The Secret Lives of Color

by Kassia St. Clair

  Anita Loos, an American scriptwriter born in 1889, wasn’t a fan of blondes either. It was a blonde who had stolen the journalist and intellectual H. L. Mencken from under her nose. Her revenge came in the form of a magazine column, which became a novel in 1925, then a stage show, and finally the film starring Marilyn Monroe in 1953. The plot is simple: eye-catching Lorelei Lee, antiheroine of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, blunders from one millionaire to the next. Although she is no fool when it comes to financial gain—“I can be smart when it’s important,” she says, eyeing up a diamond tiara—she is decidedly birdbrained when it comes to everything else. On board the boat to Europe, she seems uninformed about the birds and the bees: “Most of the sailors seem to have orphans which they get from going on the ocean when the sea is very rough.”5

  Goddesses, fairy-tale heroes and heroines, and models are disproportionately fair-haired. Blonde waitresses have been shown to get bigger tips.6 And for those not lucky enough to have been born with the requisite A (adenine) in place of a G (guanine) in chromosome 12, there is always hair dye.7 As the coiffed lady from Clairol’s 1960s hair advertisements said, “If I have only one life, let me live it as a blonde.”

  Lead-tin yellow

  There are many art world mysteries: the identity of Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring; the whereabouts of Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence [here]; who pulled off the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, to name but a few. One that has attracted little popular attention, and has yet to be completely solved, is the curious case of the yellow that vanished.

  Peter Paul Rubens and Isabella Brant were married in St. Michael’s Abbey in Antwerp on October 3, 1609. Isabella was the daughter of Jan Brant, an important citizen; Rubens had just returned from a fruitful eight-year stay in Italy, honing his skill as an artist. He had a large workshop in Antwerp, and had just been appointed as a court painter. The double portrait Rubens painted of himself and his new wife brims with love and confidence. Isabella wears a dashing straw hat, a large ruff, and a long stomacher embroidered with yellow flowers; Rubens—his right hand clasping his wife’s, his left fingering the hilt of a sword—wears a rich doublet with sleeves of yellow and blue shot silk, and a slightly whimsical pair of grapefruit-colored hose. The pigment Rubens used for all these symbolic golden-yellow touches was lead-tin yellow.1

  He was far from alone in his reliance on this color: it was the key yellow from the fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. It first crops up around 1300, later appearing in Florence in paintings ascribed to Giotto, and then in the works of Titian, Tintoretto, and Rembrandt.2 From around 1750, however, and for no obvious reason, use of the pigment began to peter out, and it doesn’t appear at all in nineteenth- or twentieth-century works. More intriguing still, before 1941 no one even knew that it existed.3

  Part of the reason for this is that the pigment we now call lead-tin yellow wasn’t known by any one name. To Italians, it was usually known as giallorino or giallolino; in northern European sources it was at times known as massicot, at others genuli or plygal.4 Perplexingly, these terms were also sometimes used for other pigments, like Naples yellow [here]. To add to the confusion, another lead-based yellow, lead oxide (PbO), was also known as massicot.5 Another reason it slipped beneath art historians’ radars for so long is that, until the twentieth century, the tests available to restorers and researchers did not allow them to identify all the ingredients in a paint. If they found lead in a yellow paint they assumed it was Naples yellow.

  We owe our knowledge of lead-tin yellow’s existence to Richard Jacobi, a researcher in the Doerner-Institute in Munich. While doing some research in around 1940, he repeatedly found tin in yellow samples from various paintings.6 Intrigued, he began experimenting to see if he could create this mysterious yellow pigment himself. He found that by heating three parts of lead monoxide with one part tin dioxide a yellow began to form.7 If the mixture was heated between 1,202 and 1,292°F the compound produced was more ruddy; between 1,328 and 1,472°F it was more lemony. The end product was a heavy yellow powder, very opaque in oils and stable, unaffected by exposure to light. As an added bonus it was, like lead white [here], both cheap to produce and accelerated the drying of oil paint.8 When Jacobi published his findings in 1941 the art world was dumbfounded. As with all good riddles, however, many questions remain. How and why was the secret of its manufacture lost? Why did artists begin using Naples yellow instead, which even its admirers admitted had many flaws? Answers remain elusive, but that this was the yellow of the Old Masters is beyond doubt.

  Indian yellow

  For all its sunny brightness, Indian yellow has an obscure history. Although many Indian painters, particularly from the Rajasthani and Pahari traditions, used this pigment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, no one is quite sure where it came from or why its use died out.1 For Westerners, this pigment, like gamboge [here], which it closely resembled, was a product of trade and empire.2 It began making its way to Europe from the East in the late 1700s, in the form of powdery balls of a rotten mustard color, with yolk-bright centers and a distinctive telltale reek of ammonia. So strong was its scent that recipients—colormen like George Field and Messrs. Winsor and Newton—would have been able to guess the contents of the packages the moment they began unwrapping them.

  While the French colorman Jean François Léonor Mérimée admitted that the odor was very much like that of urine, he stopped short of making a definitive connection.3 Others were less delicate. The New Pocket Cyclopædia of 1813 ventured that it “[is] said to be an animal secretion.”4 An acquaintance of the English artist Roger Dewhurst told him in the 1780s that Indian yellow was possibly made from animals’ piss and strongly advised that the pigment be diligently washed before use.5 George Field was less circumspect: “[It] is produced from the urine of the camel.” But even he wasn’t completely sure: “It has also been ascribed, in like manner, to the buffalo, or Indian cow.”6 In the 1880s Sir Joseph Hooker, the great peppery Victorian explorer and botanist, decided he needed a more definite answer to the riddle of Indian yellow and its peculiar smell. Busily engaged as he was in his role as director of Kew Gardens, Hooker decided to make inquiries.

  On January 31, 1883, he dispatched a letter to the India Office. Nine and a half months later, by which time Hooker had no doubt forgotten all about the obscure pigment, he received a reply.7 Half a world away Trailokyanath Mukharji, a 36-year-old civil servant, had seen Hooker’s letter and taken decisive action. “Indian yellow” or piuri, Mr. Mukharji informed Hooker, was used in India to paint walls, houses, and railings and, very occasionally, to dye clothes (although the smell prevented this latter use from catching on).8 He tracked the mysterious yellow balls to what he said was their sole point of origin: Mirzapur, a tiny suburb of Monghyr, a town in Bengal. There, a small group of gwalas (milkmen) tended a herd of ill-nourished cows they fed only on mango leaves and water. On this diet the cows produced extraordinarily luminous yellow urine—about three quarts per day per cow—which the gwalas collected in small earthen pots. Each night they boiled this down, strained it, and rolled the sediment into balls that were gently toasted over a fire and then left to dry out in the sun.9

  Hooker forwarded Mr. Mukharji’s letter to the Royal Society of Arts, who published it in their journal the very same month—but the mystery refused to remain solved. Shortly afterward, the pigment vanished altogether, and, while it was believed that the practice had been outlawed, no record of such laws could be found. Stranger still, contemporary surveys of the region by British officials, detailed enough to note the number of adult cows and the havoc wreaked by syphilis in the nearby town of Shaikpoora, made no mention of these valuable cows or the yellow balls made from the contents of their bladders.10 Victoria Finlay, a British writer, decided to retrace Mr. Mukharji’s footsteps in 2002 only to draw another blank. None of Mirzapur’s modern denizens—including the local gwalas—had the slightest clue what piuri was.
Perhaps, Finlay mused, Mukharji had been a nationalist, wanting to gently poke fun at the gullible Brits.11

  This seems unlikely. Mr. Mukharji worked for the Department of Revenue and Agriculture, which, despite its stuffy name, was comparatively progressive in relying on and promoting local Indian professionals. A few months before writing his letter to Hooker he had produced the catalog for the 1883 Amsterdam Exhibition, and he was to do the same for the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition and another held two years later in Glasgow.12 He also became the assistant curator in the Art and Economics section of London’s Indian Museum and, in 1887, donated a collection of nearly one thousand different minerals and botanical samples to the National Museum of Victoria in Australia. He even presented a copy of his book, A Visit to Europe, to Queen Victoria in 1889—hardly the actions of a hardened nationalist. It may be that even as he wrote up his account of the poor cows and the brilliant yellow pigment made from their urine, he had an inkling that he might not be believed. Perhaps this is why he sent his report off to Sir Joseph with some corroborating evidence: some balls of pigment he had bought from the gwalas, an earthen pot, some mango leaves, and a sample of the urine itself, all of which arrived on November 22, 1883. While the urine, pot, and leaves have vanished, the pigment, still faintly malodorous, remains in Kew’s archive to this day.

  Acid yellow

  In 2015 the Oxford English Dictionary announced that its word of the year was not, in fact, a word, but an emoji: “face with tears of joy.” The same year Unicode, an organization that ensures texts (and emojis) are represented consistently across different platforms, announced that people had been using many of these little yellow faces incorrectly for years. The one with a double jet of steam coming out of its nose, for example, commonly used to express fury, was intended to appear triumphant. And Unicode 1F633 (“Flushed Face”) was used differently depending on the system: Apple users used it to signal alarm, while the Microsoft version looked “happy go lucky, but with sheepish eyes.”1

  One that seemingly needed no clarification, though, was the original smiley. The origins of the crude design—a perfect bright yellow circle outlined with black, two small lines for eyes, and a semicircular mouth—are contested. A crude smiley appeared in an American television program in 1963; two brothers based in Philadelphia printed a similar design on badges, some 50 million of which had been sold by 1972. But during the political upheavals of the 1970s, the childlike smiley was co-opted as a symbol of subversion. By 1988 it was a pop-culture phenomenon, inextricably linked with music and the new club scene. A yellow smiley was used on the UK cover for the Talking Heads’ song “Psycho Killer,” on “Beat Dis” by Bomb the Bass, on an iconic flyer for London’s Shroom club, and later—with crosses for eyes and a squirming mouth—as an informal logo for the band Nirvana.2 A blood-spattered version was also the primary visual motif of Watchmen, the 1985 dystopian graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

  Soon the acid yellow of the smiley seeped out to become the signature color of the dance-happy youth, euphoric one moment, insidious, chemical, and rebellious the next. Rave culture—or rather the drugs that were believed to fuel it—began to cause moral panic. “Acid” could refer both to the subgenre of house music and to LSD, while this bright yellow also evoked the laser light shows of nightclubs.

  Although rave culture has come down from its pre-millennial high, its informal mascot, the seemingly benign acid yellow smiley face, beams on. For a new generation it signals something very different. It is believed that the first emoticon smiley appeared in a bone-dry email about humor from Scott E. Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon, sent in 1982: “I propose . . . the following character sequence for joke markers :-).”3 From such inauspicious beginnings the emoticon smiley has become intrinsic to modern communication, its subversive traces, for the moment, forgotten.

  Naples yellow

  Sometime in the early 1970s a collection of 90 small bottles was discovered in an old German pharmacy near Darmstadt. Some were as round and plain as jam jars, others looked like inkwells, and some resembled tiny, stoppered perfume bottles. Each had its own carefully written calligraphy label, but even so it was hard to identify what each contained. The powders, liquids, and resins were labeled with words as unfamiliar and outlandish as “Virid aëris,” “Cudbeard Persia,” and “Gummi gutta.”1 When examined in a laboratory in Amsterdam, it was discovered that this was in fact a cache of pigments from the nineteenth century. One, bearing the cramped legend “Neapelgelb Neopolitanische Gelb Verbidung dis Spießglaz, Bleies,” was Naples yellow.2

  The pigment’s owner did not yet know it, but at the time that it had been stashed, Naples yellow’s days as an essential part of the artist’s palette were numbered. The name properly applies to a synthetic preparation of lead antimonate,3 which is usually pale yellow with just a suggestion of warm red undertones. The earliest use of the term is thought to be in a Latin fresco treatise written between 1693 and 1700 by Andrea Pozzo, an Italian Jesuit brother and baroque painter. He mentions a yellow pigment, “luteolum Napolitanum,” and either the name stuck or it was already in common use. References to giollolino di Napoli appear more frequently from the beginning of the eighteenth century and the term soon made its way into English.4

  Although beloved for its color, and better behaved than chrome yellow [here], Naples yellow was far from being the most stable pigment. George Field approvingly mentioned its “considerable reputation,” opacity, and “pleasing, light, warm, yellow tint,” but was forced to admit that it had major drawbacks. Not only was it “liable to change even to blackness by damp and impure air” if incorrectly glazed; care also needed to be taken to ensure that no iron or steel implements came into contact with it. Field suggested using a spatula of ivory or horn instead.5

  Part of the pigment’s appeal was that, like the bottles discovered in the German pharmacy, no one was quite sure where it came from. Many—including Field, writing in 1835, and Salvador Dalí, writing in 1948—suggested that it was mined from Mount Vesuvius. In fact lead antimonate is one of the oldest synthetic pigments. (The ancient Egyptians manufactured it, a process that required a good deal of skill and specialized knowledge, since the principal ingredients—lead oxide and antimony oxide—also had to be chemically produced.)6 Another, more practical reason for its popularity was that, with the exception of the yellow iron ochers, which even at their best tended to be a little dull and brownish, there were no yellow pigments that were completely reliable until the twentieth century. Naples yellow was one of the best of a bad bunch and, notwithstanding its drawbacks, remained indispensable for many artists. In 1904 the post-impressionist Paul Cézanne, upon seeing a fellow artist’s palette bereft of this pigment, was thunderstruck. “You paint with just these?” he cried. “Where is your Naples yellow?”7

  Chrome yellow

  The baking late summer of 1888 was the happiest of Vincent Van Gogh’s life. He was in the “Yellow House” in Arles in the south of France, eagerly awaiting the arrival of his hero, Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh hoped that together they would found an artists’ commune in Arles and he was, for once, optimistic about the future.1

  He wrote to his brother Theo on Tuesday, August 21, to say that he had received a note from Gauguin to the effect that he was “ready to come to the south as soon as chance permits,” and Van Gogh wanted everything to be perfect. He began working on a series of sunflower paintings, with which he planned to cover his whole studio. He told Theo he was painting them “with the gusto of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse,” and he hoped they would be a symphony of “harsh or broken yellows” and blues, “from the palest Veronese to royal blue, framed with thin lathes painted in orange lead.” The only thing slowing him down, it seemed, was nature itself. He found he could only work in the early morning, “[b]ecause the flowers wilt quickly and it’s a matter of doing the whole thing in one go.”2

  While the avant-garde artists of the day had access
to wonderfully saturated reds and blues, they were lacking an equivalent for the third primary: yellow. Without this, they believed, they would be unable to create balanced compositions, or create sufficiently bright pairings of complementary colors, which impressionist art relied upon for its drama. Chrome yellow arrived none too soon and Van Gogh was one of many to fall hard for it. It owed its genesis to the discovery in 1762 of a scarlet-orange crystal in the Beresof gold mine in deepest Siberia.3 The mineral, called crocoite (from the Greek word for saffron, krokos [here]) by the scientists who discovered it and plomb rouge de Sibérie (Siberian red lead) by the French, wasn’t much use as a pigment—the supply was too irregular and the price too high. However, the French chemist Nicolas Louis Vauquelin began working on crocoite and soon discovered that the orange stone contained a new element.4 It was a metal, which he named chrome or chromium, after another Greek word meaning “color,” because its salts seemed to come in an extraordinary variety of hues. Basic lead chromate, for example, could range from lemon yellow to “a yellowish-red or sometimes a beautiful deep red,” depending on the method used to make it.5 In 1804 Vauquelin suggested that these might make useful pigments; by 1809 they were already on artists’ palettes.

  Sadly for artists and art lovers alike, chrome yellow has a nasty habit of browning as it ages. Research carried out on Van Gogh’s paintings in Amsterdam over the past few years has shown that some of the chrome yellow in the flowers’ petals has darkened significantly, due to the reaction of chrome yellow with other pigments in sunlight.6 Van Gogh’s sunflowers, it seems, are wilting, just as their real-life counterparts did.