porcelain; Western terminology tends to call it “stoneware.”

Celadon includes those pieces with green glazes that owe their colors to reduced iron oxide, rather than those owing their colors to oxidized copper, which are much brighter green than true celadon-ware.

A Chinese scholar, Dr. Chen, has suggested that the mythical Chai ware is in fact
mi se
, after Shizong was given this precious imperial ware as a royal gift. In which case the poem would be more important for its mention of the clouds than that of the peeping blue sky.

The earliest greenware was made two thousand years ago, although none of it survives. Then, in the late sixth century, it was reinvented, according to legend, by a civil servant called Ho Chou. He hadn’t wanted to make it for its own sake but had been trying to replicate green glass, the recipe for which had been lost two hundred years before. Within forty years the first Tang emperor was commissioning imperial celadon-makers to create bowls that were “thin in body, translucent and brilliant as white jade.” The rich Tangs loved it, and soon celadon kilns were opening up all over the country, wherever there was enough wood and good clay.

The color of celadon depends partly on the atmosphere in the kiln: reduction leads to greenware like
mi se
, oxidation leads to brown-ware.

Dawn Rooney. Personal correspondence.

Michael Rogers. Personal correspondence.

Bushell,
Oriental Ceramic Art
. Written by an Englishman who had worked for many years as the British legation’s doctor in Peking, and had become fascinated by oriental ceramics.

The chinoiserie style was to last for a further decade or so until the Victorians wanted a change, and decided to revive Gothic, Greek, Pompeian, Egyptian, Byzantine, Baroque and indeed virtually everything
but
East Asian traditions instead.

Thompson,
Napoleon Bonaparte
.

www://
grand-illusions.com/napoleon/napol1.htm

Journal of the Society of Arts
, 1880.

It is likely that this was Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Thudichum, a controversial scientist in Victorian London, who at the time was researching the effect of cholera on the brain.

Michelangelo’s
Manchester Madonna
in the National Gallery shows the underpainting of the flesh in
terre verte
, a practice that seems to have been popularized by Giotto and continued spasmodically until Tiepolo in the eighteenth century. Hebborn,
The Art Forger’s Handbook
, p. 105.