Color: A Natural History of the Palette (2 page)

PREFACE

The Beginning of the Rainbow

“An image reflected in a mirror, a rainbow
in the sky, and a painted scene

Make their impressions upon the mind, but in
essence are other than what they seem

Look deeply at the world, and see an illusion,
a magician’s dream.”

THE SEVENTH DALAI LAMA: “
Song of the
Immaculate Path”
¹

It was a sunny afternoon that still sparkled after earlier rain when I first entered Chartres cathedral. I don’t remember the architecture, I don’t even have a fixed idea of the space I was in that day, but what I do remember is the sense of blue and red lights dancing on white stones. And I remember my father taking me by the hand and telling me that the stained glass had been created nearly eight hundred years ago, “and today we don’t know how to make that blue.” I was eight years old, and his words knocked my explanation of the world into a tailspin. Up until then I had always believed that the world was getting better and better and more and more clever. But that day my tender theory about the Evolution of History fell on its head, and it has—for better or for worse—never been quite right ever since. And sometime around about then I decided in my small but very determined heart that I would find out “about the colors.” One day.

But then I forgot. I didn’t follow a path that led me into glassmaking or even technically into art—my school did not offer the kind of creative environment where children without drawing skills were encouraged. Instead I discovered social anthropology, which was followed by a short spell in the business world, and then by newspaper journalism. But the news journalism became arts journalism, and every time I heard anecdotes about colors—an archaeologist explaining how the Chinese used to depend on Persia for the blue on their famous Ming porcelain; the astonishing discovery that English artists once smeared dead humans onto their canvases; artists in Hanoi talking about how their work had changed not just because they had new things to say as Vietnam opened up, but very simply because they had better and brighter paints—those childhood memories stirred.

Then, one day, I arrived in Melbourne to cover the city’s arts festival for the
South China Morning Post
. I spent a spare hour between shows in a university bookshop. Casually picking up a heavy art book, I opened it at random and read these words: “INDIAN YELLOW: an obsolete lake of euxanthic acid made in India by heating the urine of cows fed on mango leaves.” And then these: “EMERALD GREEN: the most brilliant of greens, now universally rejected because it is a dangerous poison . . . Sold as an insecticide.” Art history is so often about looking at the people who made the art; but I realized at that moment there were also stories to be told about the people who made the things that made the art.

My heart started beating, and I had a bizarre sensation that was rather like being in love. This was an annoying feeling to have in a bookshop so I tested myself. Even the (arguably) more boring “DUTCH PINK: a fugitive yellow lake made from buckthorn” made me swoon with its paradox. I was smitten, so I did what any reluctant lover might do when they don’t know what is good for them. I turned my back on it, took no note of its name or how to get hold of it . . . and then dreamed about it for months. Arriving back in Melbourne a year or so later on an Australian government arts fellowship, the first thing I did was return to the shop. By then the book—Ralph Mayer’s classic
The Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques
—was reduced in price because too many people had thumbed through it. I took this as a good sign, and I bought it.

In those twelve months I realized I had—almost subconsciously—been looking for a book that would answer my questions about paints and dyes: What does a cochineal beetle look like? Where on the map of Afghanistan can I find the ultramarine mines? Why is the sky blue?—and I could not find one anywhere. So I decided to write it myself. Since then a number of books about color have been published—Simon Garfield’s
Mauve
, Robert Chenciner’s
Madder Red
, François Delamare and Bernard Guineau’s
Colour
and most recently Philip Ball’s
Bright Earth
— and I have found some excellent sources in libraries, especially John Gage’s
Colour and Culture
and Jenny Balfour-Paul’s
Indigo
, but there are many more. I am glad I did not find them earlier or I would not have dared suggest my own book, and I would have missed some wonderful encounters and journeys discovering why red paint can really be the color of blood, or how indigo workers once threatened the foundations of the British Empire, or how an entire nation once made its trade—and got its name—from the color purple.

There is a little theory mixed in with the journeys but this is not the place to find detailed debates on color harmonies or color science. Instead this is a book full of stories and anecdotes, histories and adventures inspired by the human quest for color—mostly in art but sometimes in fashion and interior design, music, porcelain and even, in one example, on pillar boxes. Most of the stories take place before the end of the nineteenth century: not because the twentieth is not interesting, but because so much happened after the 1850s in terms of color—in art, in music, in science, in health, in psychology, in fashion, indeed in every area—that these developments could be, and have been, each the subjects of their own books.

The first challenge in writing about colors is that they don’t really exist. Or rather they do exist, but only because our minds create them as an interpretation of vibrations that are happening around us. Everything in the universe—whether it is classified as “solid” or “liquid” or “gas” or even “vacuum”—is shimmering and vibrating and constantly changing. But our brains don’t find that a very useful way of comprehending the world. So we translate what we experience into concepts like “objects” and “smells” and “sounds” and, of course, “colors,” which are altogether easier for us to understand.

The universe is pulsating with an energy that we call electromagnetic waves. The frequency range of electromagnetic waves is huge—from radio waves, which can sometimes have more than 10 kilometers between them to the tiny cosmic waves, which move in wavelengths of about a billionth of a millimeter—with X rays and ultraviolet and infrared and TV and gamma rays in between. But the average human eye can detect only a very small portion of this vast range—only, in fact, the portion with wavelengths between 0.00038 and 0.00075 millimeters. It seems a small differential, but these are magical numbers for our eyes and minds. We know this section as visible light, and we can distinguish about ten million variations within it. When our eyes see the whole range of visible light together, they read it as “white.” When some of the wavelengths are missing, they see it as “colored.”

So when we see “red,” what we are actually seeing is that portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with a wavelength of about 0.0007 millimeters, in a situation where the other wavelengths are absent. It is our brains (and our language) which inform us it is “red,” and at the same time they often attach cultural labels that tell us it is powerful, or that it is the color of love, or that it is a traffic sign which means we have to stop.

In 1983 the American scientist Kurt Nassau identified fifteen ways in which something can be colored,
²
and the list can (if you’re lucky) begin rather like a silly music-hall song: “Vibrations, excitations, incandescence of the limelight/Transitions and refractions, scattering of the white light . . . .” All very complicated. But, in simple terms, coloring can be divided into two main causes: chemical and physical. Within “chemical” causes of color we can include the vivid greens and yellows on the cover of this book, the delicate or brash hues of flower petals, the blue of lapis lazuli, the color of your skin and mine.

These chemical colors appear because they absorb some of the white light and reflect the rest. So the green glass on the book cover is simply absorbing the red and orange wavelengths from the white light around it, and is rejecting the green—so that is what we “see.” But the big question is why? Why should some substances absorb red light and some absorb blue? And why should others— “white” ones—not absorb very much light at all?

If you are, like me, not a scientist, you’re probably inclined to skip this section, but stay with me because it is quite an astonishing story. What is important to remember about “chemical” coloring is that the light actually does affect the object. When light shines on a leaf, or a daub of paint, or a lump of butter, it actually causes it to rearrange its electrons, in a process called “transition.” There the electrons are, floating quietly in clouds within their atoms, and suddenly a ray of light shines on them. Imagine a soprano singing a high C and shattering a wineglass, because she catches its natural vibration. Something similar happens with the electrons, if a portion of the light happens to catch their natural vibration. It shoots them to another energy level and that relevant bit of light, that glass-shattering “note,” is used up and absorbed. The rest is reflected out, and our brains read it as “color.”

For some reason it is easier to understand this idea of electromagnetic waves actually altering what they touch when you are talking about invisible ones like X rays. It is hard to believe that light—lovely friendly white light—also changes almost every object it hits, and not only the ones that contain chlorophyll which are waiting for the right wavebands of light to make them photosynthesize.

The best way I’ve found of understanding this is to think not so much of something “being” a color but of it “doing” a color. The atoms in a ripe tomato are busy shivering—or dancing or singing; the metaphors can be as joyful as the colors they describe—in such a way that when white light falls on them they absorb most of the blue and yellow light and they reject the red—meaning paradoxically that the “red” tomato is actually one that contains every wavelength except red. A week before, those atoms would have been doing a slightly different dance—absorbing the red light and rejecting the rest, to give the appearance of a green tomato instead.

I saw what I understand to be transitional color only once, on a journey to Thailand to undertake a ten-day fast. I was feeling good (although I had never realized it is possible to smell chocolate ice cream at 20 meters), and on day nine I was walking through a garden when suddenly I stopped in amazement. In front of me was a bougainvillea bush covered in pink flowers. Only they were not pink, they were shimmering—almost as if a heartbeat had been transformed into something visible. I suddenly understood with my eyes and not just my mind how the phenomenon of color is about vibrations and the emission of energy. I must have stood there for five minutes, before I was distracted by a sound. When I looked back the bougainvillea had returned to being flowers, and nature had turned itself the right way round once more: it’s usually easier that way. After I started eating, this never happened again.

There are several “physical” causes of color,
³
but one with which we are all familiar is the rainbow, which forms in the sky when light bounces around raindrops and gets divided—what is called “refracted”—into its separate wavelengths. This explanation was famously discovered in 1666 by a young man sitting in a dark room with two small pyramids, or prisms, made of glass in front of him. In the window shutter he had drilled a small hole, about a centimeter wide, which allowed a thin beam of sunlight to shine into the room. On a day that has become myth, the Cambridge student— whose name was Isaac Newton—held up the prism and saw how it made what he later described as a “colored image of the sun” on the opposite wall. He already knew that this would happen, but his genius lay in placing the second prism upside down so the multicolored light passed through it. And he found that this time the rainbow disappeared and white light was restored. It was the first time a scientist had acknowledged that white light was made up of rays of every color in the spectrum, and when Newton finally published his findings—it took him thirty-eight years
⁴
—it was the first real explanation of how the ray of each color bends at a certain fixed angle while passing through the prism. Red bends least, and violet bends most. And in the same book Newton named five other colors that lie between the two of them. One of his choices was extraordinary, as I would find out in my search for indigo.

The Proof by Experiments.

Exper.3. IN a very dark Chamber at a round hole about one third part of an Inch broad made in the Shut of a Window I placed a Glafs Prifm, whereby the beam of the Sun’s Light which came in at that hole might be refracted upwards toward the oppofite Wall of the Chamber, and there form a coloured Image of the Sun.