Colours have minds of their own. They keep secrets and hide shady pasts. Every colour we encounter in a great work of art, from the ultramarine that Johannes Vermeer wove into the turban of his Girl with a Pearl Earring to the volatile vermillion that inflames the fiery sky of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, brings with it an extraordinary backstory. These histories unlock surprising layers in masterpieces we thought we knew by heart. This fascinating and forgotten language that paintings and sculptures use to speak to us is the subject of my new book, The Art of Colour: The History of Art in 39 Pigments. Colour, we discover, is never what it seems.
Consider, for instance, Prussian Blue, the captivating hue that unexpectedly connects Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa, 1831, with Pablo Picasso’s The Blue Room, 1901. Had it not been for an accident in an alchemist’s lab in Berlin in 1706, such works, and countless others besides by Edgar Degas and Claude Monet, would never have pulsed with such enduring mystery or power.
It all started when a German occultist by the name of Johann Konrad Dippel bungled a recipe for an illicit elixir that he believed could cure all human ailments. Born in Frankenstein’s Castle three decades earlier, Dippel (who, some suspect, inspired Mary Shelley’s Doctor Frankenstein) was about to discard his botched brew of soggy wood ash and bovine blood when the dye-maker with whom he shared his workshop suddenly stopped him.
Fresh out of scarlet dye, the colour-maker grabbed Dippel’s rejected solution, chucked in a few fistfuls of crushed crimson beetles, threw the pot back on the fire, and started stirring. Soon, the two were staring with astonishment at what was bubbling back at them in the cauldron: nothing remotely red at all, but a deep shimmering blue that could rival the resplendence of ultra-expensive ultramarine, which for centuries had been prized as a precious pigment far dearer than gold.
It wasn’t long before artists were reaching for Prussian Blue (so christened after the region of its serendipitous concoction) with both hands, lacing their works with fresh levels of mystery and intrigue. This is the thing about colour: it never forgets. Just as the etymology of a given word can augment our reading of the poems and novels in which that word appears, the origin of a colour shapes the meaning of the masterpieces in which it features.
Invented by Stone Age cave-dwellers and savvy scientists, seedy charlatans and greedy industrialists, the colours that define the works of everyone from Caravaggio to Cornelia Parker, Giotto to Georgia O’Keeffe, vibrate with riveting tales. Although Van Gogh might have sculpted a smidgen of so-called Indian Yellow into the shape of a moon in the corner of The Starry Night, 1889, the sharp pigment still retains an aura of its anguished origin – distilled as it was from the urine of cows fed nothing more than mango leaves. A colour’s making is a colour’s meaning.
What follows is a selection of great works whose deepest meanings are unlocked by exploring the origins and adventures of the colours inside them.
