Color: A Natural History of the Palette Read Online Free PDF Page A

landscapes. Suddenly blues are striped with yellows, and on top of Tanguy’s hat is Mount Fuji, giving him the conical look of a rice farmer, rather than the quizzical look of a French merchant. Both paintings were part of what van Gogh called his “gymnastics” of experimenting with how to put intense colors rather than gray harmonies in his paintings. 13
    Van Gogh’s relationship with the Tanguys was turbulent— Mme. Tanguy frequently complained about the amount of credit the artist was given (blaming one’s spouse for financial precision is a convenient way for a merchant to stay both amiable and solvent), and van Gogh often complained in turn about the insipidness of some of the products. 14 He may have been right: certainly someone was supplying him with fugitive paints, as there are several that have faded. One of the most popular works at Washington’s National Gallery of Art is a van Gogh painting that for years has been titled White Roses . It was only in the late 1990s that it was realized that it contained traces of what was probably madder red, and that the roses had originally been pink. 15 When I visited the gallery shop in early 2001, the postcards labelled the painting simply as Roses but the posters, which were older stock, still bore witness to van Gogh’s choice of a paint that had faded.
    Since the end of the eighteenth century we have seen dozens of new colors arrive on artists’ palettes. The new colors are mostly beyond the scope of this book—but some of the more important were chromium (isolated by Louis Nicolas Vauquelin in 1797 from a rare orange mineral called crocoite), cadmium, which was discovered by accident in 1817 by a German chemist, Dr. Stromeyer, and the “aniline” colors first isolated from coal tar in 1856 by a teenage chemist called William Perkin, who reappears in my quest for purple.
    But alongside the excitement of new discoveries, there has often been a parallel movement to rediscover the colors of the past. Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon is one of England’s most popular tourist destinations. In 2000 it was redecorated—from an arrangement of white walls and what, in retrospect, look from the photographs like 1970s curtains, to an attempt to reproduce in an authentic way what Shakespeare actually grew up with in the sixteenth century. So “painted cloths”—the kind of cheap alternatives to tapestries that a middle-class glove-maker could have afforded—have been made on unbleached linen, with the designs of naked putti and satyrs colored in with ochre reds and yellows, lime white and soot, just as the Stratford “peynter-steyners” and “daubers” would have made them. Meanwhile the “second-best bed” 16 is now covered with curtains and bedspreads in astonishingly bright greens and oranges, as was the fashion of the time. The fabrics are made of a woven material called dornix—a wool-linen blend, dyed with natural plant extracts, which was last made in England in 1630.
    It is a trend for authentication that is being followed by historical houses all over the world—from colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, which has become a center for eighteenth-century paint technology, to a Tudor town house called Plas Mawr in Conwy, North Wales. At Plas Mawr the original wall decorations have been re-created—big-bosomed and near-naked caryatids leering pinkly from above fireplaces—so bright in their authentic organic and mineral colors (and certainly a shock if one had thought the Tudors liked whitewash or subtle effects best) that when I met the paint consultant, Peter Welford, he asked me whether I had my sunglasses with me.
    This move to revisit the ghosts of pigments past, mixed with a sense of loss for what today we have forgotten, is not new at all. The Romans carefully copied the Greek polychrome techniques, the Chinese were always re-creating and adapting the crafts and colors of previous dynasties, while Cennino’s book itself was an