Colours, therefore, should be understood as subjective cultural creations: you could no more meaningfully secure a precise universal definition for all the known shades than you could plot the coordinates of a dream. [loc. 272]
Seventy-five short essays about the cultural, social and scientific history of 75 colours, from gamboge to heliotrope. St Clair weaves in a vast array of facts, some of which surprised me: 'There is evidence that in the Middle Ages blue was considered hot, even the hottest of colours'; 'Leonhard Fuchs never saw the plant [fuchsia] that now bears his name'; 'French dyers could not touch [indigo], on pain of death, until 1737'. (Copious footnotes and a bibliography support each assertion.) St Clair has a knack for the vignette. Some of the essays examine the history of a specific dye; others explore the associations of a particular hue. (The chapter on 'Kelly Green' focuses on St Patrick.) There's a lot about the history of trading in dyes, about various artists' use of colour, and about the chemical discoveries that led to vivid modern dyes. And there's a surprising amount of etymology: for example, the word 'miniature' derives from the name of an orange-red pigment, minium, via the word for the person applying it -- the miniator.
This was a good read on my Kindle, but oh! the joy of opening it in the Kindle phone app and discovering that the grey bars that frame each chapter are, in fact, bars of the relevant colour! (I'm slightly ashamed that it took me so long to twig...) Apparently the physical book has border-stripes of the colour, so that you can flip through to the colour you're interested in. There's also a brilliant, and very useful, 'Glossary of other interesting colours' at the end, from Amethyst ('violet or purple, from the precious stone') to Wheat ('pale gold') -- again, with coloured circles to illustrate each hue.
Absolutely fascinating, and highly recommended as a book to dip into from time to time. Get the physical book, though, unless you're reading the ebook on a colour device.
Fulfils the ‘essay collection’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge (2023).
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