The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  For the formal lying in state, the coffin was transported to the Hall at Chelsea Hospital. There the black drapes were shaped into a gigantic tent, within which the coffin rested on a black velvet bier on a cloth-of-gold carpet. Round the bier were ten pedestals, on which Wellington’s military honours were displayed on black cushions. Queen Victoria was the first visitor, with her consort and several of the royal children. They were followed the next day by the principal members of the aristocracy, the principal members of the government and foreign ambassadors. There was not a large public attendance.

  Queen Victoria proposed a state funeral, and on Thursday 19 November the body was conveyed to St Paul’s in a procession which took two hours to pass. It was led by six battalions of infantry, the artillery with nine guns, the Chelsea Pensioners, Wellington’s standard and his servants, Wellington’s physicians in a mourning coach and Prince Albert in a royal carriage. Then came the heralds, Wellington’s baton as Field Marshal on a black velvet cushion in a mourning coach, his coronet on a black velvet cushion in a separate mourning coach and the pallbearers, consisting of eight generals in two mourning coaches (‘mourning coaches’ being invariably black).

  There followed the enormous funeral ‘car’, advancing slowly to dead marches by the military bands, the beat of muffled drums and the periodic firing of cannon (illus. 88). There had been a touch of fancifulness in Nelson’s car, shaped like the Victory with a prow and figurehead, and something even light in spirit in its slender columns and swags, appropriate both to the Regency and to Nelson’s reputation as a lover as well as an admiral. There was nothing light in Wellington’s ‘car’, which was compared to a juggernaut, the towering vehicle with wheels like millstones used to transport Indian gods. It was drawn by twelve horses, three abreast in four rows – ‘the largest and finest black horses that could be procured’ – themselves covered to the ground with black velvet housings set with black plumes. Their appearance and slow advance, each led by a groom in full black mourning, was described as ‘elephantine’ – as it may have been, since the car weighed eighteen tons. It was made of iron and bronze, and stood 17 feet high – that is, 3 feet higher than a double-decker bus, and 2 feet wider. It was 12 feet long, the length of many railway engines, and in engravings it can resemble a giant locomotive, with its three bronze wheels, on either side, evenly spaced beneath a metal rim (also, like a locomotive, it carried a nameplate, ‘Waterloo’). The upper structure was muffled by a vast pall of black velvet (powdered with silver and with a silver fringe), on which, at a height, rested the red and gold coffin, beneath a canopy trailing black streamers. In the engraving by Thomas Ellis the car itself is dwarfed by the magnificent funeral drapes laid over Temple Bar, beneath which it is soon to pass.

  The car was followed by Wellington’s relatives, his horse, led by his groom, officers and men from every regiment in the Service, and the carriage of the Queen (without the Queen). But I pause on the car, because it was this gigantic, snail-paced, black-draped vehicle that drew most comment. It was emphatically military, bristling on all sides with massed lances, halberds, battle-axes, banners, breastplates, helmets, cannon-barrels and cannonballs, though what most struck contemporaries was the apparent absence from it of any religious sign or emblem. This was not utterly the case, for the bier carried the legend ‘Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord’, but the very small Christian presence in the procession is striking.

  88 Thomas Ellis, Funeral Car of the Late Field Marshal Duke of Wellington – Passing through Temple Bar, on its way to St Pauls Cathedral, where the remains of the Great Duke was entomb’d Novr 18th 1852, 1852, engraving.

  And the procession was the great communal event, in contrast to the lyings in state. Not many visitors came when the body lay in Walmer Castle, and the rest at Chelsea Hospital was poorly attended when opened to the public. This is hardly surprising, given Wellington’s recent reputation as an ineloquent prime minister who resisted reform with poor success. But the funeral procession was watched, it was said, by a million and a half people. Every window overlooking the route was filled, as were the roofs above. Along with its many blacks, the procession had an element of festive colour, with the reds and blues and golds and whites of the military uniforms and banners. Nor was the public emotion that of grief, since – as was said at the time – grief will be qualified for a leader who dies peacefully in his eighties. But public emotion there was, described by an onlooker as ‘sentiments sublimer far than sorrow’. The emotion had in part to do with the commemoration of campaigns in many parts of the world where the victories, like the casualties, were national as well as being Wellington’s. In some sense, the funeral procession was a triumph in the Roman Imperial sense – the victory procession of a supreme victor – though in the nineteenth century such a victor could process with such sombre magnificence only after he had died, making the victory procession a death procession, gravely and grandly black, and only the more triumphal for being so. Sublimity, Burke said, combines the great and the terrible, and in almost excluding Christian symbolism the Wellington funeral discovered perhaps a continuity with the triumphalism of other empires that had crumbled to dust many centuries before. There is something barbaric in the blatancy of its pageant of power and death.

  When connected with the military, black has of course its menace, together with its mournfulness. To pass briefly from a vast construction to a relatively small one, there is in the Victoria & Albert Museum a silver and crystal table centrepiece (illus. 89). It was presented by the officers of the combined forces to Queen Victoria on her Golden Jubilee in 1887. On either side of this towering table-architecture, two figures stand who are, oddly, lacquered black. A black Britannia with flowing black drapes holds high the fearsome trident of British naval might. We used to hymn her praises, though here we might think her a demon queen. On the other side of the table piece, with his back to us in the photograph, stands – or rather swaggers – a black-lacquered St George. He wears black, baroquely furling armour and, beyond our view, brandishes a black and lethal scimitar. At the centre of the royal banquet both death and national grandeur, in both male and female form, show one deadly mask-face: it is the face of world power both on the land and on the sea.

  As to hymns for the dead, both Nelson’s funeral and Wellington’s included the ‘Dead March’ from Handel’s Saul, but that piece too has a Christian accent. If one sought a music more apt to the spectacle it occurs to me one might find it in the ‘Dead March for Siegfried’ in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, which for all its gravity is savagely barbaric and pagan; Wagner being another artist who wore black with panache, favouring black silk and velvet and a black velvet cap. If this suggestion is extravagant, still it seems to me that one may find in Wagner the music that fits best the nineteenth century’s passion for black, since so often it is a death-music – inspiring neither depression nor grief, but rather exaltation. And in Tristan, Wagner makes music for the intimate union of love with death. The conjunction of love and death was a recurring theme in the century, in opera, drama, fiction, painting. Often the private love and death are linked to a public cause, as in the paintings by John Everett Millais in which we are invited to think that one of the parting lovers will die the next day (in the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in A Huguenot, on St Bartholomew’s Day Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge and on the field of battle in The Black Brunswicker). The theme was not new – one thinks of Romeo and Juliet, whose near-simultaneous deaths buy peace between the warring clans, or Richard Lovelace’s ‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more’ – but in the nineteenth century the love-death-and-honour theme swelled.42 The idea of sacrifice, for love but not for the love of God (though maybe for the love of the nation), was dear to the century. One might relate this sense to the rigid, erect dignity with which the nineteenth century stands in so many portraits – single, family and communal – and in so many daguerreotypes and early photographs; th
e men, and not seldom the women, in black, and with their dark or black goods about them. The stance, and the black, have in part to do with piety but also often with pride, and often with power – exerted or served – together with a sense of the price to be paid for living in what was then called the great age of the world, though mainly it was the great age of Europe.

  89 Black-lacquered figures of St George and Britannia, at either side of the crystal and silver centrepiece presented by the officers of the combined forces to Queen Victoria on her Golden Jubilee, 1887.

  90 The annual banquet of the National Boot and Shoe Manufacturers’ Association, New York, 1906.

  TEN

  Our Colour?

  IF ONE USED those large terms which take history by the handful, one would say that the high nineteenth century shaded – or rather brightened – into the belle époque. Lighter woodwork came in, gilded plaster returned, women’s dresses and their bustles had sharp, aniline colours – lime, rose, mauve. Even the original Ford Model T was originally (from 1908 to 1914) red, green, blue or grey: it was only in 1914 that it became, as Henry Ford famously said, ‘any colour . . . so long as it is black’.1 The other, now-forgotten vehicles of those years – the steam-lorries and steam-trams – could be red, green or blue. The fronts of buildings might excresce, corrugate and curve in waves; Barcelona facades by Gaudí may grow like fungus-trees up from the ground, topped by iridescent tiles which hump like the scales of a restless dragon. Paris Metro stations curled slender, cast-iron tendrils. It was the period of Art Nouveau on both sides of the Channel (of Jugendstil in Germany and Secession in Austro-Hungary). In painting the strong colours of the 1890s – best known now in Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin – were followed by the saturated reds and yellows of the Fauves. The most famous Fauve is Henri Matisse, and in his paintings of the early 1900s it is clear that modernism has arrived, with its freedom, its flatness – its colour.

  As the new century advanced, the brightness of the Modern style grew only clearer. The pioneering architect Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) worked principally in white. As a young traveller he had celebrated colour more broadly: ‘colour . . . exists for the caress and for the intoxication of the eye’. But as his priorities clarified through the 1920s he insisted with emphasis that ‘there is only one colour, white’; white, he said, ‘cleans, cleanses, and is cleanness and hygiene . . . It is the eye of truth.’ Visiting America, he was dismayed to see how dark the quintessential modern building, the skyscraper, was: appallingly, parts of the Empire State Building carried black marble cladding. Nor was Le Corbusier the first modern architect to celebrate white. In 1901 Charles Rennie Mackintosh had designed, for a competition, a ‘house for an art-lover’ with a flat roof, all-white walls and large expanses of windowless space. More generally in early modernist taste the love of white was balanced by the love of colour: the painter Fernand Léger thought white alone ‘an obstacle, a dead end’. Le Corbusier too said, ‘if you want to highlight the delicious brilliance of white, you must surround it with vibrant suggestions of colour’.2

  Seeing this change, from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, one might recall the similar change that had occurred between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, when tones also lightened, moving towards the whites and brights of the classical age – to darken again in the period spanning the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It seems that different periods have, as it were, a tonal index which changes in slow cycles – the change being visible, to varying extents, in dress, in painting and in the look of buildings, inside and out. The tonal swing, through centuries, might be said to have a wavelength of about a hundred years. Such a broad tonal movement is I think first apparent in the fifteenth century, when dress tones deepen and black is increasingly popular – though this first dark wave is slower to gather, and could perhaps be said to peak in the late sixteenth century, finding its signature in the black art of Caravaggio. Styles are diverse throughout this period, however, and it is only in the seventeenth century that a clear tonal trend is fully discernible. Thereafter one can more consistently point to light tones in the mid-eighteenth century, dark tones in the mid-nineteenth century, light tones in the mid-twentieth century, moving in our time to darker tones again. Of course tones and colours vary greatly at all times everywhere, but still a tonal preponderance is visible. As I have I hope emphasized from chapter to chapter, the factors that affect society’s visual tone are diverse and unpredictable; they include the relative rise and fall of nations and empires, changes in religious revelation, wars and epidemics, changing technologies, economic booms and busts and the evolution or revolution of social hierarchies. But the very diversity of the causal factors, and the changing complexities of connection between them, make it the more remarkable that there should be any pattern so consistent as the slow swing of a pendulum between dark and light.

  What is further clear is that tonal change does not relate in a simple way to perceived goods and bads. Light tones may sometimes have a benign dimension, and dark tones can reflect anxiety and oppression. But one could also say that the sense of well-being was strong in those who set the dark tones in sixteenth-century Spain and in nineteenth-century England. And, on the other side, in the Black Death which raged in the mid-fourteenth century, one-third of the population died in great pain, but the ‘culture’ kept its bright look, with parti-coloured clothes (green on one side, red on the other).

  Again in the First World War, in the influenza epidemic which followed it, and then in the Second World War, the mortality – and mortality among the young – was horrendous. But though widespread mourning had some effect on dress styles, the broader visual tone stayed light. And now that dark tones are increasingly in fashion, with a growing use of black in many departments, we find – happily – that this change does not need to be correlated with an overt vast disaster, like the atomic war which used to be feared. This is not to suggest that there is no connection between the look of a period and large-scale prosperity or anxiety, grief and death, but that such connections have an indirect, complex and elusive logic. There does seem to be present within this logic a visual or even aesthetic principle which works with some autonomy. One should not perhaps characterize this ‘principle’ precisely, when its fundamental value may be abstract. In general vision dark and light matter almost equally to us, and broad tendencies in style towards either dark or light may have a neutral or equivalent value simply as communal movement. Broad change is evidence of cultural life and, with its slow, large rhythm, may reflect an element of integrity within divided societies.

  To return to the first half of the twentieth century: if visual values brightened, it was not that black had vanished. Rather, black concentrated, and came to occupy a narrow but central position. Amid the bright canvases of 1915, Malevich painted his Black Square. And if you visited Le Corbusier, you would find him wearing a smart black suit. His style was consistent with his theory. He believed black had the value in clothing which white had in architecture: it was pure and resistant to decoration. He imagined his large white spaces to be peopled by slender, clear figures in black, and in his own drawing of Vitruvian Man, his ‘Modulor’ human is a black silhouette.

  In the general wear of men, nevertheless, black retreated steadily. Checks and oatmeal tweeds bulged, the blazer and the straw hat came, and patterned sleeveless knitwear. By the 1930s a man’s smart suit could be almost any colour but black. In the 1920s dark tones had been privileged – deeply dark greys, browns, navies – but in the ’30s and ’40s lighter greys were smart both in business and in society. There were exceptions. The longstanding connection of black with finance, associated with money’s gravity and the need for trust, meant that, in the City of London, a uniform of black jacket, black bowler and dark pinstripes continued into the second half of the century. Black had also been popular with national varieties of the Fascist movement: it was worn with calculated and terrifying effect by Himmler’s SS in Germany,
and on a smaller scale by the British Union of Fascists. In Italy the black shirt had first been worn by the volunteer arditti in the Great War, the elite shock troops who included D’Annunzio. Disaffected after the war, they attached to the Fascist movement, and came to set the style of Mussolini’s elite bodyguard of Musketeers, of the Italian Fascist Movement generally and of Mussolini himself, as we see him still in photographs, in the urgency of his oratory (illus. 91).

  Fascist black also passed, however – as more locally, in London, the ‘blackout’ ended. By mid-century one could say – for the first time since the end of the fourteenth century – that black had disappeared from the general daily dress of men. But not from their dress in the evening. When men’s black began its territorial expansion, at the start of the nineteenth century, it arrived first in eveningwear. And it is in eveningwear, still, that black has been the last to leave. Indeed, it has not left, for the smart jet-black three- or two-piece known as the tuxedo or dinner-jacket suit is with us still. It is not worn often, and one could say that its claim to be the last word has become theoretical. Yet it survives.

  Because it has proved such a long-lived classic, the dinner jacket deserves a further word. For what shows, if one consults the fashion illustrations decade by decade, is how little the style has changed. The first dinner jackets, in the 1890s, are all smooth curves, and look as if they were cut out of circles of cloth. They have shawl lapels, and the front edge of the jacket makes a perfect smooth curve running round to the back. The main changes to this streamlined shape consisted of adding corners. Almost at once the peaked collar arrived, to compete with the shawl – a friendly competition that continues still. And around 1900 the jacket became more square-cut, though its corners still were bevelled. Evidently some squareness was needed, in a shape that may have seemed too casual or too feminine. Thereafter its fundamental form has stayed, together with its black-and-white colour scheme (including a black bow tie). Collars have changed, lapels have daggered outwards or gone notched, occasionally other colours have visited (briefly). The material too has lightened from the weighty wool of the past. The result still is that a dinner suit offered for sale in 1904 looks virtually identical, as to jacket and trousers, to one that might be sold today. The members of the American National Boot and Shoe Manufacturers’ Association, gathered for their annual banquet in 1906, show some difference from contemporary style in their shirt collars and waistcoats, but their black suits could be ours (illus. 90).