In 1775 Carl Wilhelm Scheele, a Swedish scientist, was studying the element arsenic when he came across the compound copper arsenite, a green that, though a slightly grubby pea shade, he immediately recognized as having commercial potential in an industry starved for green pigments and dyes.1 It went into production almost immediately and the world fell in love with it. It was used to print fabrics and wallpapers; to color artificial flowers, paper, and dress fabrics; as an artists’ pigment; and even for tinting confectionery. J. M. W. Turner, ever willing to try out the latest innovations, used it in an oil sketch of Guildford in 1805.2 After a trip to Italy in 1845, Charles Dickens returned home seized with a passion to redecorate his whole house in the newly fashionable shade. (He was, luckily, dissuaded by his wife.)3 By 1858 it was estimated that there were around 100 square miles of wallpaper dyed with copper arsenite greens in British homes, hotels, hospitals, and railway waiting rooms. And by 1863 the Times estimated that between 500 and 700 tons of Scheele’s green were being made each year in Britain alone to satisfy the ballooning demand.
However, just as it seemed as if the appetite for greens could not be satiated, disturbing rumors and a string of suspicious deaths began to dull consumers’ hunger. Over 18 months working as an artificial-flower maker, Matilda Scheurer rapidly sickened—her likely symptoms included nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, rashes, and listlessness—and finally died in November 1861 at age 19. In another case, a little girl had died after sucking the green powder from a bunch of artificial grapes.4
As more and more people succumbed after experiencing similar symptoms, doctors and scientists began conducting tests on all green consumables. An article in the British Medical Journal in 1871 noted that green wallpaper could be found in all manner of houses, “from the palace down to the navvy’s hut”; a six-inch-square sample of such a paper was found to contain enough arsenic to poison two adults.5 G. Owen Rees, a doctor at Guy’s Hospital in London, became suspicious after a patient was apparently poisoned by some calico bed curtains. He did further tests in 1877 and found to his horror that “some muslin of a very beautiful pale green” used for dressmaking contained over 60 grains of an arsenic compound in every square yard. “Imagine, Sir,” he wrote to the Times, “what the atmosphere of a ballroom must be where the agitation of skirts consequent on dancing must be constantly discharging arsenical poison.”6
Scheele had known from the beginning that his eponymous pigment was poisonous: he said so in a letter to a friend in 1777, adding that his other principal concern was that someone else might get the credit for his discovery.7 The head of the Zuber & Cie factory in Mulhouse wrote to a professor in 1870 to say that the pigment, “so beautiful and so brilliant,” was now only being supplied in small quantities. “To want to prohibit all trace of arsenic in papers is to go too far,” he continued, “and to hurt business unjustly and needlessly.”8 The public, it seemed, largely agreed, and no laws were ever passed banning its use. If this seems strange, it should be remembered that this was a world where arsenic and its dangers were accepted with more equanimity. Even after a mass poisoning in 1858, when a package of powdered white arsenic was mistaken for powdered sugar and added to a batch of peppermints in Bradford, it took a long time for people to come around to the idea of regulations and warning symbols.9
This more laissez-faire attitude to the poisonous substance was given some accidental backing by researchers at Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics in 2008. In order to finally settle the question of Napoleon’s death, they tested other samples of hair from different stages of his life, and found that the levels of arsenic had remained relatively stable. They were, yes, very high by today’s standards, but not at all unusual for his.10
Terre verte
Reading treatises and manuals by early artists, it is hard not to think that they often faced a Sisyphean struggle to create works of lasting beauty. Pigments were often mercurial, reacting badly with other pigments or changing color over time, like verdigris [here]; they were downright lethal, like orpiment [here] and lead white [here]; or they were ludicrously expensive and difficult to acquire, like ultramarine [here]. It could be assumed, then, that if a pigment were found that was inexpensive, relatively plentiful, completely stable, and in a color where there were very few other options, that this pigment would be in high demand. The case of terre verte shows this is not the case.
Also known as green earth or Verona green, terre verte is a rather mongrel collection of naturally occurring pigmented earths of varying hues and mineral makeups. The green coloring agents are usually glauconite and celadonite, but can also include many other minerals.1 The pigments crop up in great quantities in various locations throughout Europe, most famously Cyprus and Verona, and come in a range of colors, from deep forest, to an almost crocodilian shade, and even a rather beautiful sea mist. The drawback is their low tinting strength, but they are all very permanent and stable, rather transparent, work perfectly in all mediums, give a peculiar, almost buttery texture to oils, and, crucially, were some of the few green pigments readily available. And yet, when artists write about terre verte, their words have the air of a school report about a child who means well but is totally devoid of charm. George Field, in his book Chromatography, published in the mid-nineteenth century, is typical in his indifference:
[I]t is a very durable pigment, being unaffected by strong light and impure air, and combining with other colors without injury. It has not much body, is semi-transparent, and dries well in oil.2
Curiously, prehistoric man seems to have been equally apathetic when it comes to the green earths. In the Lascaux caves in France, where images date back to 15,000 B.C., the pigments that dominate are red and yellow ochers, manganese oxide browns and blacks, and calcite white. At Altamira in Spain, where paintings date from 10,000 B.C., much of the work uses hematite [here]. In fact cave art is dominated by browns, whites, blacks, and reds; the use of blues and greens is almost unheard of. With blue, which is very rare in mineral form, this is not surprising, but the absence of green certainly is: terre verte was widely available and easy to process and use.3 It did get used a lot later on. It can be seen, for instance, in a wonderful naturalistic mural of a tree in Stabiae, a town near Pompeii that was also destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Terre verte really came into its own, however, when artists discovered that it was perfect for shading the pale pinky-red of European skin. In some European manuscripts, where the top layers have faded, the green underlayer shows through, giving the saints an unsuitably demonic air.
Cennino Cennini, an artist pupil of the Tuscan master Giotto, was undoubtedly a pragmatist. He loved art and also enjoyed showing others how they could replicate it themselves. His Il libro dell’arte spent several centuries consigned to oblivion on a dusty Vatican shelf before being rediscovered and republished in the early nineteenth century, and it has remained in print ever since. In this book he explains all manner of processes, from gilding a panel to making glue with the “muzzles, feet, sinews, and . . . skin” of goats (a practice that should only be attempted in March or January).4 Terre verte and its uses occur again and again. Cennini notes enthusiastically that the pigment is good for everything from faces to draperies, and works just as well in fresco as it does in secco (dry). To produce good flesh tones in tempera, for example, he tells his readers to lay two coats, mixed with white lead, “over the face, over the hands, over the feet, and over the nudes.” He recommends using tempera made with the “yolk of a town hen’s egg” for young faces, because their flesh is cooler, while the yolk of a “country or farm” hen is better suited “for tempering flesh colors for aged and swarthy persons.” For the flesh of corpses he suggests omitting the pink that was usually layered over the top: “a dead person has no color.”5 It is difficult to know what it was that made him look more favorably upon this rather unlovable pigment. Perhaps the secret lies in his first encounter with it. When he was a boy, Cennino’s father, Andrea Cennini
, took him to the workings at Colle di Val d’Elsa. “[U]pon reaching a little valley,” he wrote, “a very wild steep place, scraping the steep with a spade, I beheld seas of many kinds of color.”6
Avocado
In February 1969 the beaches of Santa Barbara, California, turned black. Several days earlier, on the morning of January 28, an oil well 6 miles off the coast had ruptured. In all it is estimated that 200,000 gallons of crude oil escaped, and for 11 days it spewed out from the seafloor, coating a 35-mile stretch of California coastline and any marine wildlife in its path. The Santa Barbara spill marked a turning point in the way the world, and particularly the United States, perceived the globe and its fragility.1 The inaugural Earth Day was celebrated on April 22 the following year. (It was founded by Senator Gaylord Nelson, who had seen for himself the damage at Santa Barbara.) Over the next few years, in response to popular protests, legal progress against pollution gained traction in America: the Clean Air, Clean Water, and National Environmental Policy Acts were passed.
Over the next decade the environmental health of the world loomed increasingly large in the public consciousness. A picture of the globe taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17, who were bound for the moon, made the world look, for the first time, vulnerable. The “Blue Marble” photo became one of the most iconic and widely shared images of all time. Artists like Robert Smithson and James Turrell used the land as a raw material, creating works that frankly commented on the earth’s fragility and challenged perceptions of the planet as immutable and inexhaustible.2 It was during this period that the color green became the shorthand for nature. The two had always been linked, of course—the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for “green” was a papyrus stalk—but during the 1970s the link became ubiquitous.3 A small organization called the Don’t Make a Wave Committee changed its name to Greenpeace in 1972. PEOPLE, the forerunner to the British Green Party, was founded in 1973; Germany’s equivalent, Die Grünen, in 1979; and France’s Les Verts were consolidated in the 1980s.
These grand ideas and a burgeoning concern for the natural world were translated into a back-to-nature palette of earthy colors: burnt orange, harvest gold, and, above all, avocado. This shade, which appears so dated now, dominated palettes throughout the 1970s. As shoppers strove to appear sincerely concerned for the welfare of the world, the furthest reaches of consumer goods—clothing, kitchen appliances, baths, even cars—were colonized by this smoky yellow-green tint.
These attempts at environmental redemption through consumption may well seem hopelessly naive, but similar consumer impulses prevail today. And avocado has stealthily been reprising its role since the millennium. Those who doubt this need only check their Instagram feeds. While few advocate for avocado-colored macramé and shag pile, the Persea americana has become the poster fruit (technically it’s a single-seed berry) for a new kind of luxury consumption underpinned by the concept of natural healthfulness. Lovingly slathered on pieces of toast everywhere from Southern California to Slough, it has become the centerpiece of the eat-clean brand of aspirational lifestyle. And as one of the few heart-healthy, “good” fats that nutritionists consistently agree on, avocado imports have skyrocketed. In 2014, four billion avocados were consumed in America, around four times the number eaten a scant 15 years before. In 2011 alone sales were $2.9 billion, an 11 percent increase on the year before. As Mike Brown, a marketing executive for the Mexican Hass Avocado Importers’ Association, told a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in 2012: “The stars have aligned.”4
Celadon
Honoré d’Urfé led a dramatic life. He was imprisoned for his political beliefs, lived much of his life as an exile in Savoy, and married his brother’s beautiful widow in order to keep her fortune in the d’Urfé family. It was perhaps this surfeit of intrigue that led him to write the nostalgic, meandering L’Astrée. Published between 1607 and 1627, the 5,399-page and 60-book pastoral comedy recounts the futile quest of Céladon, a lovelorn shepherd, to win back his lover Astrée after a misunderstanding.1 Despite its prodigious length and unwieldy cast of characters, it was a hit with his contemporaries. It was widely translated, circulated throughout Europe, and spawned a stage play and even a fashion for dressing in sylvan green à la Céladon.2
So firmly linked was Céladon with this particular woodland-fog color that the word celadon was soon used to refer to a kind of similarly hued type of ceramics imported from the East. The Chinese had been making celadon objects for centuries before d’Urfé’s hero sprang into being. Usually grayish green—although the colors can vary enormously, from blues to grays to ochers and even blacks—these ceramics are characterized by the presence of iron in the clay and iron oxide, manganese oxide, and quartz in the glaze.3 Pieces are usually fired at just under 2,100°F degrees, and oxygen levels are dramatically reduced midway through. Many have thin networks of fissures in the glazes, as fine as the network of veins in a leaf, which are produced intentionally to make the surface resemble jade.4 Although the method originated in China, similar ceramics were produced by the Goryeo dynasty on the Korean Peninsula between A.D. 918 and 1392. Even within China, there was a great variance in the style, color, and aesthetic of celadon pieces produced in different regions and eras.5
Song-dynasty celadon has been found as far afield as Japan and Cairo, and there is evidence of a healthy trade in celadon with the Middle East. Turkish rulers, who believed celadon was a natural antidote to poison, amassed a vast collection that can still be seen at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.6 A variant, called mi se or “mysterious color,” was long the most costly and exclusive ceramic made in China, reserved for royal households. Nor was mi se a misnomer: few contemporaries outside the courts had ever seen a single piece, so most could only guess at what it looked like. Xu Yin, a tenth-century poet, described the color as “carving light from the moon to dye the mountain stream,” which certainly sounds like an artful guess.7 The true color of mi se celadon was only rediscovered by archaeologists in the late 1980s, when a precious cache was discovered in a secret chamber underneath a collapsed temple tower. The mysteriously colored celadon China’s rulers had guarded so jealously turned out to be a rather drab olive.8
Although “oriental” books and objets d’art had been dribbling west for centuries, Europeans, at the far end of a series of tortuous trade routes, were too distant from the source to understand celadon’s myriad classifications. Patterns and colors that, to a trained observer, would have communicated purpose, place, and time of origin, meant nothing to seventeenth-century Europeans. For them, the beautiful, sea-mist ceramics that had traveled so far conjured up only the hapless Céladon in his shabby coat of green.
Khaki
Buff
Fallow
Russet
Sepia
Umber
Mummy
Taupe
Brown
The creation of man from clay is a motif that appears across many cultures and religions, from Babylonian to Islamic. As the Bible has it: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”1 It may be symbolic of the rich soil from which we get our food, but we will never show brown our gratitude. After all, it is not only the color of the earth to which we will one day return, but also mud, filth, refuse, and shit.
Brown suffers in part because it is not a hue, but a shade. It is not found in a rainbow or on a simple color wheel; making it requires darkening and graying down yellows, oranges, and some impure reds, or mixing together the three artists’ primaries—red, yellow, and blue. That there is no bright or luminous brown led to its being despised by both medieval artists and modernists. For medieval artists, who disliked mixing on principle and saw the glory of God reflected in the use of pure precious materials like ultramarine [here] and gold [here], brown was inherently corrupt. Centuries later Camille Pissarro boasted that he had expung
ed all the earth pigments from his own palette (although in actual fact they do crop up occasionally).2 Where browns were necessary—inevitably, since the impressionists and many who came after them enjoyed painting landscapes en plein air—they were made using mixtures of the saturated new synthetics.
This was willfulness on the part of the artists, because iron oxides, known as ochers, are some of the most common compounds on the earth’s surface. They were also one of the first pigments used by humankind. The cattle, deer, lions, and handprints found on the walls of prehistoric caves were lent their warm browns and maroons by earth pigments. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans also used ochers. To add to their utility, they were not only plentiful but also found in many different varieties.
Like some blacks, browns have long been used by artists for underdrawings and sketches. Bister, a dark but not particularly colorfast material, usually prepared from the tarry remains of burned beech wood, was popular.3 Other notable examples include the yellowy sienna from Italy and umber [here], which is darker and cooler. A blood-brown earth known as sinopia, after the port it came from, was beloved too. Pedanius Dioscorides, a Greek physician who lived around A.D. 40–90, described it as heavy and dense and the color of liver.4 In July 1944 an Allied bullet grazed the roof of a building beside the leaning tower in Pisa’s famous Piazza dei Miracoli and set it aflame, seriously damaging the Renaissance frescoes within. According to Giuseppe Ramalli, a local lawyer who saw the whole thing, they were left “swollen, dilated, coming off or stained by thick, wide streaks, drawn by the lead dripping down from the molten roof . . . Words fail to convey that ruin.”5 When what remained was ripped off the walls to be repaired, a host of spirited sinopia preparatory drawings were revealed. These can still be seen, in all their fresh and expressive glory, today.
The Secret Lives of Color Page 17
