Viscountess Marianne Margaret Compton Cust Alford

Cautley, “Emblems,” p. 21.

It is my intention to confine myself to the discussion of colour, in as far as it belongs to the dyes of textiles and the materials for embroidery. I will adhere as closely as I can to this part of what is a great and most interesting subject—one which the science of to-day has opened out, and by the test of experiment, cleared of erroneous theories; revealing to us all its beauty and fitness for the use and delight of man.

As through all ages the eye has been gradually educated to appreciate harmony in colour, so dissonance—that is, what errs against harmony—hurts us, without apparently a sufficient reason; and we have to seek the causes of our sensations in the scientific works and lectures of Professor Tyndall and others.

There is no doubt that the appreciation of colour has belonged in different degrees to the eye of every animal, but especially to that of man, ever since light first painted the flowers of the field. The eye is created to see colour, as well as form. But we know that men, being accustomed to acquiesce in the powers with which they find themselves gifted by nature, enjoy and use them, long before they begin to study, classify, and name them.

When we recollect that the circulation of the blood was not known within the last three hundred years, and that Albert DÜrer painted the skeleton Death on the bridge of Lucerne, with one bone in the upper and one in the lower arm, we shall be surprised to find that the ancients had named the colours they saw, with some degree of descriptive and scientific precision. The word “purple,” for instance, covered a multitude of tints, which had not as yet been differentiated, either in common parlance or in poetry,[283] though as articles of commerce the purple tints had been early distinguished.

What names have we now, in this present advanced day, for defining tastes or smells? We say that something smells like a violet, or a rose, or a sea breeze, or a frosted cabbage. We say a smell is nice or nasty, that a taste is delicious or nauseous; but beyond calling it sweet or sour, we have no descriptive words for either smells or tastes, whereas the nations who traded in the materials for dyes exchanged their nomenclatures, which we can recognize from the descriptive remarks of different authors.

Colour, as an art, was born in those lands which cluster round the eastern shores of the Mediterranean—the northern coasts of Syria and Arabia, and the isles of Greece. All art grew in that area, and all its adjuncts and materials there came to perfection, though often imported from more southern and eastern sources.[284]

E. Curtius says that the science of colour came into Europe with the Phoenicians and accompanied the worship of Astarte. This, of course, applies to artistic textiles, as the Greeks had already acquired the art of dyeing for plain weaving. Numa, in his regulations for necessary weaving, refers also to colour. The Italians therefore must at that time have made some advance in the art, especially the Etruscans.[285]

The infinity of variation in colour is difficult to imagine. The chemists of the Gobelins have fixed and catalogued 4480 tones. Besides, we must not forget that it is now all but ascertained that the same colour is probably appreciated differently by nearly every eye.[286]

How the eye accepts colours and conveys them to the mind is still a question in dispute, though the theories of Tyndall, Helmholz, Hering, Charpentier, and others, aided by experiments, are drawing ascertained facts into a circle, which will ere long be complete, and the mysteries of colour may be ascertained.

Probably the effects of colour on educated minds are as various as the tints and shades of tones of the many substances which receive them,—reflected from all surrounding objects, blazing in light, or softened by shadow,—fresh and glowing, or permanently faded—shining with modern varnish, or sobered by the dust of ages.

It is the art of the colourist, whether he paints pictures, or dyes textiles, or embroiders them, to reduce the tints of the prism to an endurable and delightful lowness of tone, while preserving as far as possible all their light and purity.

Prismatic colours are so radiantly glorious, that when we see the rainbow in the sky it is each time a joyful surprise. The most stolid natures are moved by it; we have even seen our dog staring at it.

When, in experiments on light, the shafts of colour are thrown on the wall, they are greeted with shouts of admiration; but these glories are veiled to us by the fact that the eye cannot dissect the prismatic ray without the assistance of the instrument that has revealed it. This is a merciful arrangement; for we are not fitted to live in a prismatic display, any more than in a continuity of lightning flashes. We should go mad or blind if exposed to either.

Science has shown us the perfect beauty of colour without form, the soothing pleasures of its harmonies, and the delightful surprises of its contrasts. From the glimpses we have of its nature and laws, we may hope for fresh inspiration for the art of the colourist.

Though it is true that each eye, even when educated, retains its own special appreciation of the colours that gratify its seeing nerve, yet there are certain standards which give almost universal pleasure.[287]

The blind and the colour-blind must remain exceptions for all time; and there are many gradations in colour-blindness, till we come to the normal class of seeing eyes; and passing them by, reach to those few men, gifted beyond all others with that fund of sensitive eye-nerve and mental power, which enables them to create new thoughts in colour.[288] Titian and his school arose from the inherited science and tradition, and carefully prepared pigments of his immediate predecessors, acting on an exceptional eye and mind, imbued with the splendours of the early mornings and the sunsets in the glowing atmosphere of Venice.

Colour has long been supposed to convey certain impressions to the mind. The absence of all colour, which we call “black,” symbolizes in dress, grief, pride, or dignity; according as it drapes the mourner, the Spanish grandee, or the priest.[289] Yellow being the colour of the sun and of corn and gold, represents riches, generosity, and light. Red stands between the dark and the lively colours, and represents warmth and animation, dignity, splendour, life, love, and joy.

The expression of blue is that of purity. It recalls the distant sky, the calm ocean, and has an immortal and celestial character. It ascends to the highest and descends to the lowest tones of chiaro-oscuro. Nothing so nearly approaches pure white as the palest blue; nothing is so nearly black as the darkest.

Green has been assigned by nature the place of the universal background. It is the complementary colour of red, softening and assimilating it by reflected shadows, and setting off the glory of every flower and fruit. The expression of green is gaiety and modesty, light and tenderness, shadow and repose, to both the eye and the mind.[290]

It must be allowed that it is by the earliest associations of the individual, or by those derived from the family, the tribe or the nation, that colours are connected with such attributes welded by art and time into traditional meanings, which they absolutely possess,[291] and from which fashion cannot disconnect them; such, for instance, is the royalty of purple.

The word purple is so indiscriminately used as a poetic epithet, rather than as a distinctive appellation, that much confusion has been caused by it. Historically, among the Persians, Greeks, and Romans it appears to have been simply the royal colour, varying from the purest blue, through every shade of violet, down to the deepest crimson. Sometimes, poetically, “purple” seems to have described only a surface. The breezy or stormy sea was purple; the sky was purple; the hyacinthine locks of Narcissus, the rosy lips of Venus were purple. As a textile, velvet was purple, even when it was white.[292]

The epithets “purple” and “wine-coloured” are often bestowed on the Mediterranean Sea, and are justified by its occasional hue:—

Professor Tyndall suggests that the soft green of the sea, shadowed by clouds, assumes a subjective purple hue. Homer must have observed this before he became blind. Pliny gives us much information about this colour; he enumerates the different sea-shores and coasts, Egyptian, Asiatic, and European, whence came the shell-fish (the murex and pelagia) that produced the so-called Tyrian purple dyes.[293]

He says that Romulus wore the purple, and that the dyed garments, all purple, were sacred to the gods in those days. After saying that it was still a colour of distinction, he continues: “Let us be prepared to excuse the frantic passion for purple, though we are impelled to inquire why such a high value is placed on the produce of this fish, seeing that in the dye the smell of it is offensive, and the colour, of a greenish hue, resembles the sea when tempestuous.” He describes purples[294] as being differently coloured according as to whether these “conchylia” inhabited the sea mud, the reefs, or the pebbly shores, the last being the most valuable.[295] This purple, said to have been imported from the coasts of Tyre, was till lately sold in Rome for its weight in gold; it gave the burning rosy red dye of the Cardinal’s robes, and was called “Porpora encarnadina,” purple incarnadine. It is full of light and freshness, and never fades; in fact, it has all the qualities ascribed to it by Pliny. It intensifies in the light.[296]

After purple, scarlet was the colour most esteemed by the ancients. The Israelites must have carried with them the dyes which coloured the hangings, woven or embroidered, belonging to the sanctuary in the wilderness, of which the outer covering of rams’ skins was dyed scarlet, and was probably of the nature of red morocco.[297]

There was the mineral dye, (cinnabar or red sulphate of mercury), and the insect dye; the first was probably used in mural painting. It is translated in our Bible as vermilion, in the account given by Jeremiah of a “house, ceiled with cedar, and painted with vermilion.”[298] Also Ezekiel gives us another instance of house-painting in vermilion.[299] Homer, who as a rule does not describe colouring, says the Greek ships were painted red.

It is probable that cinnabar was tempered, by admixture of white or other colours, for the monochrome painting of the Egyptians and Greeks. It was called by the Greeks miltos, by the Romans minium.

The dye of the red portions of the funeral tent of Queen Isi-em-Kheb, Shishak’s mother-in-law, is found by analysis to be composed of hematite (peroxyde of iron) tempered with lime. This is a beautiful pink red.[300]

The mineral red now called vermilion must have borrowed its name from the insect dye which the Greeks and Romans called “kermes.” In the Middle Ages the dye from the kermes was still called “vermiculata,” of which the word vermilion is a literal translation.

We should be fortunate if we could find how the Greeks and Romans prepared the cinnabar for mural painting, of which we find remnants in ruins and tombs—a lovely and pure red, with a tender bloom on it like a fragment of the rainbow, and not the slightest shade of yellow. One of the most beautiful specimens of this scarlet that I am acquainted with, is a small drinking-cup (a “rhyton”) at the British Museum, in the form of a sphinx, with a white face, gilded hair, and a little cap of pure cinnabar, which is so soft in tone that it suggests the texture of scarlet velvet.

Cochineal, which was first brought from America in the sixteenth century, has now replaced almost every other scarlet dye for textiles.

Crimson is once mentioned in Chronicles as karmel,[301] which may mean the dye of the kermes insect;[302] and from this the word crimson is legitimately derived. Whether the scarlet coupled with it is a vegetable, mineral, or insect colour, we have no means of ascertaining. “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red as crimson, they shall be as wool.”[303]

From what Pliny says, it appears that some green dyes were produced from a green clay; others from metals. Copper furnished the most beautiful shades.

Blue has always been extracted from indigo. Pliny tells us that the Phoenicians brought it from Barbarike, in the Indies, to Egypt; and he quotes the “Periplus” on this subject. He gives an amusing report that indigo is a froth collected round the stems of certain reeds; but he was aware of its characteristic property, that of emitting a beautiful purple vapour when submitted to great heat; and he says it smells like the sea. The Egyptians likewise extracted blues from copper. Yellow was anciently, in Egypt, sometimes a vegetable and sometimes a mineral dye. Browns and blacks were prepared from several substances, especially pine wood and the contents of tombs burned into a kind of charcoal.

We find that lime, chalk, white lead, and other mineral substances were employed by the ancients for the different approaches to dazzling whiteness. That of the lily, the emblem of purity, can only be emulated in textile or pictorial art by opaque substances reduced as much as possible by bleaching to the last expression of the colour of the raw material. Nothing that is transparent can be really white, as colours are seen through it, as well as the reflected lights on the two surfaces.

In painting, we can produce the effect of whiteness in different ways, leading by the gradation of tender colours and shadows up to a high light. But in textile art, which is essentially flat, it is necessary to pursue a different method, and that of isolation is the most simple and effective, and was well understood in Egypt, Greece, and India. The white pattern, or flower, is surrounded with a fine dark line (black is the best), which effectually separates it from all the surrounding colours, and gives it the effect of light, even when the whiteness retains enough of the natural colour of the raw material to tone it down very perceptibly. The eye accepts it as white, and ignores the tint that pervades it, and is hardly to be expelled from silk or wool. Linen and cotton are the whitest of materials, after passing through the hands of the chemist or the bleacher.

It is amusing to observe that Pliny regarded colours, whether vegetable or mineral, rather as useful for the pharmacopeia of his day, than as dyes or artistic pigments. He speaks contemptuously of the art of his time, and yet he gives some curious hints that are well worth collecting for experiment. His fragmentary information, though often inaccurate, is most valuable to those who are seeking once more to find lasting colours, and despair of discovering mordants that will fix the aniline tints. From him we learn more of the Egyptian colouring materials than of any others, as he named their sources, European, Asiatic, or African; and there is no doubt of the perfection of their mural pigments and textile dyes, which have remained unimpaired to the present time.

Renouf says that “painting, as it is now understood, was totally unknown to the Egyptians; but they understood harmony of colour,[304] and formulated in it certain principles for decorative uses. They made the primary colours predominate over the secondary by quantity and position. They introduced fillets of white or yellow in their embroideries, as well as in their paintings, between reds and greens, to isolate them; and they balanced masses of yellow with a due proportion of black.” They never blended their colours, and had no sense of the harmony of prismatic gradations, or the melting of one tint into another; each was worked up to a hard and fast edge line. If in one part of a building, one set of colours predominated, they placed a greater proportion of other colours elsewhere, within the range of sight, so as to readjust the balance. Those they employed were mostly earthy mineral colours (used alike for frescoes and for painting cotton cloths, though vegetable dyes were needed for woollens and linens). These were: for white, pure chalk; for black, bone-black mixed with gum; for yellow, yellow ochre; for green, a mixture of yellow ochre and powdered blue glass; for blue, this same blue glass mixed with white chalk; for red, an earthy pigment containing iron and aluminium.[305] They understood the chemistry of bleaching, and the use of mordants in dyeing.[306]

The statistical records of China of the time of Hias (2205 B.C.), according to Semper, mention colours as being of five tints, and all the produce of the Chinese Empire.[307]

In the unchanging art of India, the ancient colours are used now. Therefore, when we give the following list, we must suppose that it embraces all that have been known from the beginning.

Indian dyes are mostly vegetable. For yellow, akalbir, the root of the Datiscus Canabinus; also yellow is dyed with asbarg, the flower of the Cabul larkspur (Delphinium sp.).

Orange. Soneri dyed with narsingar, the honey-scented flower of nyclanthes (Arbor Tristis).

Scarlet is first dyed with cochineal (formerly with kermes), which gives a crimson colour; next with narsingar, which turns it vermilion.

Purple is dyed first with cochineal (formerly kermes), afterwards with indigo.

Lilac. Ditto, only paler.

Blue. All shades of indigo.

Green. With indigo first, and next the various yellow dyes.

Brown. Sandal-wood, called “sandali;” almond colour (Badami).

Grey. Sulphate of iron and gold.

Black. Deepest shade of indigo.[308]

Speaking of Indian coloured textiles, Sir G. Birdwood says: “All violent contrasts are avoided. The richest colours are used, but are so arranged as to produce the effect of a neutral bloom, which tones down every detail almost to the softness and transparency of the atmosphere.” He says that in their apparel both the colouring and the ornaments are adapted to the effect which the fabrics will produce when worn and in motion. “It is only through generations of patient practice that men attain to the mystery of such subtleties.”

An outline, in black or some dark colour that harmonizes with the ground, or else worked in gold, is common in Indian work, not only for the purpose of isolating the colours of the design, but also to give a uniform tone to the whole surface of the texture. Their traditional arrangements of tints were thoroughly satisfying to the eye. But degenerated by European commerce, the artistic sense of beauty itself is disappearing throughout our Indian Empire.

Persian carpets (the fine old ones of the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries) give us lessons in the art of isolating colours. In these, a flower will lie upon a surface which contains two or more other tints, and as the design passes over them, the outline colour is changed, so as to isolate the flower equally on the different grounds. This is done with such art that the eye ignores the transition till it is called to remark it. For instance, as a white, or no-coloured pattern, wanders over a green and red ground, the outline changes suddenly from green to red, and again to green as it leaves the opposite colour on the ground pattern.

Mr. Floyer speaks of the brilliancy and lasting qualities of the dyes which the Persians, by slow and tedious processes, extract from plants; from the “runaschk” (madder), a fine red; from the “zarili” (the golden), which is a yellow flower from Khorasan, and also from the leaves of the vine, a bright yellow.[309] They import indigo from Shastra (or from India), by the Khurum river. He says these dyes are perfectly fast, leaving no trace on a wetted rubber, whereas the European dyes they sometimes use come off freely.

Pliny says the Gauls had invented dyes counterfeiting the purple of Tyre; also scarlet, violet, and green, all of these were dipped in the juices of herbs.[310]

Vitruvius says the Romans extracted dyes from flowers and fruits, but he neither specifies nor describes them.

The ancient Highland tartans were dyed with bark of alder for black, bark of willow for flesh colour. A lichen growing on stones supplied their violets and crimson.[311] The lichen on the birch-tree gives a good brown; heather gives red, purple, and green.[312]

Thus we see that pure colours for dyeing textiles have been extracted from vegetable substances—herbs, wood, seeds, flowers and fruits, mosses and sea-weeds;[313] mineral substances—earths, sands, ores, metals, rusts, and stones; animal substances—both of land, water, and air; beasts, fishes, shells, birds, and insects.

It is evident, from the derivation of the word, that there were chromatic scales in colour before the phrase was ever applied to music.

The Greeks and Romans are supposed to have understood chromatic scales of tints—animal, vegetable, and mineral—and except with the intention of producing startling effects, they did not mix them. They felt that each was harmonious as a whole, and, unlike the Egyptians, they studied harmony. They arranged their scales according to the materials from which they were extracted, and kept those from different chemical sources apart, as being discordant.[314] One scale was that of the iodine colours, of and from the sea. Marine products are mostly iridescent. To comprehend this, think of the harmonious interchange of delicate tints, called by the ancients “purple,” on a string of pearls. Shells and shell-fish, sea-weeds and fish, furnished these dyes. They were called “conchiliata.”

The chemistry of the arts of bleaching was not unknown to the ancients; but they reserved and regulated it for certain purposes, preferring to retain at least a part of the original colouring, as shades of grounding which served, as a surface glaze does in painting, to connect and harmonize the superinduced tints.

Experiments with the object of reviving this mode of producing harmonious combinations, have been made lately at the Wilton Carpet Works, by dyeing shades of colour on unbleached goat’s and camel’s hair, and sheep’s wool; and the tones produced are beautifully soft and rich. M. Edouard Charton ascribes the great change in the modern scales of colours to the discovery by the French, in the Gobelins, of a pure scarlet dye, the use of which made it necessary to raise the tone of all other colours. He says that scarlet was formerly represented by the dye called kermes, which indeed was not scarlet, but altered from crimson to something approaching it by the addition of narsingar, of which the bright yellow gave the scarlet effect.

M. Chevreul, director of the dyeing department of the Gobelins, has succeeded in composing the chromatic prism, to which I have already alluded, containing 4420 different tones. We may take it for granted, that from these may be selected any possible scale of tints required for decorative work. This vast area for choice of our material will impose on the artist of the future fresh responsibilities.

In the typical Oriental colouring, the whole arrangement was traditional, and it was irreligious to depart from what had been fixed by statute many centuries before, and only perfected by the experience of many generations of men; and this veneration for traditional custom has hitherto been prevalent in European art to a certain point. But the old conservative perfection of unadulterated colour has already been done away with. The freedom of experimental art is chartered, and mercantile interests now, as ever, govern the supply of materials.

Our normal bad taste and carelessness has been cast back on the lands which were the cradle of art, and we receive, to our surprise, gaudy, vulgar, and discordant combinations from the East, whence we drew our first inspirations. For the future we shall have to study ancient specimens, and correct our errors by the help of their teaching to the eye and mind.

Gas colours are at present our worst snares. They are in general very beautiful; but they are so evanescent, and fade into such unexpected and contradictory tones, that we cannot reckon upon them. When embroidering with the coloured materials of the day, we are in constant dread of what disastrous effect may be produced by the first shaft of sunshine that may fall from our moderately illuminated sky, through the uncurtained window.

The trade in colours can hardly be an honest one, till the means of fixing each tint permanently is ascertained.[315] At any rate, something should be done towards grouping them, with respect to their enduring qualities, so that when they fade, if fade they must, they may do so harmoniously, and in sympathy with each other; and while they are in their first glow they should be selected, as much as possible, from what Pliny calls natural colours,[316] which recall the exquisite effects of nature, searched out and displayed by every sunny gleam, reflected on each other in lovely tones, and subdued and veiled by passing shadows. It is said that Mr. Wardle, of Leek, is now seeking for dyes of pure unadulterated colours, and mordants to fix them. He deserves all success.

The reason I have entered, in even so cursory a manner, into the history of colours is my desire to point out the great value placed, long ago, on the careful preparation of those used in ancient textile art; and to show how our forefathers sought them out in many lands and waters; how they noted their varieties; how they classed and prized them for their endurance as well as for their pristine beauty; how they paid their weight in gold or silver for certain culminating tints; and how they, therefore, produced works which became matters of history and landmarks in civilization.