Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox
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Average rating4
Part travelogue, part narrative history, 'Colour' unlocks the history of the colours of the rainbow, and reveals how paints came to be invented, discovered, traded and used. This remarkable and beautifully written book remembers a time when red paint was really the colour of blood, when orange was the poison pigment, blue as expensive as gold, and yellow made from the urine of cows force-fed with mangoes. It looks at how green was carried by yaks along the silk road, and how an entire nation was founded on the colour purple. Exciting, richly informative, and always surprising, 'Colour' lifts the lid on the historical palette and unearths an astonishing wealth of stories about the quest for colours, and our efforts to understand them.
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Having previously read Victoria Finlay's Buried Treasure: Travels Through The Jewellery Box, and enjoying that a lot, I was looking forward to what I expected to be a similar book on colour. This was no disappointment.
Finlay pulls together a book about colour - primarily dyes, paints & pigments - arranged in chapters of colour (Ochre, Black & Brown, White, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet) and within each skips about a bit with some travel, some history, some science (lite), some modern usage etc, but all focussed around that colour.
Other readers were put off that the travel aspects, or the non-scientific content, or the sometimes biographic content, but for me I was fine with the balance. I suspect without aspects of all these it would be a more impersonal, scientific book which would likely interest me less.
Prussian blue, ultramarine, cadmium red, Indian yellow, malachite green, cobalt,burnt sienna, Chartres blue Flemish white and cochineal red... for me these all conjure up mystical, old world colours I know almost nothing about, although the names are familiar enough. Finlay researches historic documentation, explores, visiting locations where possible, talks to people. She covers a lot of ground (my shelves are the country list of where she visited), went to a bunch of interesting places. She references artists, artworks, takes note from historic forgers, talks to modern artists using historic materials. She explores the many paints and pigments that are dangerous (poisonous or carcinogenic) and those that were secret or ‘lost' and talks to people who have rediscovered those secrets.
Wile the book runs to almost 500 pages (although around 100 are bibliography, notes & index), it could probably have been 50-75 pages shorter by the I was finished. After Ochre, Black & white and working through Roy G. Biv, I felt violet was a bit of a drag...
If sort-of-science, anecdotes, travels and exploration, research and history all mixed up peak your interest, then I would recommend both this and Buried Treasure (in fact, I liked Buried Treasure a little more).
4 stars
