The ‘untranslatable’ emotions you never knew you had

The ‘untranslatable’ emotions you never knew you had

By David Robson 26th January 2017

From gigil to wabi-sabi and tarab, there are many foreign emotion words with no English equivalent. Learning to identify and cultivate these experiences could give you a richer and more successful life.

• This story is featured in BBC Future’s “Best of 2017” collection. Discover more of our picks. 

Have you ever felt a little mbuki-mvuki – the irresistible urge to “shuck off your clothes as you dance”? Perhaps a little kilig – the jittery fluttering feeling as you talk to someone you fancy? How about uitwaaien – which encapsulates the revitalising effects of taking a walk in the wind?
These words – taken from Bantu, Tagalog, and Dutch – have no direct English equivalent, but they represent very precise emotional experiences that are neglected in our language. And if Tim Lomas at the University of East London has his way, they might soon become much more familiar.
Lomas’s Positive Lexicography Project aims to capture the many flavours of good feelings (some of which are distinctly bittersweet) found across the world, in the hope that we might start to incorporate them all into our daily lives. We have already borrowed many emotion words from other languages, after all – think “frisson”, from French, or “schadenfreude”, from German – but there are many more that have not yet wormed their way into our vocabulary. Lomas has found hundreds of these "untranslatable" experiences so far – and he’s only just begun.
Learning these words, he hopes, will offer us all a richer and more nuanced understanding of ourselves. “They offer a very different way of seeing the world.”

Gigil is a Tagalog word that describes the irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished (Credit: Alamy)

Lomas says he was first inspired after hearing a talk on the Finnish concept of sisu, which is a sort of “extraordinary determination in the face of adversity”. According to Finnish speakers, the English ideas of “grit”, “perseverance” or “resilience” do not come close to describing the inner strength encapsulated in their native term. It was "untranslatable" in the sense that there was no direct or easy equivalent encoded within the English vocabulary that could capture that deep resonance.
Intrigued, he began to hunt for further examples, scouring the academic literature and asking every foreign acquaintance for their own suggestions. The first results of this project were published in the Journal of Positive Psychology last year.
Many of the terms referred to highly specific positive feelings, which often depend on very particular circumstances:

• Desbundar (Portuguese) – to shed one’s inhibitions in having fun
• Tarab (Arabic) – a musically induced state of ecstasy or enchantment
• Shinrin-yoku (Japanese) – the relaxation gained from bathing in the forest, figuratively or literally
• Gigil (Tagalog) – the irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished
• Yuan bei (Chinese) – a sense of complete and perfect accomplishment
• Iktsuarpok (Inuit) – the anticipation one feels when waiting for someone, whereby one keeps going outside to check if they have arrived

But others represented more complex and bittersweet experiences, which could be crucial to our growth and overall flourishing.

• Natsukashii (Japanese) – a nostalgic longing for the past, with happiness for the fond memory, yet sadness that it is no longer
• Wabi-sabi (Japanese) – a “dark, desolate sublimity” centred on transience and imperfection in beauty
• Saudade (Portuguese) – a melancholic longing or nostalgia for a person, place or thing that is far away either spatially or in time – a vague, dreaming wistfulness for phenomena that may not even exist
• Sehnsucht (German) – “life-longings”, an intense desire for alternative states and realisations of life, even if they are unattainable

In addition to these emotions, Lomas’s lexicography also charted the personal characteristics and behaviours that might determine our long-term well-being and the ways we interact with other people.

• Dadirri (Australian aboriginal) term – a deep, spiritual act of reflective and respectful listening
• Pihentagyú (Hungarian) – literally meaning “with a relaxed brain”, it describes quick-witted people who can come up with sophisticated jokes or solutions
• Desenrascanço (Portuguese) – to artfully disentangle oneself from a troublesome situation
• Sukha (Sanskrit) – genuine lasting happiness independent of circumstances
• Orenda (Huron) – the power of the human will to change the world in the face of powerful forces such as fate

You can view many more examples on his website, where there is also the opportunity to submit your own. Lomas readily admits that many of the descriptions he has offered so far are only an approximation of the term's true meaning. "The whole project is a work in progress, and I’m continually aiming to refine the definitions of the words in the list," he says. "I definitely welcome people’s feedback and suggestions in that regard."

Portuguese fado singers like Cristina Branco channel the intense longing of "saudade" (Credit: Getty Images)

In the future, Lomas hopes that other psychologists may begin to explore the causes and consequences of these experiences – to extend our understanding of emotion beyond the English concepts that have dominated research so far.
But studying these terms will not just be of scientific interest; Lomas suspects that familiarising ourselves with the words might actually change the way we feel ourselves, by drawing our attention to fleeting sensations we had long ignored.
“In our stream of consciousness – that wash of different sensations feelings and emotions – there’s so much to process that a lot passes us by,” Lomas says. “The feelings we have learned to recognise and label are the ones we notice – but there’s a lot more that we may not be aware of. And so I think if we are given these new words, they can help us articulate whole areas of experience we’ve only dimly noticed.”
As evidence, Lomas points to the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University, who has shown that our abilities to identify and label our emotions can have far-reaching effects.
Her research was inspired by the observation that certain people use different emotion words interchangeably, while others are highly precise in their descriptions. “Some people use words like anxious, afraid, angry, disgusted to refer to a general affective state of feeling bad,” she explains. “For them, they are synonyms, whereas for other people they are distinctive feelings with distinctive actions associated with them.”
This is called “emotion granularity” and she usually measures this by asking the participants to rate their feelings on each day over the period of a few weeks, before she calculates the variation and nuances within their reports: whether the same old terms always coincide, for instance.

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese term that describes our appreciation of transient and imperfect beauty - such as the fleeting splendour of cherry blossom (Credit: Getty Images)

Importantly, she has found that this then determines how well we cope with life. If you are better able to pin down whether you are feeling despair or anxiety, for instance, you might be better able to decide how to remedy those feelings: whether to talk to a friend, or watch a funny film. Or being able to identify your hope in the face of disappointment might help you to look for new solutions to your problem.
In this way, emotion vocabulary is a bit like a directory, allowing you to call up a greater number of strategies to cope with life. Sure enough, people who score highly on emotion granularity are better able to recover more quickly from stress and are less likely to drink alcohol as a way of recovering from bad news. It can even improve your academic success. Marc Brackett at Yale University has found that teaching 10 and 11-year-old children a richer emotional vocabulary improved their end-of-year grades, and promoted better behaviour in the classroom. “The more granular our experience of emotion is, the more capable we are to make sense of our inner lives,” he says.
Both Brackett and  Barrett agree that Lomas’s “positive lexicography” could be a good prompt to start identifying the subtler contours of our emotional landscape. “I think it is useful – you can think of the words and the concepts they are associated with as tools for living,” says  Barrett. They might even inspire us to try new experiences, or appreciate old ones in a new light.
It’s a direction of research that Lomas would like to explore in the future. In the meantime, Lomas is still continuing to build his lexicography – which has grown to nearly a thousand terms. Of all the words he has found so far, Lomas says that he most often finds himself pondering Japanese concepts such as wabi-sabi (that “dark, desolate sublimity” involving transience and imperfection). “It speaks to this idea of finding beauty in phenomena that are aged and imperfect,” he says. “If we saw the world through those eyes, it could be a different way of engaging in life.”
--
David Robson is BBC Future’s feature writer. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.

Flannery O'Connor in the driveway at Andalusia, 1962. (A... more

Essay

July 16, 2020

Flannery O’Connor and the Terrors of American Sentimentality

In a recent issue of the New Yorker, Paul Elie accuses novelist and short-story writer Flannery O’Connor of possessing “a habit of bigotry.” He argues that her opinions and language about race are seriously flawed, and that her admirers must come to terms with this unsettling reality when interpreting her fiction.
But Elie’s orientation is backwards. As O’Connor herself understood, art is not meant to be approached by way of dissecting the artist; the only way to appreciate O’Connor as a writer is to closely examine her stories, which emphatically are not racist. Elie’s argument is both wrong and dangerous—it is a sign of the type of terror O’Connor prophetically sees coupled to the sentimental pursuit of justice unhinged from charity and friendship.
Elie’s Case for O’Connor’s “Habit of Bigotry”
As evidence of her racism, Elie points to the personal letters O’Connor wrote her mother in 1948 at the age of eighteen while visiting New York and Massachusetts with extended family. The letters reveal O’Connor’s shock to see a black man in the same college classroom as her cousin, and that she avoided sitting next to black people on the subway. Elie understands that these were the reactions of a teenager leaving the 1940s South for the first time, but asserts that she never successfully or fully excised these racist attitudes from her soul, and that they therefore have to be taken into account when interpreting her work. They are part of the character of the artist, and therefore part of the art.
The proof of O’Connor’s enduring bigotry are letters written at the height of her talent to her friend, the Civil Rights activist Maryat Lee, in which O’Connor plays the part of gradualist reformer lamenting the forced demise of Southern society by Northern radicals. Elie acknowledges that there is a playfulness to these letters, but insists that they are not always in jest, that much of what O’Connor says to her correspondent reflects her real opinions about race. And because these letters come in her more mature and reflective years, Elie uses them to claim that O’Connor’s bigotry was “clearly maintained and growing more intense as time went on.”
One of the passages from O’Connor’s correspondence to Lee cited by Elie comes from a May 1964 letter written just months before her death. Here O’Connor says:

About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent. Baldwin can tell us what it feels like to be a Negro in Harlem but he tries to tell us everything else too. M. L. King I don’t think is the ages great saint but he’s at least doing what he can do & has to do. Don’t know anything about Ossie Davis except that you like him but you probably like them all. My question is usually would this person be endurable if white. If Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a minute. I prefer Cassius Clay. “If a tiger move into the room with you,” says Cassius, “and you leave, that don’t mean you hate the tiger. Just means you know you and him can’t make out. Too much talk about hate.” Cassius is too good for the Moslems.  

Unlike O’Connor’s youthful letters to her mother, many of her letters to Lee, including the brunt of that quoted above, have been available to readers since the publication of Mystery and Manners in 1979. Elie claims that O’Connor fans have been downplaying these types of comments for a long time, happily accepting those parts of her correspondence that are witty and wise but refusing to acknowledge her racism. These admirers cheer at the Christian spirit that went into O’Connor’s stories, with little if any comment about her bigoted opinions. But, says Elie, these letters to Lee “were written at the same desk where O’Connor wrote her fiction and are found in the same lode of correspondence that has brought about the rise in her stature.”
For Elie, a reassessment is necessary of O’Connor’s work, considering all parts of the author’s character—the racially-biased side as much as the daily-mass side. O’Connor’s admirers are mistaken, Elie tells us, in elevating the published letters and occasional prose that they like while explaining away the racial epithets and evidence of bigotry. This approach “cordons off the author from history” by refusing to look squarely at her more controversial statements: “Those remarks don’t belong to the past, or to the South, or to literary ephemera. They belong to the author’s body of work; they help show us who she was.”
In terms of her fiction, Elie’s only substantial example is the vision of Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation,” the story of a proud Southern lady who unreflectively equates the class hierarchies of her community with God’s divine plan. She wonders what she would have done if Jesus had made her choose between being black or white trash, and she gives thanks that she was made a respectable white lady with “a little of everything.” She is offered, however, a chance to grow in self-knowledge after encountering a hostile Wellesley student in a doctor’s waiting room. The young girl throws a book at Mrs. Turpin and tells her, memorably, to “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.” Mrs. Turpin interprets the incident as a message from God, and after questioning him in the spirit of Job, experiences a revelatory vision of souls marching heavenward in a subverted form of the hierarchical categories that shape her imagination. For Elie, this is a “segregationist’s vision, in which people process to Heaven by race and class, equal but separate.” O’Connor’s racism is thus part of her fiction.
Part of Elie’s turn to “Revelation” is to clarify his point about O’Connor’s letters to Lee. Both correspondents would frequently and playfully use pseudonyms meant to caricature their positions on race. O’Connor would sometimes sign hers as “Mrs. Turpin,” and Elie sees in this O’Connor’s embrace of a racist worldview that the writer’s fans are loath to admit. The time of reckoning, however, has come. We must face O’Connor’s true feelings about race and shake our heads at her willing blindness to the truth of human equality. If we refuse to acknowledge this side of O’Connor, we can never fully understand her literature; rather, we’ll make it out to be far more holy and exemplary than it is. Whatever goodness it has is stained by her habit of bigotry. Such is the thrust of Elie’s essay.
Finding the Interpretive Key
Elie’s approach to literary interpretation assumes that O’Connor’s letters and posthumously published prose can serve as—and should be used as—the interpretive key to her work. Elie claims that O’Connor was careful to keep carbon copies of her correspondence and public lectures because she intended for these to be the interpretive lens for reading her short stories and novels. Everything came from the same mind, written on the same typewriter, and thus is part of the same body of work. The only way, then, to understand O’Connor’s art is to read it through the autobiographic picture she drew for us through her letters.
Elie has plenty of company in this regard. There is no shortage of admirers who like O’Connor’s stories because they know she was Catholic, or a woman, or had lupus. This is why the stakes over O’Connor’s racial views are so high. If we can’t like O’Connor the person, can we really like her stories?
I stand with O’Connor in thinking that this orientation is the wrong way to read literature, particularly from an artist as self-conscious and deliberate as the one Elie puts on trial for racism. The irony of using O’Connor’s letters to form an interpretation of her work is that she frequently admonishes her correspondents not to take this approach. She insists that her fiction must be read on its own terms, without distracting adventures into her psyche.
For example, O’Connor jokes in a January 1956 letter to her friend Betty Hester that she can see two critics that look to the artist to understand art “chained together by mutual hate on one of the less important circles of the inferno, eternally arguing if church steeples are phallic symbols.” In May of the same year she wrote, again to Hester, that a story should say “something about life colored by the writer, not about the writer colored by life.” A few years later she rebuked her friend Billy Sessions for his use of Freudian literary criticism in the classroom, reminding him that it “can be applied to anything at all with equally ridiculous results,” adding, “My Lord, Billy, recover your simplicity.”
A little simplicity can go a long way when it comes to reading literature. O’Connor would have had as little patience for race-infused readings of her stories as she did for sex-infused interpretations. In both cases readers are more concerned with the author’s mind and character than the fruits of hard work and a dedication to the vocation of writing. In fact, O’Connor frequently argued against using her biography as a lens for reading her stories. The writer’s task is to look at reality and render a vision of what is seen. Vision is, of course, shaped by social mores and experience, but a good writer tries to look beyond the temporal to a fuller reality, however mysterious it may be. O’Connor insisted that her Catholicism broadened her ability to see, and what she saw was grace acting on nature, God intervening in the lives of souls living in modern America. But readers need not know that O’Connor was Catholic, or had lupus, or lived alone with her mother in rural Georgia, or had a short courtship with a book salesman to grapple with her vision of the world we inhabit. All that’s necessary are the stories.
Elie’s essay is a good example of the danger of interpreting art through the biography of the artist. He argues that because O’Connor possessed the habit of bigotry throughout her life, her many admirers must come to terms with the fact that an author they cherish held unacceptable racial views. He suggests that any serious interpretation of her work going forward must account for the fact that she was wrong when it comes to race, whatever we might think of her artistic talent or theological acumen. He does not say the stories should stop being read, but that is a logical step for the next critic to make. Elie just throws the first punch, knocking O’Connor off her pedestal.
O’Connor’s letters, of course, do make for wonderful reading. They are valuable for understanding the woman who wrote such startling and memorable tales; they reveal a deeply philosophic soul living a simple though painful life on a small dairy farm outside of Milledgeville, Georgia, raising peafowl and other exotic birds, and struggling with the ravages of lupus while devoting herself wholeheartedly to her vocation as a writer. O’Connor’s biography is worth knowing, and in many regards it is inspiring. But we must have the discipline not to conflate the artist with her art.

A serious reader who happened to come upon O’Connor’s fiction without having heard of her could not in honesty conclude that the meaning of the stories justifies racism. Rather, nearly every story, to different degrees, questions the racist attitudes of the American South and points to the individual conversions necessary to bring about the new code of manners based on charity for which she hoped.

Rather than her correspondence, critics like Elie would do well to follow O’Connor’s advice and treat the body of O’Connor’s published art on its own terms. Importantly, this includes her introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann, the biography of a twelve-year-old girl who died of cancer, written by the Dominican sisters who cared for her in Atlanta. Regarding this essay, O’Connor says in a June 1961 letter to Hester that the introduction is particularly important for understanding her work. When critics ignore it, they miss O’Connor’s concern with the modern proclivity to govern by tenderness rather than faith, a move that becomes dangerous when tenderness is divorced from charity. O’Connor predicted that tenderness without charity would end in terror, and in Elie’s accusation that she possessed a “habit of bigotry,” she risks becoming subject to the very terror she foresaw.
The passage from O’Connor’s introduction to the Mary Ann book is worth quoting at length:

In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in force-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.

O’Connor is not just remarking here on the causes of those depraved atrocities of mid-20th century communist and fascist nations on the other side of the world. Her fiction makes clear that her gravest concerns about modern terrors are of the home-grown variety connected to her own regime, where tenderness comes packaged in various theories, including the social-justice variety. People absorbed in such theories are prone to a sentimentality that can lead them to terrorize those who see things differently. Fascists and communists excel in terror—but 17th and 18th century New England Puritans also knew how to scare people into having the “right” opinions. O’Connor understood that we still have Puritans among us.
Simply put, Elie is looking in all the wrong places for an interpretative key to O’Connor’s work. His use of the phrase “habit of bigotry” is a clever, if underhanded, play on the title of Sally Fitzgerald’s edited volume of O’Connor’s correspondence, The Habit of Being, meant to convey O’Connor’s virtues as a person, a Catholic, and an artist. To the extent that we are concerned with O’Connor’s biography, an accurate account of her vices is as important as attending to her virtues—but trying to understand her habits, good and bad, can and likely will distract us from her art. We end up seeking the source of her vision rather than the rendered product.
Elie claims that O’Connor intended for her letters and occasional prose to serve as the interpretive lens for reading her fiction. But this is strange given that those same letters and essays make plain O’Connor’s hope that the stories be read on their own terms. She shuttered at the idea of literature being a game of hide-and-seek, with audiences trying to find the author behind every Freudian symbol. Are we to see O’Connor relationship with her mother in “The Enduring Chill,” or her broken heart in “Good Country People,” or her semi-conscious racism in “Everything that Rises Must Converge”? Such an orientation makes it impossible to appreciate and learn from her fiction as it was offered to the public.
O’Connor’s Fiction is Not Racist
Jessica Hooten Wilson offers a good counter to Elie’s misreading of O’Connor and a more balanced articulation of O’Connor’s racial attitudes. As she points out, Elie neglects to mention O’Connor’s friendships with African Americans and civil-rights activists like Father McCown and Tom and Louise Gossett. In fact, much of O’Connor’s biography can be used to show that Elie’s portrait of the writer lacks complexion and nuance; that one would have to be heavily influenced by the sentiments de jour to think her comments to Maryat Lee are sufficient evidence of an unreconciled bigotry. I don’t mean to defend everything she said in those letters or elsewhere. Like all of us, she had flaws, and was guilty of sin.
But in terms of her biography, a fairer complaint about O’Connor would look not to her feelings, but her stated opinions on policy questions about race. Elie is simply wrong that O’Connor fans have been ignoring the issue. They have been trying to understand it since at least the publication of Habit of Being, in which Fitzgerald provides evidence that the real difference between O’Connor and Lee was not their views on race, but their proposed solutions to the injustices of the South. Lee was an activist wanting immediate change, while O’Connor thought the only solution was the development of “a new code of manners based on mutual charity,” which can only be worked out slowly over time. Readers like Elie can side with Lee in this debate, but they cannot justly demonize her opponent as a racist.
Even if one insists that O’Connor was a racist, that does not mean that her work was ipso facto racist. A serious reader who happened to come upon O’Connor’s fiction without having heard of her could not in honesty conclude that the meaning of the stories justifies racism. Rather, nearly every story, to different degrees, questions the racist attitudes of the American South and depicts the individual conversions necessary to bring about the new code of manners based on charity for which she hoped.
Serious exegesis of literature is not to be expected in short essays, but Elie’s claim about the racism of “Revelation” misses completely the fact that the vision is reported to us by the narrator through the eyes of Mrs. Turpin, and cannot in fairness be attributed to O’Connor. Plainly, Mrs. Turpin experienced a moment of conversion, and that the revelation she witnesses is personal—a grace from God particularly for her. It upends her previous attitudes about people she had thought beneath her—both blacks and whites. It is a corrective of her opinions, not a reflection of O’Connor’s mind.
Like “Revelation,” O’Connor’s other stories are about individuals who suddenly have their theories crushed in a moment of grace, a devastation that opens up the possibility for conversion. The Grandmother from “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” for example, thinks of herself as good, tender souls fully in accord with the theories of Southern hierarchy that reigned in the mid-20th century. She dresses up for road trip because if she were to be in an accident, she’d want everyone to know that “she was a lady” and not some white trash. Not until she is confronted by the Misfit does she see the shallowness of her opinions. Thanks to a moment of violence, she dies with more important things on her mind than appearing as a lady. The Southern code, including its racist assumptions, ends up meaning very little when faced with real rather than hypothetical death. Sinners of all types, racists among them, might act and think differently if there were someone there to shoot them every minute of their lives.
In what O’Connor thought was her deepest story, “The Artificial Nigger,” the suffering of black Americans is united to the suffering of Christ on the cross. One of the most striking moments of the story takes place in the opening pages, when a young boy responds to his racist grandfather’s question about what he sees when a colored person walks by: “A man,” responds the boy. The point is that social categories that correspond to skin color are accidental, or artificial, rather than essential to personhood. The grandfather’s bigotry and selfishness are tied to the harm he causes his grandson as they walk through the city, and it is only in their confrontation with severe suffering and humiliation, represented in a racist lawn statue, that they are reconciled.
And then there are the stories of social reformers, like Rayber from The Violent Bear It Away and Sheppard from “The Lame Shall Enter First.” They are the epitomes of atheistic tenderness wrapped in theory, and everything they touch breaks. In both stories, a romantic sensibility leads these characters to care more for misguided youth than their own flesh-and-blood sons. And in both cases their upside-down priorities lead not just to harm, but to death. These are tales of the sort of terror that can accompany sentimentality in America—fathers endangering the lives of their children in the name of social reform.
The examples of characters like Rayber and Sheppard should give us pause in the summer of 2020, as America battles a health pandemic and violent instances of racial injustice. In both cases, our political, medical, and academic authorities may be motivated by tenderness to fix these problems, but when rightly read, O’Connor reminds us that seeking health and racial justice without charity can easily lead to American-style labor camps and gas chambers.
What this may mean in terms of the COVID-19 response I’ll leave to the reader to discern; regarding racial injustice, the obvious answer is character assassination, even of those who have long been resting in their graves. As with all sins, racism will never end without God’s grace and a willingness by all to conduct themselves with charity. Racist hunts, like all witch hunts, appear necessary when otherwise good things, like justice, are tethered to the latest intellectual theories rather than the time-honored, self-sacrificing demands of charity. One need not be a Christian to accept this—Plato and Aristotle worried as much as Thomas Aquinas about justice without friendship. Whatever opinions O’Connor held about race—and the evidence suggests they are not nearly as shocking as Elie claims—the vision proffered by her fiction contains vital tools for helping us navigate the difficult terrain in which we’re traveling as human beings and citizens. What a shame it would be if she were subjected to the very terror she predicted.

Jerome C. Foss

As with all sins, racism will never end without God’s grace and a willingness by all to conduct themselves with charity.

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Primary Sources A Natural History of the Artist's Palette

Primary Sources A Natural History of the Artist's Palette

By Philip Ball

For all its transcendental appeals, art has always been inextricably grounded in the material realities of its production, an entwinement most evident in the intriguing history of artists' colours. Honing in on painting's primary trio of red, yellow, and blue, Philip Ball explores the science and stories behind the pigments, from the red ochre of Lascaux to Yves Klein's blue.

Published

July 23, 2020

Plate 3 from Michel E. Chevreul's Exposé d’un moyen de définir et de nommer les couleurs (1861) — Source

Having taken many centuries to figure out what the primary colours are, we are now in the process of abandoning them. The very notion of primaries can now spark furious arguments among colour specialists. Some point out that the trio many of us learnt at school — red, yellow and blue — applies only to mixing pigments; mix light, as in the pixels of television screens, and you need different primaries (roughly, red, blue, green). But if you print with inks, you use another “primary” system: yellow, cyan and magenta. And in the rainbow spectrum of visible light, there’s no hierarchy at all: no reason to promote yellow light above the slightly longer-wavelength orange.

What’s more, even though painters learn how to mix colours — blue and yellow to give a green, say — they quickly learn that the results can be disappointingly muddy compared to a “pure” pigment with the intended colour: it’s especially hard to get a rich purple from red and blue. As a result, artists often think of colour not so much as an abstract property but in terms of the substance that makes it: madder red, ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow. To truly understand what colour means to the artist, we need to think of its materiality. Or to put it another way, what the artist’s palette is capable of producing has always depended on the materials at his or her disposal, and the ingenuity that went into procuring them.

Red

That ingenuity has never been lacking. During the last Ice Age life was nasty, brutish and short, yet humans still found time for art. Tools dated to around one hundred thousand years ago have been found in Blombos Cave on the coast of South Africa: grindstones and hammer-stones for crushing a natural red ochre pigment, and abalone shells for mixing the powder with animal fat and urine to make a paint that would be used to decorate bodies, animal skins, and perhaps cave walls. The paintings made 15-35 millennia ago at Chauvet, Lascaux and Altamira attest to the genuine artistry that early humans achieved using the colours readily to hand: black charcoal, white chalk and ground bone, and the earthy reds and yellows of ochre, a mineral form of iron oxide.¹

But the classic red pigments don’t rely on iron minerals, the hue of which is not the glorious red of a sunset or of blood, but of the earth. For many centuries, the primary red of the palette came from compounds of two other metals: lead and mercury. The pigment known as “red lead” was made by first corroding lead with vinegar fumes, turning the surface white, and then heating that material in air. It was used in ancient China and Egypt, Greece and Rome.

For the Roman author Pliny, any bright red was called minium — but by the Middle Ages that Latin term was more or less synonymous with red lead, which was used extensively in manuscript illumination. From the verb miniare (to paint in minium) we get the term “miniature”: nothing to do, then, with the Latin minimus, “smallest”. The association today with a diminutive scale comes simply from the constraints of fitting a miniature on the manuscript page.

Illustration for the poet Herr Kristan von Hamle (folio 71v), from the Codex Manesse, an early 14th-century poetry anthology produced in Zurich — Source

Pliny’s best minium was a different red pigment, called cinnabar. This was a natural mineral: chemically, mercury sulfide. It was mined in the ancient world, partly for use as a red colourant but also because the liquid metal mercury could easily be extracted from it by heating. Mercury was thought to have almost miraculous properties: ancient Chinese alchemists in particular used it in medicines.

By the Middle Ages, alchemists and craftspeople knew how to make mercury sulfide artificially by combining liquid mercury and yellow, pungent sulfur (available in mineral form) in a sealed vessel and heating them. This process, which was described in the craftsman’s manual De diversis artibus (ca. 1122) by the German monk Theophilus, can give a finer-quality pigment than natural cinnabar. It was a procedure of great interest to alchemists too, as the Arabic scholars of the eighth and ninth centuries had claimed that mercury and sulfur were the basic ingredients of all metals — so that combining them might be a route to making gold. Theophilus had no such esoteric goal in mind; he just wanted a good red paint.

This “artificial cinnabar” became known by the name vermilion. The etymology is curious, and shows the confusing and treacherous flux of colour terms in an age when the hue of a substance seemed more significant than vague, pre-scientific notions of what its chemical identity was. It stems from the Latin vermiculum (“little worm”), since a bright red was once extracted from a species of crushed insect: not a paint pigment but a translucent dye of scarlet colour, arising from an organic (carbon-based) substance that the insects produce.

Such dyes were also known as kermes (from the Sanskrit kirmidja: “derived from a worm”), the etymological root of crimson. Because the insects that made it could be found on Mediterranean trees as clusters encrusted in a resin and resembling berries, the dyes might also be called granum, meaning grain. From this comes the term ingrained, implying a cloth dyed in grain: the dye was tenacious and did not wash out easily. “‘Tis in grain sir, ‘twill endure wind or weather”, Olivia assures Viola of a painting in Twelfth Night.²

Red dyes were associated with majesty, opulence, status and importance: they were the colours used for cardinals’ robes. Painters needed fine reds to render on board and canvas these dignitaries whose portraits they were increasingly commissioned to paint: Raphael’s Pope Julius II (1511-12) derives its aura of power partly from the brilliance of its reds.

Raphael, Portrait of Pope Julius II, 1511 — Source

Red lead and vermilion served well enough in the Middle Ages, but the increased demand for verisimilitude in the Renaissance meant that the orangeish hue of red lead or vermilion wasn’t adequate for depicting the purplish magnificence of these dyes on canvas. One alternative was to turn the dyes themselves into a paint pigment, by fixing their colourant molecules onto solid, colourless particles that could be dried and mixed with oils. This process involved some challenging chemistry, but even the ancient Egyptians knew how to do it. The basic idea is to precipitate a fine-grained white solid within a solution of the dye: the dye sticks to the particles, which dry to make a dark red powder. In the Middle Ages this process used the mineral alum, which can be converted to insoluble white aluminium hydroxide. The pigment made this way was called a lake, after the word (lac or lack) for a red resin exuded by insects indigenous to India and southeast Asia.

One of the best red lakes of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance was made from the dye extracted from the root of the madder plant. As lake manufacture was perfected, artists such as Titian and Tintoretto began to use these pigments mixed with oils, giving a slightly translucent paint that they would apply in many layers for a deep wine-red tint or wash over a blue to make purple.

Aside from the creation of red lakes, rather little about the painter’s reds changed from the Middle Ages until modern times. The Impressionists in the late nineteenth century made avid use of the new yellows, oranges, greens, purples, and blues that advances in chemistry had given them, yet their reds were not really any different to those of Raphael and Titian.

It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that a vibrant and reliable new red entered the repertoire. The discovery of the metal cadmium in 1817 immediately produced new yellow and orange pigments, but a deep red was made from this element only around the 1890s. The yellow and orange are both cadmium sulfide; but to get a red, some of the sulfur in this compound is replaced by the related element selenium. It wasn’t until 1910 that cadmium red became widely available as a commercial colour, and its production became more economical when the chemicals company Bayer modified the method in 1919.

Cadmium red is a rich, warm colour — and arguably the painter’s favourite red, except for the price. That was certainly true for Henri Matisse, for who red held a special valence — as his interiors in La Desserte (aka The Red Room, 1908), Red Studio (1911) and Large Red Interior (1948) attest. Of the second of these, the art critic John Russell said “It is a crucial moment in the history of painting: colour is on top, and making the most of it.”³

Henri Matisse, The Red Studio, 1911 — Source

Yellow

The ochres used by the artists of prehistory offered them not just rusty reds but a kind of natural yellow too. This yellow ochre was, however, the hue of tawny hair and wood, and not at all the thing for tulips or an emperor’s satin robes.

Brighter yellows were, from antiquity, made from synthetic compounds of tin, antimony, and lead. The ancient Egyptians knew how to combine lead with antimony ore, and in fact a natural mineral form of that yellow compound (lead antimonate) was also used as an artists’ material. It could be found on the volcanic slopes of Mount Vesuvius, which is how it came to be associated with Naples: from the seventeenth century a yellow composed of tin, lead, and antimony was often called “Naples yellow”. Other recipes for a yellow of similar appearance specified mixing the oxides of lead and tin. The ingredients weren’t always too clear, actually: when Italian medieval painters refer to giallorino, you can’t be sure if they mean a lead-tin or lead-antimony material, and it is unlikely that the painters recognised much distinction. Before modern chemistry clarified matters from the late eighteenth century, names for pigments might refer to hue regardless of composition or origin, or vice versa. It could all be very confusing, and from a name alone you couldn’t always be sure quite what you were getting — or, for the historian today, quite what a painter of long ago was using or referring to.

In some respects that’s still true now. A tube of modern “Naples yellow” won’t contain lead (shunned for its toxicity) or antimony, but might be a mixture of titanium white and a chromium-based yellow, blended to mimic the colour of the traditional material. There’s no harm in that; on the contrary, the paint is likely to be not only less poisonous but more stable, not to mention cheaper. But examples like this show how wedded artists’ colours are to the traditions from which they emerged. When you’re talking about vermilion, Indian yellow, Vandyke brown, orpiment, the name is part of the allure, hinting at a deep and rich link to the Old Masters.

One thing is for sure: you won’t find the gorgeous orpiment yellow on the modern painter’s palette (unless perhaps they are consciously, and in this case rather hazardously, using archaic materials). It is a deep, golden yellow, finer than Naples and lead-tin yellows. The name simply means “pigment of gold”, and the material goes back to ancient times: the Egyptians made it by grinding up a rare yellow mineral. But by the Middle Ages, the dangers of orpiment were well known. The Italian artist Cennino Cennini says in his handbook Il libro ‘dell arte, written in the late fourteenth century, that it is “really poisonous”, and advises that you should “beware of soiling your mouth with it”.⁴ That’s because it consists of the chemical compound arsenic sulfide.

Orpiment was one of the gorgeous but costly pigments imported to Europe from the East, in this case from Asia Minor. (In the early nineteenth century there were also imports from China, so that orpiment was sold in Britain as Chinese yellow.) Such alluring imports often arrived through the great trading centre of Venice, and orpiment was hard to acquire up in Northern Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance — unless, like the German artist Lucas Cranach, who ran a pharmacy, you had specialist connections to exotic materials. Some orpiment was made not from the natural mineral but artificially by the chemical manipulations of alchemists. This type can be spotted on old paintings today by studying the pigment particles under the microscope: those made artificially tend to be more similar in size and have rounded grains. From the eighteenth century it was common to refer to this artificial orpiment as King’s yellow. Rembrandt evidently had a supplier of the stuff, which has been identified in his Portrait of a Couple as Isaac and Rebecca (often called The Jewish Bride), painted around 1665.

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Portrait of a Couple as Isaac and Rebecca (known as The Jewish Bride), ca. 1665 — Source

If Dutch painters wanted a golden yellow like orpiment without the risk of poisoning, the Age of Empire supplied another option. From the seventeenth century, Dutch paintings (including those of Jan Vermeer) begin to feature a pigment known as Indian yellow, brought from the subcontinent by the trading ships of Holland. It arrived in the form of balls of dirty yellowish-green, although bright and untarnished in the middle, which bore the acrid tang of urine. What could this stuff be? Might it truly be made from urine in some way? Lurid speculation abounded; some said the key ingredient was the urine of snakes or camels, others that it was made from the urine of animals fed on turmeric.

The mystery seemed to be solved in the late nineteenth century by T. N. Mukharji, an author, civil servant, and curator at Kolkata's Indian Museum. Making enquiries in Kolkata, Mukharji was directed to a village on the outskirts of the city of Monghyr in Bihar province, allegedly the sole source of the yellow material. Here, he reported, he found that a group of cattle owners would feed their livestock only on mango leaves. They collected the cows’ urine and heated it to precipitate a yellow solid which they pressed and dried into lumps.

The cows (so the story goes) were given no other source of nutrition and so were in poor health. (Mango leaves might also contain mildly toxic substances.) In India such lack of care for cattle was sacrilegious, and legislation effectively banned the production of Indian yellow from the 1890s.

There has been debate about how much of this story is true, but the basic outline seems to stand up — the pigment has a complicated chemical make-up but contains salts of compounds produced from substances in mango leaves when they are metabolized in the kidneys.

Ragamala Rajput painting from northern India, ca. 1700, displaying heavy use of "Indian yellow" — Source

J. M. W. Turner, Teignmouth, 1812. One of many Turner paintings to use "Indian yellow", but one of only a few to feature the animal whose urine lies at the centre of the colour's legend — Source

If deadly arsenic-laden powers or cows’ urine did not appeal to artists, the choice of yellows was decidedly lacklustre — literally. There were yellow plant extracts, such as weld or saffron, that faded easily, or compounds of tin, lead and antimony with a pale, insipid quality. It’s not hard, then, to imagine the excitement of the French chemist Nicolas Louis Vauquelin when at the start of the nineteenth century he found he could make a vibrant yellow material by chemical alteration of a mineral from Siberia called crocoite.

This stuff was itself red — it was popularly called Siberian red lead, since there was truly lead in it. But in 1797 Vauquelin found there was something else too: a metallic element that no one had seen before, and which he named after the Greek word for colour, chrome or chromium.

The name was aptly chosen, because Vauquelin soon discovered that chromium could produce compounds with various bright colours. Crocoite is a natural form of lead chromate, and when Vauquelin reconstituted this compound artificially in the laboratory, he found it could take on a bright yellow form. Depending on exactly how he made it, this material could range from a pale primrose yellow to a deeper hue, all the way through to orange. Vauquelin figured by 1804 that these compounds could be artists’ pigments, and they were being used that way even by the time the French chemist published his scientific report on them five years later.

The pigment was expensive, and remained so even when deposits of crocoite as a source of chromium were discovered also in France, Scotland, and the United States. Chromium could also supply greens, most notably the pigment that became known as viridian and which was used avidly by the Impressionists and by Paul Cézanne.

The chromium colours play a major role in the explosion of prismatic colour during the nineteenth century — evident not just in Impressionism and its progeny (Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism, and the work of Van Gogh) but also in the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites. After the muted and sometimes downright murky shades of the eighteenth century — think of Joshua Reynolds’ muddy portraits and the brownish foliage of Poussin and Watteau — it was as if the sun had come out and a rainbow arced across the sky. Sunlight itself, the post-Impressionist Georges Seurat declared, held a golden orange-yellow within it.

Georges Seurat, Seascape (Gravelines), 1890 — Source

For their sun-kissed yellows, the Pre-Raphaelites and Impressionists did not need to rely on chromium alone. In 1817, the German chemist Friedrich Stromeyer noticed that zinc smelting produced a by-product with a yellow colour in which he discovered another new metallic element, named after the archaic term for zinc ore, cadmia: he called it cadmium. Two years later, while experimenting on the chemistry of this element, he found that it would combine with sulfur to make a particularly brilliant yellow — or, with some modification to the process, orange. By the mid-century, as zinc smelting expanded and more of the byproduct became available, these materials were offered for sale to artists as cadmium yellow and cadmium orange.

There’s a lesson in the cadmium pigments that applies to all colours, through all ages: they have often been byproducts of some other chemical process altogether, often discovered serendipitously as chemists and technologists pursue other goals — to make ointments, say, or soap, glass, or metals.

Or dyes. If you buy a tube labeled “Indian yellow” today, mangoes and cows had nothing to do with it. It probably contains a synthetic pigment that goes by the unromantic name of PY (pigment yellow) 139 — a carbon-based molecule that is one of the countless offshoots of the industry that arose in the nineteenth century to supply bright dyes for textiles. The first of these artificial dyes, discovered in 1856, was aniline mauve. A chemically related “aniline yellow” — a member of the important family of colorants called azo dyes — was sold commercially from 1863.

This manufacture of a galaxy of synthetic colours from petrochemicals seems a deeply unglamorous way to brighten the world today, compared to the age of King’s yellow, saffron, and Indian yellow. It could feel that what is saved in the purse is sacrificed in the romance. Maybe so. But artists are typically pragmatic people, as eager for novelty as they are attached to tradition. There has never been a time when they have not avidly seized on new sources of colour as soon as those appear, nor when they have not relied on chemistry to generate them. The collaboration of art and science, craft and commerce, chance and design, remains as vibrant as ever.

Blue

Blue has always spoken to something beyond ourselves: it is a colour that draws us into the void, the infinite sky. “Blue is the typical heavenly colour”, said Wassily Kandinsky in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912).⁵ And who would doubt it after seeing the ceiling of the Arena Chapel in Padua, painted by Giotto around 1305, a vault coloured like the last moments of a clear Italian twilight? Some cultures don’t even recognise the sky as having a hue at all, as if to acknowledge that no earthly spectrum can contain it. In the ancient Greek theory of colour, blue was a kind of darkness with just a little light added.

Detail featuring the Virgin Mary, from the ceiling of the Capella degli Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), in Padua, magnificently adorned with Giotto frescoes in ca. 1305. For the luminous blue throughout Giotto made use of ultramarine, which, due to its chemistry and expense, had to be applied on top of the already-dry fresco (fresco secco) — Source (Photo: José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro, CC BY-SA 4.0)

There’s a strong case to be made, then, that shades of midnight have always been the most treasured of artists’ colours. One of the earliest of the complex blue pigments made by chemistry was virtually an ancient industry in itself. The blue-glazed soapstone carvings known now as faience produced in the Middle East were traded throughout Europe by the second millennium BCE. Faience is typically now associated with ancient Egypt, but it was produced in Mesopotamia as long ago as 4500 BC, well before the time of the Pharaohs. It is a kind of glassy blue glaze, made by heating crushed quartz or sand with copper minerals and a small amount of lime or chalk and plant ash. The blue tint comes from copper — it is of the same family as the rich blue copper sulfate crystals of the school chemistry lab, although faience could range from turquoise-green to a deep dusk-blue. These minerals were typically those today called azurite and malachite, both of them forms of the compound copper carbonate. It’s not at all unlikely, although probably impossible to prove, that the manufacture of glass itself from sand and alkaline ash or mineral soda began in experiments with firing faience in a kiln somewhere in Mesopotamia.

Similar experimentation might have given rise to the discovery of the trademark blue pigment of the Egyptians, simply known as Egyptian blue or frit. The recipe, at any rate, is almost the same: sand, copper ore, and chalk or limestone. But unlike faience glaze, this material is not glassy but crystalline, meaning that the atoms comprising it form orderly arrays rather than a jumble. Producing the pigment requires some artisanal skill: both the composition and the kiln temperature must be just so, attesting to the fact that Egyptian chemists (as we’d call them today) knew their craft — and that the production of colours was seen as an important social task. After all, painting was far from frivolous: mostly it had a religious significance, and the artists were priests.

The minerals azurite and malachite make good pigments in their own right — the first more bluish, the second with a green tint. They just need to be ground and mixed with a liquid binder. In the Middle Ages that was generally egg yolk for painting on wooden panels, and egg white (called glair) for manuscript illumination. Good-quality azurite wasn’t cheap, but there were deposits of the mineral throughout Europe. To the English (who had no local sources) it was German blue; the Germans knew it as mountain blue (Bergblau).

Albrecht Altdorfer, Christ Taking Leave of His Mother, ca. 1520 — Source

A cheaper blue was the plant extract indigo, used as a dye since ancient times. Unlike most organic dyes — those extracted from plants and animals — it doesn’t dissolve in water, but can be dried and ground into a powder like a mineral pigment, and then mixed with standard binding agents (such as oils) to make a paint. It gives a dark, sometimes purplish blue, sometimes lightened with lead white; Cennino described a “sort of sky blue resembling azurite” made this way from “Baghdad indigo”.⁶ As the name suggests — the Latin indicum shares the same root as “India” — the main sources for a European medieval artist were in the East, although a form of indigo could also be extracted from the woad plant, grown in Europe.

But the artist who could find a patron with deep pockets would be inclined towards a finer blue than any of these. When the Italian traveller Marco Polo reached what is today Afghanistan around 1271, he visited a quarry on the remote headwaters of the Oxus River. “Here there is a high mountain”, he wrote, “out of which the best and finest blue is mined.”⁷ The region is now called Badakshan, and the blue stone is lapis lazuli, the source of the pigment ultramarine.

Cennino shows us how deeply ultramarine blue was revered in the Middle Ages, writing that it “is a colour illustrious, beautiful, and most perfect, beyond all other colours; one could not say anything about it, or do anything with it, that its quality would not still surpass”.⁸ As the name implies, it came from “beyond the seas” — imported, since around the thirteenth century, at great expense from the Badakshan mines.

Ultramarine was precious not just because it was a rare import, but because it was extremely laborious to make. Lapis lazuli is veined with the most gorgeous deep blue, but grinding it is typically disappointing: it turns greyish because of the impurities in the mineral. These impurities have to be separated from the blue material, which is done by kneading the powdered mineral with wax and washing the wax in water — the blue pigment flushes out into the water. This has to be done again and again to purify the pigment fully. The finest grades of ultramarine come out first, and the final flushes give only a low-quality, cheaper product, called ultramarine ash. The best ultramarine cost more than its weight in gold in the Middle Ages, and so it was usually used sparingly. To paint an entire ceiling with the colour, as Giotto did in the Arena Chapel, was lavish in the extreme.

Detail from "The Ascension" (folio 184r) from the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, ca. 1412 — Source

More often the medieval painter would use ultramarine only for the most precious components of a painting. That seems to be the real reason why most altarpieces of this period that depict the Virgin Mary show her with blue robes. For all that art theorists have attempted to explain the symbolic significance of the colour — the hue of humility or virtue, say — it was largely a question of economics. Or, you might say, of making precious materials a devotional offering to God.

You can compare azurite and ultramarine side by side in Titian’s explosion of Renaissance colour, Bacchus and Ariadne (1523). Here is that starry vault, turning to day before our eyes, and it is painted in ultramarine. So too is Ariadne’s robe, which dominates the scene. But the sea itself, on which we see Theseus’s boat receding from his abandoned lover, is azurite, with its greenish tint.

Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1523 — Source

Over the centuries, artists accumulated a few other blues too. Around 1704 a colour-maker named Johann Jacob Diesbach, working in the Berlin laboratory of alchemist Johann Conrad Dippel, was attempting to make a red lake pigment when he found that he had produced something quite different: a deep blue material. He had used a batch of the alkali potash in his recipe, supplied by Dippel — but which was contaminated with animal oil allegedly prepared from blood. The iron used by Diesbach reacted with the material in the oil to make a compound that — unusually for iron — is blue in colour. By 1710 it was being made as an artist’s material, generally known as Prussian blue.

It wasn’t entirely clear what had gone into this mixture, and so for some years the recipe for making Prussian blue was surrounded by confusion and secrecy. In 1762 one French chemist declared that “Nothing is perhaps more peculiar than the process by which one obtains Prussian blue, and it must be owned that, if chance had not taken a hand, a profound theory would be necessary to invent it.”⁹ But chance was a constant companion in the history of making colours. At any rate, Prussian blue was both attractive and cheap — a tenth of the cost of ultramarine — and it was popular with artists including Thomas Gainsborough and Antoine Watteau. It comprises some of the rich blue Venetian skies of Canaletto.

Canaletto, Piazza San Marco, ca. 1725 — Source

Another blue from the Renaissance and Baroque periods went by the name of smalt, which is not so very different from the cobalt-blue glass of Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres, ground to a powder. Its origins are obscure, but may well come out of glass-making technology; one source attributes the invention to a Bohemian glassmaker of the mid-sixteenth century, although in fact smalt appears in earlier paintings. Cobalt minerals were found in silver mines, where their alleged toxicity (actually cobalt is only poisonous in high doses, and trace amounts are essential for human health) saw them named after “kobolds”, goblin-like creatures said to haunt these subterranean realms and torment miners. Natural cobalt ores such as smaltite were used since antiquity to give glass a rich blue colour, and smalt was produced simply by grinding it up — not too finely, because then the blue becomes too pale as more light is scattered by the particles. As a result of its coarse grains, smalt was a gritty material and not easy to use.

Some art historians make no distinctions between this “cobalt blue” and those that were given the name in the nineteenth century. But the latter were much finer, richer pigments, made artificially by systematic chemistry. In the late eighteenth century the French government asked the renowned chemist Louis-Jacques Thénard to look for a synthetic substitute for expensive ultramarine. After consulting potters, who used a cobalt-tinted glassy blue glaze, in 1802 Thénard devised a strongly coloured pigment with a similar chemical constitution: technically, the compound cobalt aluminate. Cobalt yielded several other colours besides deep blue. In the 1850s a cobalt-based yellow pigment called aureolin became available in France, followed soon after by a purple pigment called cobalt violet: the first ever pure purple pigment apart from a few rather unstable plant extracts. A sky blue pigment called cerulean blue, a compound of cobalt and tin, was a favourite of some of the post-Impressionists.

Claude Monet, La Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877 — Source

But what artists craved most of all was ultramarine itself — if only it wasn’t so expensive. Even by the mid-nineteenth century it remained costly, which is why the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti caused much dismay (not to mention added expense) when he upset a big pot of ultramarine paint while working on a mural for Oxford University.

By Rossetti’s time, however, artists did at last have an alternative — it’s just that several of them had not yet learnt to trust it. As chemical knowledge and prowess burgeoned in the early nineteenth century, bringing new pigments such as cobalt blue onto the market, it seemed within the realms of possibility to try to make ultramarine artificially.

It was a prize well worth striving for, because pigment manufacture had become big business. The manufacture of colours and paints wasn’t supplying artists; there was now a taste for colour in the world at large, in particular for interior decoration. Factories were set up in the nineteenth century to make and grind pigments. Some sold them in pure form to the artist’s suppliers, who would then mix up paints for their customers from pigment and oil. But some pigment manufacturers, such as Reeves and Winsor & Newton in England, began to provide oil paints ready-made; from the 1840s these were sold in collapsible tin tubes, which could be sealed to prevent paints from drying out and could be conveniently carried for painting out of doors.

Pages from a Winsor & Newton catalogue, ca. 1895 — Source

Mindful of the importance of the pigment market, in 1824 the French Society for Encouragement of National Industry offered a prize for the first practical synthesis of ultramarine. It is a complicated compound to make — unusually for such inorganic pigments, the blue colour comes not from a metal but from the presence of the element sulphur in the mineral crystals. This composition of ultramarine was first deduced by two French chemists in 1806, offering clues about what needed to go into a recipe for making it. In 1828, an industrial chemist named Jean-Baptiste Guimet in Toulouse described a way to make the blue material from clay, soda, charcoal, sand and sulfur, and he was awarded the prize (despite a rival claim from Germany). In England this synthetic ultramarine was subsequently widely known as French ultramarine, and Guimet was able to sell it at a tenth of the cost of the natural pigment. By the 1830s there were factories making synthetic ultramarine throughout Europe.

Artists looked upon this substitute with considerable caution, however. Ultramarine still retained some of its old mystique and majesty, and painters were reluctant to believe that it could be turned out on an industrial scale. Perhaps the synthetic variety was inferior — might it fade or discolour? Actually synthetic ultramarine is (unlike some synthetic pigments) very stable and reliable, but J. M. W. Turner was evidently still wary of it when, in the mid-century, he was about to help himself to the ultramarine on another artist’s palette during one of the “finishing days” at the Royal Academy, where artists put their final touches to paintings already hung for display on the walls. Hearing the cry that this ultramarine was “French”, Turner declined to dab into it.

But by the end of the century, synthetic ultramarine was a standard ingredient of the palette: small wonder, given that it could be a hundred or even a thousand times cheaper than the natural variety. Synthetic ultramarine is the pigment in Yves Klein’s patented International Klein Blue, which he used for a series of monochrome paintings in the 1950s and early 60s. But ultramarine never looked like this before — at least, not on the canvas.

Yves Klein, IKB 191, 1962, one of a number of works Klein painted with International Klein Blue — Source (Not public domain)

Klein noticed that pigments tend to look richer and more gorgeous as a dry powder than when mixed with a binder — another consequence of how light gets transmitted and refracted — and he sought to capture this appearance in a paint. In 1955 he found his answer in a synthetic fixative resin called Rhodopas M60A, made by the Rhone-Poulenc chemicals company, which could be thinned to act as a binder without impairing the chromatic strength of the pigment. This gave the paint surface a matt, velvety texture. Klein collaborated with Edouard Adam, a Parisian chemical manufacturer and retailer of artists’ materials, to develop a recipe for binding ultramarine in this resin, mixed with other solvents.

Even in the modern era, then, some artists were still depending on chemical assistance and expertise. Despite the profusion of new pigments with complicated and recondite chemical formulations, the intimate relationship of painters to their materials has not been entirely severed.

Notes

Show Notes

1. During the Industrial Revolution, chemists perfected a method for making iron oxide artificially, allowing the red colour to be more precisely controlled. It was an offshoot of the manufacture of sulphuric acid, an important ingredient for textile bleaching. This red substance was sold to artists as “Mars red”, an echo of the old alchemical term for iron compounds.
2. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 1, scene 5. https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=12night&Act=1&Scene=5#a1,s5
3. John Russell, The Meanings of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981), 67.
4. Cennino d’Andrea Cennini, The Craftsman's Handbook: The Italian “Il libro dell'arte”, transl. D. V. Thompson (New York: Dover, 1954) 28–29.
5. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, transl. M. T. H. Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977), 38.
6. Cennini, Craftsman’s Handbook, 36.
7. Marco Polo, Il milione, ed. D. Ponchiroli (Turin: Einaudi, 1954), 40.
8. Cennini, Craftsman’s Handbook, 36.
9. Jean Hellot, “Sur la préparation du Bleu de Prusse”, Histoire del’Académie Royale des Sciences, avec les Mémoires de mathématique &de physique pour la même année MDCCLVI (Paris: 1762), 53–9.

Public Domain Works

• Il libro dell'arte (The Book of the Art)
  Cennino Cenninica. 1400
  • Internet Archive 1844 translation by Mary Philadelphia Merrifield
  • Internet Archive 1922 translation and notes by Christiana Herringham
  Texts
• De diversis artibus (On Various Arts)
  Theophilus Presbyterca. 1122
  • Internet Archive 1847 English translation and notes by Robert Hendrie
  Texts
• Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours
  Robert Boyle1664
  • Project Gutenberg
  Texts
• The Painter's Companion, or, A Treatise on Colours
  John Hoofnail1823
  • Internet Archive
  Texts
• The Compleat Gentleman
  Henry Peacham1622
  • EEBO
  Texts
• Theory of Colours
  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1810
  1840 English translation
  
  • Internet Archive
  • Project Gutenberg
  Texts

Further Reading

• Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color

  By Philip Ball

  A fascinating historical study into how art and technology have interacted through the ages to bring us art in colour.

  More Info and Buy
  
• An Atlas of Rare and Familiar Colour: The Harvard Art Museums' Forbes Pigment Collection

  By Kingston Trinder

  Visually excavating Harvard Art Museums’ extraordinary collection, this book examines the contained pigments and artefacts ― their provenance, composition, symbology and application. It also explores the larger related fields of chromatics, the historical narratives of art and chemistry, and the innovations with which we have sought to better illustrate our aesthetic and expressive compulsions.

  More Info and Buy
  
• Chromatopia: An Illustrated History of Color

  By David Coles

  This origin story of history’s most vivid color pigments is perfect for artists, history buffs, science lovers, and design fanatics. Spanning from the ancient world to modern leaps in technology, and vibrantly illustrated throughout, this book will add a little chroma to anyone’s understanding of the history of colors.

  More Info and Buy
  
• The Secret Lives of Colour

  By Kassia St Clair

  The unusual stories of the 75 most fascinating shades, dyes and hues. From blonde to ginger, the brown that changed the way battles were fought to the white that protected against the plague, Picasso's blue period to the charcoal on the cave walls at Lascaux.

  More Info and Buy
  

Books link through to Amazon who will give us a small percentage of sale price (ca. 4.5%). Discover more recommended books in our dedicated PDR Recommends section of the site.

Philip Ball is a freelance science writer and broadcaster. He worked previously at Nature for over 20 years, first as an editor for physical sciences and then as a Consultant Editor. His writings on science for the popular press have covered topical issues ranging from cosmology to the future of molecular biology. His books include Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (Penguin, 2002), Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen (University Of Chicago Press, 2015) and most recently, How To Grow a Human (William Collins, 2019).

Categories

• Art & Illustrations
• Science & Medicine

Tags

color5colour8color theory2colour theory3painting11art7chemistry4

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