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A review by tanyarobinson
Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay
4.0
I have studied a fair bit of art history, but I've never thought much about what it took to create the colorful pigments on the canvases in all those museums. I've read books about fashion, and enjoyed exhibits of historical clothing, yet I've given only a passing thought to how artisans turned cloth a rainbow of colors. Victoria Finlay's micro history of the color palette chases around the world looking for the origins of the earliest dyes and pigments, and it's pretty fascinating.
I learned about blues from lapis lazuli rocks, reds from cochineal beetles, indigo from bushes, green from a chemical reaction involving wood ash and kaolin, yellow from saffron, and on and on. I was particularly interested to find out which historical coloring agents were poisonous (obviously the lead that brought such brilliant whites onto the canvas, the greens in arsenic-laced wallpapers, and some of the cosmetics from early eras). It was fun to learn how secret recipes were kept, and how intellectual espionage was a regular game of the trade.
One of the things that stood out for me from the book was the discussion of how paintings (and other painted and dyed items) have changed with time. I always assumed the darkened altar pieces and canvases I've seen were dark just because they were dirty and coated with pollution. I had no idea certain pigments reacted with others, and would darken and chemically change with time. I was also surprised to learn some artists used colors they knew would quickly fade because they were more concerned with with the short-term product (J.M.W. Turner, I'm talking to you - you knew your watery sunset scenes would lose all their reds in just a few years, and that what hangs in the National Gallery in London is not at all what it started out to be).
BUT - and it's a big but - I lost my enthusiasm for the subject as the chapters went on and on. I loved the beginning. I was entranced through the chapters on black and white and red, but as we moved through the spectrum I got a little bogged down. Finlay went so many places - the Australian outback, China, Afghanistan, the Caribbean, Spain, India, etc etc etc - looking for the stories behind the colors. While I would have appreciated every one individually, I got tired of them collectively. I think this book could best be appreciated read drawn out over a longer time period, with a chapter soaked up here and there. There is such good information, and the author put so much time and effort to gathering all her stories. And her writing itself is so engaging. I just pushed through it too hurriedly to keep in touch with that engagement.
Anyway, 3.75 stars rounded up to a 4.
I learned about blues from lapis lazuli rocks, reds from cochineal beetles, indigo from bushes, green from a chemical reaction involving wood ash and kaolin, yellow from saffron, and on and on. I was particularly interested to find out which historical coloring agents were poisonous (obviously the lead that brought such brilliant whites onto the canvas, the greens in arsenic-laced wallpapers, and some of the cosmetics from early eras). It was fun to learn how secret recipes were kept, and how intellectual espionage was a regular game of the trade.
One of the things that stood out for me from the book was the discussion of how paintings (and other painted and dyed items) have changed with time. I always assumed the darkened altar pieces and canvases I've seen were dark just because they were dirty and coated with pollution. I had no idea certain pigments reacted with others, and would darken and chemically change with time. I was also surprised to learn some artists used colors they knew would quickly fade because they were more concerned with with the short-term product (J.M.W. Turner, I'm talking to you - you knew your watery sunset scenes would lose all their reds in just a few years, and that what hangs in the National Gallery in London is not at all what it started out to be).
BUT - and it's a big but - I lost my enthusiasm for the subject as the chapters went on and on. I loved the beginning. I was entranced through the chapters on black and white and red, but as we moved through the spectrum I got a little bogged down. Finlay went so many places - the Australian outback, China, Afghanistan, the Caribbean, Spain, India, etc etc etc - looking for the stories behind the colors. While I would have appreciated every one individually, I got tired of them collectively. I think this book could best be appreciated read drawn out over a longer time period, with a chapter soaked up here and there. There is such good information, and the author put so much time and effort to gathering all her stories. And her writing itself is so engaging. I just pushed through it too hurriedly to keep in touch with that engagement.
Anyway, 3.75 stars rounded up to a 4.