Color: A Natural History of the Palette
by Victoria Finlay
First Posted May 2014
I refer back to Color so frequently that I am surprised it took me this long to migrate it from goodreads. The story of knowing the historical trade routes of physical materials and applying that knowledge to correctly date surviving antiquities maps onto the concept of expertise in my mind in a perfect one-to-one. I truly cannot believe it is deployed in this review to support how I would have told everyone at a party that cochineal is squished bugs if I had known.
I almost wish this review was shorter so it could be a cleaner reference when I use it to mean subject/matter mastery. Ah 2014, my year of pretending I wrote for The New Yorker. Was I….secretly obnoxiously pretentious?
Brooklyn is a decently long trip from my apartment, even if you know your local-express-local swaps. Two weekends in a row I left the thirty-four square miles that I voluntarily strand myself on: the first, for Champs, my favorite diner; the second, for a barbeque in someone’s yard. Imagine; greenery unattached to the public domain—how decadent. It was pretty fantastic to be in an outdoor spot that didn’t contain a thousand other people vying for the same five-by-five patch of grass and sky. And the stomach is the impetus of all my travels, so between the views and the food, I will call both ventures a success. These extended periods on the train also gave me a few stretches to actually get into Color: A Natural History of the Palette after dragging my feet through the first forty pages.
Color starts off with the surprisingly weak Ochre chapter. It sets a rather monotonous (monotone-ous? eh?) pace—I didn’t find the author’s trip to the Australian outback gripping, and I didn’t pick out much else that was interesting to me, either. It lacks the panoply of tidbits and insights that stuff the later chapters with life:
At a place called Botogol Peak, Alibert found the world’s richest seam of blacklead, just a graphite pebble’s throw from the Chinese border. English scientists reluctantly conceded that it was as good as the Borrowdale supply [in England] which had almost run out. French scientists, naturally enough, testified that it was much better, and the Americans agreed.
Suddenly everyone wanted “Chinese” pencils. It was therefore a brilliant marketing move a few decades later when mass-produced pencils in America began to be painted bright yellow. They copied the color of Manchu imperial robes, and symbolized the romance of the Orient, while suggesting that the pencils came from that valuable Alibert mine, even though they probably did not.
I can understand, functionally, that ochre has chronological precedent—the Australian cave paintings, done with ochre, are dated almost thirty thousand years ago—but to frontload the book with the weakest chapter was a hard sell. Perhaps the editors believed that people would jump around, selecting the colors they wanted to read at the time rather than approach the work as a monolithic rainbowed entity. Also worth considering is the explanation that this chapter is fascinating to most readers and I lack a point of entry for this information to impact me. Weighed against the strength of the rest of the book, the fault of failing to find any of the details about indigenous Australians accessible or interesting likely lies with me rather than with the author.
But by the time I made it to the chapter about red, though, I was hooked. It became so packed with information that it was nearly impossible to put down. I wasn’t as interested in the travelogue aspects as I was in discovering what piece of color-contextual history would next be unearthed:
The Spaniards brought logwood, or “campeachy” wood, in some of the first ships arriving back from the New World. It was marketed as a good ingredient for both red and black dyes, although in England it was not used much until about 1575. And almost as soon as it was used, it was banned. Parliament claimed it was “because the colors produced from it were of a fugacious character,” and pretended they were looking after the interests of the users, although the fact that it represented profit for the Spaniards cannot have helped. The law banning logwood dyeing was passed in 1581; the sea battle of the Armada occurred in 1588.
Then in 1673 the antilogwood laws were repealed. Parliament now claimed it was because “the ingenious industry of modern times hath taught the dyers of England the art of fixing the colour made of logwood.” But a cynic might wonder whether it was not something to do with the fact that the British suddenly had access to the natural logwood plantations of Central America, and needed a home market for their new resource.
I’m not sure in what other context someone would be able to discuss the realpolitik behind the British logwood laws, or why someone would ever learn about it. But the fascination lies less in the details than in the main thrust of history—that the realities of mercenary mercantilism formed the idealist propaganda of protectionist nationalism five hundred years ago.
Color is at its best when it combines the dissemination of esoteric fact with the oblique historical context that surrounds, informs and often directs the path of a society:
The various rules about [purple] over the centuries are bizarre and fairly confusing. In some reigns (Nero’s was one of them, but the fifth-century Christian emperors Valentian, Theodosius and Arcadius were even more vehement) almost nobody could wear mollusk-dyed purple, on pain of execution. Sometimes (as in the time of Septimus Severus and Aurelian in the third century) women could wear it, but only very special men like generals could join them. In other reigns—and Diocletian in the fourth century was particularly enthusiastic—everybody had to wear as much purple as possible, with the money going straight into the imperial coffers.
Color is everywhere, but why that particular color is en vogue or even simply available is often the most fascinating story.
When a can of grapefruit-flavored wheat beer was making its rounds at that picturesque Brooklynite barbeque, I would like to say my first thoughts were about how and why it was a soft, foamy red—not the standard-beer murky golde. The ideas within Color hadn’t quite taken over my brain completely, so when I noticed the hue, it was only in hindsight; when I opened the book for the uptown trip back home, I began a nearly twenty page discussion of cochineal, the South American insect used to make red dye. Cochineal, the same term that was displayed on the can of beer, to which no one had a definite response. Someone even remarked on how prominent “contains cochineal” was on the can—slightly out of place, like a Surgeon General’s warning label on a pack of cigarettes—it certainly drew attention. But while the answer was, as always, only a googled cellphone tap away, something about weekend barbeques made us all eschew technological research—no matter how mundane—and just enjoy the sun. Perhaps we’re old.
Had my train arrived in Brooklyn a page and a half later, the word cochineal would have been floating around in my head after it made its first triumphant appearance in the pages of Color. Oh, the lament for a missed opportunity; would I have been able to resist the ineluctable draw of erudite kismet; learning and being asked about the same obscure term within the same hour? To don the mantle of the serpent—destroyer of innocence—and illuminate an abyss perhaps best kept in shadow; in this instance, that everyone was about to imbibe an aesthetic trickle of bug blood? It is my belief that someone at that party knew the mysteries of cochineal yet was altruistic enough to keep the rest of us in blessed ignorance. Noblesse oblige is alive and well and living in Park Slope.
I doubt my self-control would have been strong enough to avoid blurting out the truth—even the author acknowledges the temptation of spewing forth fascinating but useless facts:
In the national arts library at the Victoria and Albert Museum I read how the cobalt quality varied throughout the Ming dynasty. The finest blue was in the mid-fifteenth century Xuande reign, while under the emperors Zhenge and Jiajing a hundred years later, porcelain-makers were using an excellent violet glaze. Meanwhile—and bear with me on the dates here—the “blue and white” from the Chenghua (late fifteenth) and Wanli (late sixteenth) reigns was virtually “gray and white,” after those emperors imposed trade sanctions against Central Asia. With the details scribbled down in my notebook I went down, with some excitement, to the Chinese gallery and tested it out. To my delight I could now tell immediately, by color alone and from a distance, when a Ming vase was probably fired. The possibilities for pretentious expertise were endless.
When I write reviews of non-fiction, I tend to excerpt the facts and strip them of their commentary. Unless the point I am reinforcing is authorial presence in the narrative or something similar. The dry banter throughout Color adds an immense value, and the above illustrates how a likable author can carry the reader through any subject. The minutia is interesting but partially irrelevant [note from 2022, I cannot believe I called it “irrelevant” when it has been my most-cited concept over the last eight years!!]; what is most fascinating is the basic concept that color and creation can be tied to history through physical production. You can look at art and artifacts and see politics, economics, or trade if you know where to look. The blues of later Ming vases are weak because of trade sanctions against the parts of central Asia where the best cobalt mines were located. Will future archaeologists be able to parse the global trade of another material—say, the coltan content in cell phone disposal areas?—to uncover lingering colonial imperialisms, the reach of global capitalism, or the state of central African politics?
While I cannot quite thrill onlookers with distance Ming vase identification—and I’ve vaulted the truth of cochineal, never to be uttered—woe betide the next fool who broaches the subject of Robin Hood with me around:
The legends of Robin Hood and his merry men, for example, describe them as wearing “Lincoln Green.” I had always imagined it to be for camouflage, but the truth is they were wearing it to show off. The green cloth was the pride of Lincoln, made of woad (a blue plant) and weld (a yellow one). It was also called “gaudy green,” and it was expensive. Wearing it was a way for the legendary bandit to laugh at his Nottingham rivals and show how he was stealing from the rich to clothe the poor.
I’m similarly poised with the derivation of scarlet:
A fashion statement in medieval Europe was to wear clothes made from a new cloth, imported from central Asia. The cloth was called “scarlet” and it was the pashmina of its time: vastly popular, frequently imitated but at its highest quality extremely expensive—at least four times the price of ordinary cloth. But the curious thing is, scarlet was not always red. Sometimes it was blue or green or occasionally black, and the reason that in English “scarlet” now means “red” and not “chic-textile-that-only-socialites-can-afford-but-which-we-all-aspire-to” is because of kermes.
By the Middle Ages, kermes was one of the most expensive dyes in Europe. And what else would the dyers use for their most valuable textile? There was madder, a plant root, which was relatively cheap. It was fine for carpets and ordinary people’s clothes, and it was reasonably light fast. But it tended toward brown, and did not have that rich crimson hue that was so valued. Greens and blues had their fans, but ultimately the most valuable cloth deserved the most valuable dye, and kermes won out.
While the time between learning these cocktail facts and bon mots and an appropriate unforced opportunity to share them is typically long enough to have forgotten the exact details—it took me two and a half years from learning why the Tappen Zee Bridge spans a particularly wide point of the Hudson to find a natural opening in a conversation to introduce that information—you don’t need to impress others with an exactitude and plethora of tiny facts to have those selfsame facts slowly impact your view of the world writ large.
The seemingly trivial and pedantic details that good non-fiction books impart may not truly matter with specificity—outside of Jeopardy!, showing off at barbeques, or during a thesis defense—but the thousand thousand petty details make up all things in life. It is nice to be reminded that—despite the fear of misremembering the tetchy particulars that the omnipresent threat of the pop quiz instills—sometimes the details matter less than the gist. A dozen books from now, I won’t remember whether it was Valentian or Aurelius who restricted purple, but I will remember the sense of time and history syncing up, of color as a thing unto itself: fought over; monopolized; traded and sold. I will remember color comes from and places and people. And I will remember what a wonderful experience Color was to read.