Color: A Natural History of the Palette (39 page)

The house at Mount Vernon in Virginia is very small for a President of the United States. In fact, in its “original state”—the term used to describe what it looked like when George Washington was enjoying his boyhood there—it was fairly small even for a farmer of the United States. Yet for nine years—between Washington’s election as President in 1789 and John Adams taking up the post in 1797—it was one of the most important buildings in America.

When I visited, on a weekday in springtime, there were so many people trying to squash into it that the line snaked out of the house and along the garden as far as the slave quarters. We were entertained by people in eighteenth-century costume pretending to be friends of the Washingtons and filling us in on the family gossip. After an hour we were able to go into the house—through a side room, which led into the building via a covered walkway. This is not how visitors used to go into Mount Vernon in the old days; there is, in the center of the house, a hallway through which guests used to enter, “greeted by Mrs. Washington herself,” our guide announced grandly. It was also a place where they used to do a quadrille or two after dinner to keep warm in the winter, he continued. We all looked rather doubtfully at the space. The hall is so small they would be hard pressed to fit in a single salsa couple today, and I imagined a party full of very little people in big skirts and hats joggling against each other gamely, exclaiming brightly about how there was plenty of space and wasn’t it amusing.
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In the early 1770s, while the soldier-farmer was still living mostly at home, he spent hours poring over the eighteenth-century equivalent of
Architectural Digest
magazine. It was called
The City and Country Builder’s and Workman’s Treasury of Designs
, published by an opinionated English freemason called Batty Langley in 1756. (Batty is apparently a Christian name, not a description of this man’s more preposterous ideas, although it could have been.) The heavy old volume is still in the Mount Vernon resource library. I read it there, as peacocks strutted outside the window, and I imagined Washington sitting in his white-walled study flicking through its pages, then occasionally spinning round on his chair (he loved having a chair that spun) to look over at the Potomac River, while he daydreamed of having English house designs in his American home.
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His interest in house design should not be underestimated. He was a freemason—one of the earliest in America—and he believed that architectural proportions were set by divine law. An elegant Palladian window, and the careful measurements of his new rooms, were not only about having somewhere nice to feed guests. Instead they were about symbolically constructing God’s will, and being seen to do so.

But then in June 1775 he was called in to be commander-in-chief of the Continental army, fighting for independence against the British. He would see his home only once in the next eight years, and on that occasion it was from a distance, across the Potomac River. He left the estate in charge of his relative, Lund Washington—and there is an interesting series of letters between the two. There was the saga of the joiner who only managed to finish the rough carpentry in the dining room although he had been asked to complete all the finer work as well. And then there were the exploits of “the stucco man” employed to plaster and paint the ceiling of the little dining room, now apparently considered one of the finest examples of colonial decorative art today, but at the time the source of considerable consternation. How hard it was to find good workmen nowadays, Washington complained. Especially in wartime.

He was a disciplinarian in charge of an army of twenty thousand men, and he dealt firmly with subordinates who—as his successor John Adams once said—quarrelled “like cats and dogs.” But in the middle of a battle, or in the days leading up to it at least, his letters reveal he was fussing over housepaints and timber.
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At first I felt uncomfortable with this. Should he not have been doing more important things? But then I thought about how lonely and bored the man must have been. It is nice in a way to think of him sitting in his tent, nostalgic for home and imagining each step of the improvements he could make to his boyhood home to make it fit for the statesman he had become.

Washington returned home on Christmas Eve 1783 to take control of the Campaign of the Large Dining Room. There were more disasters with workmen, but eventually in 1787 the room was ready to be painted. Plantation tradition encouraged the man of the house to decorate the public rooms, while women’s taste was reflected only in the private rooms. Martha Washington preferred yellows and creams, although she was brave about woodwork— which was in greens and blues. But it was George who chose the pistachio color for the large dining room, to complement the gleaming white of his new Batty-inspired Palladian window.

He and his men had routed the English, but he saw no reason not to adopt English taste in his home. So it was neoclassical for the window, and chinoiserie for the walls. He found the bright green was “grateful to the eye” and less likely to fade. He would have been pleased, no doubt, to know that green was once the color that emperors had loved, although he would probably have shaken his head and said that America had left all that old stuff behind. There was a minor hiccup in September 1787, when he wrote to a relative to say that he was “sorry to find that the Green paint which was got to give the dining room another coat should have turned out so bad,” but once that “verdegrease” had been replaced he was thrilled with the result. The views of the garden that the Palladian window was designed to show off looked spectacular against the green: like a double celebration of nature. Washington liked it so much that he immediately painted his small drawing room the same color—although perhaps he would have done well to research his paint better, because with lead white on the finishes it didn’t take long for the verdigris to react chemically, and darken.

Two years later it was in the large dining room, surrounded by a Chinese-inspired green color and by his cheering family and compatriots, that Washington learned he was to be the first President of the United States. And nearly two hundred years later it was the outrageously bright colors of this dining room after they had been restored with authentically hand-ground paints which prompted a radical reassessment of thinking about how people in America decorated their houses in the eighteenth century.
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THE LOST GREENS

Europeans stopped using verdigris in the nineteenth century, but the Persians used it in their paintings until the beginning of the twentieth century. For Muslims, green is often a holy color—the color of the Prophet Muhammad’s cloak—and often when miniature artists wanted to portray a particularly important man they would give him a verdigris halo. Court scenes in Persian miniatures symbolized power, and could be painted in any number of gem-like colors. But the sexier scenes were often set in green bowers. A garden was symbolic of love, and a wilderness represented an environment where normal rules didn’t apply. So of course the greens were particularly popular, setting the scene for the mild erotica that the Persian miniaturists were so good at. The artists had their own special recipes for this color, at least one of which was lost until recently.

At first it had been a casual observation, although an intriguing one. One day, in her laboratory at the Art University in Tehran, conservator Mandana Barkeshli was struck by something curious in a series of sixteenth-century miniature paintings done by Mughal artists in India. She noticed the paper had burn marks wherever a certain shade of green appeared. Yet when the same pistachio shade had been used in Persian paintings there had been no corrosion. “I couldn’t understand it,” she said when I met her at the Islamic Museum in Kuala Lumpur. After all, the Mughal tradition had come directly from Persia just a few years earlier, in 1526, when Babur had conquered northern India, bringing Islamic art, artillery and gardens into the predominantly Hindu subcontinent. So it would make sense if the artists from both places had used the same materials. And yet clearly they had not.

The research was to take three years. First Dr. Barkeshli studied the paper for clues but found nothing. Next she studied ancient texts and learned that verdigris—known as “zangar”—was made with a similar recipe to that used in Europe and China, although sometimes sheep-milk yogurt was used instead. One particularly
Arabian Nights
–like touch, described by Sadiqi Beg Afshar in his seventeenth-century text
Qanoon-al-sovar
, demanded the hanging of “broad swords made of thin copper” over a well, and leaving them for a month. She experimented with various alternatives (although not the sword bit) yet the answer, when she found it, came not from any formal painting treatise, but from a love poem.

In the sixteenth century, the poet Ali Seirafi had written a verse to his beloved, adding a word of advice to others who wanted to make their feelings permanent. “The smiling green pistachio that resembles your beautiful lips whispers tenderly,” he wrote, in words that were probably intended as loving, although I wonder whether the lady would have found them so flattering. “Mix saffron with zangar,” he continued more practically, “and move your pen with it gracefully.” Disturbing lip imagery notwithstanding, for Dr. Barkeshli this was the clue she needed. “I was so happy I cried,” she told me.
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A few months later, visiting the Lahore Museum in Pakistan— which was once under the directorship of Rudyard Kipling’s father, and known by their family as the Wonder House—I saw some Mughal miniatures of hunting scenes. The green fields on which the horsemen and deer were prancing and dying were fringed with brown marks of corrosion. These artists had clearly not read their contemporary love literature carefully enough and had failed to include the crucial ingredient of saffron. Interestingly, Cennino had a very similar recipe. “Take a little verdigris and some saffron; that is, of the three parts let one be saffron,” he advised readers, promising that: “It comes out the most perfect grass-green imaginable.” But he did not seem to know that his yellow herb could also save his green from corroding the parchment, or if he knew, then he did not say.

In the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam I saw a curious example of how an artist has consciously used the corrosive power of green. A color woodcut, printed in 1887 by the innovative Tagohara Kunichika, shows the actor Kukugoro V performing as a ghost. He rises with shocking pallor out of the bodies of two other theatrical characters, and his head is covered with green that has burned into the paper until it is brown and spoiled. The effect was apparently deliberate: the dangerous ectoplasm destroying even the paper on which its image is painted.

A ONE-POT DYE

Celadon travelled from China to Europe, and knowledge of verdigris went originally from Persia to Europe. But probably one of the last times green color technology moved lucratively in that east-west direction was in 1845. That year an official team from France went to China to investigate the potential for new trading items. China had just lost Hong Kong Island to the British a couple of years before, and the French wanted to see whether they could find anything for themselves. They came back with objects, not territory. But among the porcelain and textiles and mineral samples was something less obviously valuable. Just a few pots of green mud. But for a while it seemed that they were going to prove to be the greatest treasure of all: these unpretentious pots promised to revolutionize European dyeing, in the same way that cochineal had revolutionized it three hundred years before. The mud was called Lo Kao, or Chinese Green, and it caused huge excitement because it was the first one-pot natural green dye.

If artists had problems with greens, then the situation for dyers was even worse. Green had never been an easy color for them, and it tended to require them dipping the cloth into two vats—a blue one and a yellow one. Together with the problem of adding mordants and getting the right temperatures and concentrations, all this dipping meant that the chance of getting the same shade twice was fairly low. And when dyers did manage to achieve some kind of consistency it was highly prized. The legends of Robin Hood and his merry men, for example, describe them as wearing “Lincoln Green.” I had always imagined it to be for camouflage, but the truth is they were wearing it to show off. The green cloth was the pride of Lincoln, made of woad (a blue plant) and weld (a yellow one). It was also called “gaudy green,” and it was expensive. Wearing it was a way for the legendary bandit to laugh at his Nottingham rivals and show how he was stealing from the rich to clothe the poor.

We can see another example of the problems of greens in the experience of English designer William Morris. In the 1860s Morris decided to help revive medieval textile arts—and in order to give ordinary people the sense of living in a medieval castle, he created wallpapers that looked like antique tapestries. His papers were mostly blue, with a little red, just like the old tapestries Morris had admired. But if he was trying to be authentic, he had made a mistake. In the Middle Ages, dyers made their yellows from a plant called dyer’s weld, and their greens were made by overdyeing the yellow with blue woad. But weld fades, and after seven hundred years of hanging on castle walls medieval tapestry forests tend to be misty blue where once they were gaudy green. We can only imagine what the original works looked like. But they were probably surprisingly similar to the bright textiles of the nineteenth century that Morris was so passionately deriding as garish.

So for dyers, the apparently fade-resistant Lo Kao was a double boon, and the French traders were sure it was going to make them a fortune. With this Chinese gunge it was now a childishly simple process to make a good green. The recipe went along the lines of: Put mud in pot. Boil. Add cloth to pot. Clean and dry. What was not simple was the process that the suppliers in China had to go through to make the green mud in the first place. It was made from two Chinese varieties of buckthorn trees:
Rhamnus utilis
and
Rhamnus chlorophorus
, the former meaning useful, the latter meaning greenish. Buckthorn was already a familiar plant for European dyers. Common buckthorn, or
Rhamnus cathartica
(“cathartica” because of what it does to your bowels if you dare eat the yellow berries), had for thousands of years been stripped of its leaves to make yellow dyes and paints. Since the seventeenth century its berries had also been boiled (for the length of time described charmingly as a wallom or wallop, meaning a bubble or two
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) with alum to make a watercolor paint. It was called “sap green,” and was considered a bad pigment. Its image was further tarnished by its other name, “bladder green,” which did not, as some may have suggested, describe its yellowy color but referred to the pig’s bladders that artists stored it in to keep it moist.