The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  65 Hyacinthe Rigaud, Louis XIV, 1701, oil on canvas.

  EIGHT

  Black in the Enlightenment

  BY A POIGNANT visual irony, the main goods produced by black slave labour were white luxuries – first sugar, then increasingly cotton. Cotton, white as only cotton can be, was also worn in the hot months both by slave-owners and slaves.

  The contrast of dark and light was to loom large in the slave-trading century and a half, from 1650 to 1800. The dark values of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were retreating as the sombre power of Spain shrank. The power of blackness, which until then had grown steadily through history, waned. The new bright tone was set by the Sun King – Louis XIV – in France (illus. 65). In his portrait by Rigaud, he wears a silver coat with much white linen and lace at the wrist, and a white ermine cape with much lace (and gold) at the neck: but especially we notice that his vast blue train, embroidered with gold fleurs-de-lys, is turned voluminously inside out and shows endless ermine, lifted in a flourish of royal exposure to exhibit – as though they were naked beneath silver trunk-hose – his shapely legs in spotless white hose, in the posture of a dancer about to lead. For Louis liked to dance, both solo to the applause of his court, and in leading the revels as he led the nation.

  This was a new, light monarchy. Louis’ palace of Versailles, built in the 1660s and ’70s, is of cream stone on the outside and white stucco, richly gilded, on the inside; it was filled with light from the many large windows, reflected again by the many large mirrors. The statuary was mainly white marble – though the black statue of a ‘slave’ (wearing a classical shift) may be found in the occasional niche. His courtiers wore, with much lace, colours ranging from strong red to salmon, deep blue to azure, the ladies being largely in white. His soldiers, too, extending his power through the Old and New Worlds, mainly wore white uniforms (and sometimes blue – red was avoided, as the colour of the British).

  We call the style of this period, especially at its high point in the early eighteenth century, ‘rococo’ (probably from ‘rocaille’, rockwork with artificial stones). Its piety can be seen in the voluptuous white-and-gold extravagance of the Wieskirche in Bavaria (of the 1740s and ’50s), where the sensual swerve in the bodies of the carved Church Fathers is repeated in their swooning eyelids, and in the lascivious lips given to St Jerome. Its imperial grandeur is radiant still in the vast Winter Palace of the Tsars in St Petersburg – all white, pale blue and gold, the dream-palace of a society based, if not on slavery, on something little different in the form of Russian serfdom. With its many columns and curling cornices, the style is clearly a light take on Greek temples. As the mood of the century calmed, the plain style of those temples came more to the fore, until it seemed that no mansion or church, no bourse, corn exchange or customs house had a claim to respect if it failed to be fronted by a pediment with columns (or at least pilasters). Domestic interiors were light, with a lacy tracery of white-painted mouldings crossing panels painted white, or light blue, or pale grey-green.

  Pursuing the white theme, one might speak of porcelain (known as china because it originated in China) – the teapots and figurines, the fragile china baskets. Plates were thin to translucency when held to the light, unless painted (lightly) with roses and tulips, or a Chinese threesome crossing a bridge. Simpler white cups were used in coffee-shops, where men talked money as they scanned the new white newspapers, while smoking in slender white clay pipes the tobacco raised in the New World by slavery.

  As to fabrics, large imports of cotton came late in the century, for the principal cloth draping the eighteenth century was linen. When Gibbon summed up the advantages of the civilization in which he lived over the one he was describing – in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – he said that ‘the plenty of glass and linen has diffused more real comforts among the modern nations of Europe than the senators of Rome could derive from all the refinements of pompous or sensual luxury’. The bleaching of linen was refined through the century. Dowries included great chests of the stuff, and the prestige of linen can be heard again in the words of William Cowper’s John Gilpin,

  I am a linen-draper bold,

  As all the world doth know1

  Not that the century was a bridal suite. A beau as well as an officer might wear scarlet, coats in the street might be dark blue, deep russet, bottle-green – or black – and within a musket-shot of palaces and mansions were reeking, gin-sodden slums, thieves’ kitchens, streets deep in horse manure beside the sometimes open sewers. But nor, on the other hand, was the light, bright tone of high life merely a fashionable frivolity. For the eighteenth century believed in light. It has been called the Age of Reason, and Reason was recurringly described as Light. The phrase ‘the light of reason’ had been current in Neoplatonic thought, but its use multiplies widely from the late seventeenth century on. The metaphor of light is alive, not dead, in the names by which this period is known – ‘the Enlightenment’ in England, the siècle des Lumières in France, die Aufklärung in Germany, where klar has the clear-and-bright sense of the English ‘lucid’ (from the Latin lux, ‘light’). We can even hear Light arriving audibly (a little late in the century) in Handel’s oratorio The Creation, first performed in 1798: on the word Licht in ‘es werde Licht!’ (‘and there was Light’), the fading pizzicato of the strings is shattered by the hugely fortissimo C-major chord from every flute, oboe, bassoon, clarinet, trumpet, trombone and kettledrum in the orchestra.

  The same phrase from Genesis is echoed in the epitaph for Sir Isaac Newton penned by Alexander Pope, which closes: ‘God said “Let Newton be” and all was light.’ Newton shed light not only on gravity, which held the universe together, but also on light itself when he used a prism to divide a slender ray of light into a spectrum of the rainbow’s colours. The colour historian Michel Pastoureau sees a connection between Newton’s spectrum and the general brightness of the eighteenth century: ‘The traditional order of colours was overturned . . . there was no longer a place for black’, which now ‘was situated outside of any chromatic system, outside the world of colour’. He calls this change a revolution ‘that had consequences in all areas of social, artistic and intellectual life’. Among the ‘consequences’ he includes the disappearance of black from clothing and furnishing fabrics and from the palettes of painters.2

  There is some overstatement here, for black did not disappear. The new, bright look of society cannot have been caused by Newton since, though he worked on light in the 1660s, his Opticks was not published until 1704, when styles had been brightening for 40 years. One could as easily say that Newton was of his time in being so interested in light and colour. Nor did Newton ever say (as Leonardo da Vinci had) that black was not a colour. On the contrary, if one reads the Opticks, one finds Newton referring to the colour black a good deal, since he used it in his experiments to cut out the ambient light. As he puts it:

  The Sun shining into my darken’d Chamber through a hole . . . I placed at the distance of two or three Feet . . . a Sheet of Pasteboard, which was black’d all over on both sides . . . I made a little hole in the midst of the Paper for that Light to pass through and fall on a black Cloth behind it . . .

  Or again:

  I took a black oblong stiff Paper . . . distinguished into two equal Parts. One of these Parts I painted with a red colour and the other with a blue. The Paper was very black, and the Colours intense and thickly laid on . . .

  Examining the dark places in water-bubbles, he notices that some areas ‘reflect so very little Light as to appear intensely black’.3

  Far from disowning black, Newton is interested in experiments ‘which produce blackness’, for the reason that blackness causes light to disappear, and he wonders how that can be. He speculates that the ‘corpuscles’ of light (we might say ‘photons’) reflected by black objects might be so extraordinarily minute that their own light is trapped within them, where they ‘variously refract it to and fro within themselves so long, until it hap
pen to be stifled and lost, by which means they will appear black in all positions of the eye’.4

  Other scientists were interested in blackness. In the decade when Newton worked especially in dark and blackened rooms – the 1660s – Robert Boyle published his Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours. He too had analysed light and ‘Refracted . . . Prismatical Colours’, but was especially interested in ‘The Nature of Blackness and Black Bodies’ and in the way in which, as he repeatedly puts it, black will ‘Dead the Light’. He had studied reports of a blind man who claimed to be able to tell colours by touch, and who said that touching a black surface was like ‘feeling Needles points’. The blind man was not always right, and Boyle noted that to the ordinary touch a black surface might seem perfectly smooth, but he speculated that if one could look closely enough, one might find

  the Surface of a Black Body to be Asperated by an almost Numberless throng of Little Cylinders, Pyramids, Cones, which by their being Thick Set and Erected, reflect the Beams of Light from one to another Inwards, and send them too and fro so often, that at length they are Lost before they can come to Rebound out again to the Eye.5

  It is interesting that his language should anticipate so particularly the language of Newton in describing how light is ‘lost’ at the subatomic level. And though black bodies may not be as Boyle describes, his description of light-corpuscles bouncing between cavities is not a bad account of the way in which iridescence occurs within the microscopic lattices in the black-to-turquoise feathers on the head of a mallard duck. Boyle, like Newton later, noticed that when light falls on black bodies, the dancing ‘corpuscles’ of light ‘Produce . . . such an Agitation, as (when we feel it) we are wont to call Heat’. He reported the claim of a travelling friend that, in the hot parts of the world, one may roast an egg by painting it black and setting it in the midday sun.6

  Through the following century other scholars and virtuosi studied the effects of prisms, and narrow slits in black cards, within enclosures which they too made black. Their laboratories were a variation on the camera obscura (dark chamber) that artists like Vermeer had used in the seventeenth century, and perhaps were little different from the large camera obscura of Caravaggio’s studio. Scientists working on subjects other than light were interested in the reasons why not-black things turned black: Joseph Priestley, investigating gases, noted that plants deprived of air turned black, as did iron filings and olive oil when confined in bad air. He had medical interests also, and reported the way in which, in certain fevers, the tongue became ‘covered with a thick black pellicule’, while on the teeth of another patient ‘a black fur collected’.7

  It is simply not true – as Michel Pastoureau claims – that black ‘departed the colour order’. Dr Johnson quotes Newton in his Dictionary, defining ‘blackness’: ‘1. Black colour . . . “There would emerge one or more very black spots, and, within these, other spots of an intenser blackness.” Newton.’ He cites the old transitive use of ‘black’ as a verb (as when men ‘blacked’ their boots), and many of his compound words containing ‘black-’ have a colour reference (as in ‘black-pudding’, ‘blackberry’, ‘blacktail’, ‘blackthorn’). The principal exception is ‘blackmail’, which at that date meant to pay protection money – ‘A certain rate of money, corn, cattle . . . paid by men allied with robbers, to be by them protected.’

  Black was still a ‘colour’ for artists. It is true that eighteenth-century art is often luminous with the different bright colours of the spectrum: Fragonard’s girls gambol in a fluff of rose, cream and silver; Hogarth will paint an election dinner with the hard, strong colours of life. But both of these painters had black in their palettes, while in many portraits of the time the sitter stands before a dark-to-black background, often wearing quality black items – as does Gainsborough’s Lady Alston, who wears bands of black velvet at neck and wrists and a shawl of fine black lace, clearly painted by the artist with a fascination for both solid and translucent blacks (illus. 66). Often a painting will be partly ordered by a tonal scale between its brightest and its darkest point. In the Gainsborough there are two scales: a scale of brightness, rising through the blue lustre of her dress, her gold satin and white lace, to the white radiance of her chest; and a scale of blacks, strengthening from the background through the blue-black of her lower skirt, and the see-through darks of her black lace, to the almost-black of her hair, and so to the true jet-black of her velvet, where the paintings’s darkest blacks stand next to its brightest whites. The scales coordinate and contribute to the sense of a distinct but circumspect persona; though still we return to the black points of her eyes, where dark tone turns to vigilance.

  Black, in other words, is active, and not mere shadow, in the palette of Thomas Gainsborough. George Stubbs will paint black horses with a manifest delight in the lustre of their jet coat. To go further afield, Pietro Longhi, in the 1750s, paints the Carnival of Venice in a richly sombre range of whites, browns and solid blacks (illus. 67). His emphasis is not on colour, but on the snow-cold white both of the dresses and of some of the masks, and again on the clearly menacing blacks of mask, hat, cape, mantilla and domino. The round, black masks the women wear, which are smaller than their faces, seem then both surreal and a sly, pert part of the tantalizing game. And again, if one turns from oil paint to the engravings of the time, one finds Piranesi’s massive nightmare-dungeons (also of around 1750) burdened with deeply shadowed arches, gloomy bridges that lead nowhere, and dark looping ropes and hawsers lowering at us in a richness of black printing ink.

  66 Thomas Gainsborough, Gertrude Durnford, the Future Lady Alston, c. 1761, oil on canvas.

  To come to dress: the period had, from the start, a use for smart black as well as white. Although Charles II was a ‘merrie monarch’, raised partly in France, he resolved early in his reign on ‘setting a fashion for clothes which he will never alter’, aiming ‘to teach the nobility thrift’. His ‘fashion’, introduced in 1666, consisted of a long, close black coat, with an extended black waistcoat or ‘vest’ beneath it, pinked with white silk. As Samuel Pepys records, the style was quickly copied, but when Charles saw his courtiers en masse, he found the white pinking made them look like magpies, and thereafter used plain black velvet. This smartly plain black coat, with its simple line of buttons from bottom to top, evolved in time into the modern suit.8

  As portraits, royal and otherwise, show, neither Charles nor most men wore black all the time. But many men, through the eighteenth century, continued to be smart in black, apart from the fact that the clergy, lawyers, doctors and many merchants, and also many who were serious in their Protestantism (Huguenots in France, dissenters in England), continued to go about in black. In David’s portrait of the French aristocrat-scientist Antoine Lavoisier, Lavoisier wears a black coat, black breeches, black hose and black shoes in the smartest style, at once wealthily aristocratic and dedicated to serious inquiry (illus. 68). He also wears a white wig, shows white materials at the neck and cuff, and writes with a white quill on white paper. His wife and co-scientist Marie-Anne Lavoisier has white skin (well-sheltered from the sun), hair (not a wig) that is powdered white, white lace at the neck, and a beautiful, diaphanous gown of white muslin (worn with a sash of pale blue silk). Strong colour attends them, however – in the over-ample tablecloth of sumptuous red velvet on which the scientific instruments stand. Lavoisier named both oxygen and hydrogen, but this did not save him from the guillotine.

  67 Pietro Longhi, The Ridotto in Venice, 1750s, oil on canvas.

  In this portrait white shows strongest, and Lavoisier’s black is like an accent, giving the picture intensity. Black may best be thought of, in the eighteenth century, as a strong – the strongest – accent in a light and coloured world. Whatever colour coats might be, the male figure still was punctuated by black. A black tricorn hat sat on most white wigs; black slippers on the white hose on most male legs. The wig might be tied at the back with black ribbon, or gathered in a black silk bag. Or agai
n, one’s real hair (not a welcome sight) might be gathered in a bag. In Richardson’s Pamela, Pamela complains of a Frenchman she meets, ‘he wears his own frightful hair, tied up in a great black bag’. Both gentleman and lady might have black ‘beauty spots’ on their white-powdered faces – small discs of black silk stuck on with gum. In France they were called mouches, black flies on the face. In the court of Catherine the Great in Russia some ladies had their teeth lacquered black – for beauty (and doubtless for other reasons).9

  Women’s dress, like men’s, might have a black accent, as in the thick black velvet bands worn by Gainsborough’s Lady Alston. For the ladies (and some men) the muff had arrived, and could be of the lustrous black fur of the sable. Women might also wear (from the mid-seventeenth century) a dark or black fur mask. Wenceslaus Hollar’s etching Winter, of 1643, suggests the intrigue, and possibly a sinister edge, in dark-to-black furs (illus. 69). The poem beneath the print reads:

  68 Jacques-Louis David, Monsieur Lavoisier and His Wife, 1788, oil on canvas.

  69 Wenceslaus Hollar, Winter, 1643, etching.

  The cold, not cruelty makes her weare