The Historv of Colour in Art

Dn:i Bomford
Introduction
k is almost impossible for us to know just how colourful the art of the
past was. We can hardly begin to imagine how extraorfinarily sumptuous
mediaeval and Renaissance churches and palaces appeared
-
with their
n'all paintings, tapestries, painted architectural ornament, precious met-
als, enamels, and every kind of brilliant artifact. Any history of colour in
art carl only be partial, because so much art and so much colour in art
has either perished or has survived only in a much changed form.
We have only to think of sculpture, for example, to see how our imagi-
nation fails us. With classical Greek and Hellenistic marble statues, it
aln'ays comes as something of a shock to realise that they normally had
realistically coloured lips, eyes, hair and clothes. We now usually imagine
the antique through the practices ofRenaissance and neo-classical artists,
n'ho saw Greek sculptures already stripped by time or the hand of Man
of all their painted decoration. Polychromy of stone sculpture was cer-
tainly normal right up to and through the Romanesque and Gothic. It
n'as only in the Renaissance
-
by u combination of mistaken interpreta-
rion of the nature of classical sculpture and a genuine interest in the nat-
ural textures and colours of materials that polychromy of stone sculpture
died out. Very little intact medieval polychromy of carved stone survives,
but where it is found
-
as in the great west portal of the collegiate church
in Toro in north central Spain (The Portada de la Majestad, dating from
the late thirteenth century), hidden for centuries under many layers of
later polychromy
-
then the impact is astonishing.
Polychromy of wooden sculpture, of course, continued right through
the Baroque and beyond. But a moment can be identified when one artist
David Bomford
decided to strike out in a fifferent firection. In mefiaeval and early
Renaissance Germany, it was usual for limewood sculpture and altar-
pieces to be painted. Then, in t49O-2, Tilman Rimenschneider, the great-
est of all the limewood sculptors, made the first known limewood retable
in monochrome
-
the Munnerstadt altarpiece, which now survives only in
fragmentary form. It was not entirely uncoloured: the pale wood was
stained a little darker than its natural colour. But from then on, two tra-
ditions developed side by side and the more expert carvers revelled in the
new unpainted freedom to show off the fineness of their carving and the
subtle wood textures that they could produce.
There is an ironic sequel to Riemenschneider's making of the
Munnerstadt altarpiece: eleven years later, the parish decided it was too
plain, and in 1503 commissioned Veit Stoss to paint it in the old manner'
His polychromy stayed on it for three centuries or more; then
-
we do not
know precisely when
-
it was stripped off, a process that undoubtedly
removed the original glaze beneath as well. Colour in art can be as
untrustworthy as it is vulnerable.
I1 lihro deII' Arte: colour combinations based on pure
pigments
Our best chance of constructing a coherent history of colour in art is to
look at representational painting in all its forms from late mediaeval
times to the twentieth century; the best place to start is with the most
famous and influential treatise in the history of painting, Il libro dell' Arte
written around 1390 by the Tuscan painter Cennino Cennini.
In his book, Cennino gives detailed instructions on the preparation of
materials for painting in fresco and on panel. Learning to draw is impor-
tant, he says, but working up the colours and painting with them is the
'glory
of the profession'.
Cennino clearly describes systems of colour for depicting flesh,
draperies, buildings and landscapes. fmportantly, they are systems
devised for painting in fresco and egg tempera
-
opaque, quick-drying
media that were used in simple, firect techniques.
To paint faces, for example, Cennino describes how the flesh must first
be underpainted with the pale green earth, terre verte. The pink flesh
The history of colour in art
tones were then hatched or painted thinly on top, working in progres-
sively paler shades from shadow to light; the green was allowed to show
through in the half-tones and nicely imitated the pearly tones of real
flesh. Today, many such faces are worn and damaged and the green has
become too prominent. cennino was very strict about this correct
seq[rence for painting flesh:
'some
begin by layrng in the face with flesh
colour
-
then they shape it up with a little verdaccio
fbrown-green
shadou,,
colourl and flesh colour, touching it in with some highlights and it is fin-
ished. This is a method for those who know little about the profession.'
Later, in a famous passage, he recomrnends
the pale yolk of a town hen's
egg for painting the faces ofyoung people with cool flesh colours, but the
darker yolk of a country hen's egg for aged or swarthy persons.
cennino's methods for painting coloured draperies were also highly
specific, and formed the basis for painting the clothed figure right
through the quattrocento
and beyond. Essentially, colours were used in
their pure form in the deepest shadows and then lightened progressively
with white towards the lit areas, finishing with highlights of pure white.
For its time, it was a remarkably successful scheme, but there were prob-
lems with it.
First, by placing the purest and most powerfully saturated colour in
the deepest shadows and progressively
desaturating it towards the lights,
the shadows appeared to advance and the lights appeared to recede
-
the
very opposite of the desired effect. secondly, the relative brightness of the
pure colours was very variable: this could lead to the unbalancing of com-
positions in which the brighter draperies, such as the yellows, stood out
much more prominently
than the darker ones, such as the blues. For this
reason' painters often attempted a balance of symmetry arranging their
bright colours in pairs around a central axis
-
a scheme now termed
isochromatism.
with the cennino system, we thus have a series of colour combinations
based on, and pre-determined
by, the pure forms of the available pig-
ments. cennino describes the preparation
of pigments from a variety of
sources, both natural and artificial. Such colours could be reafily avail-
able and inexpensive, or rare and cost a fortune: in the latter category
the best-known is ultramarine blue (literally, from'over the sea, since it
was then found only in Afghanistan),
extracted from the semi-precious
David Bomford
stone lapis lazuli and invariably (correctly) described as more expensive
than gold. In late mediaeval times, when paintings were valued by the
worth of their materials as much as the skill of their execution, the purest
ultramarine was reserved for painting the Virgin's mantle and often
costed separately in painter's contracts.
In such a painting as Lorenzo Monaco's Coronation of the Virgtn
(Figure 1), many of the available pigments are seen at full strength or
mixed with white
-
coloured earths alongside ultramarine blues and the
very beautiful lead-tin yellow. There was no green available powerful
enough to compete with these strong colours and so areas of green
tended to be mixtures of blue and yellow. Reds raight be vermilion (an
Figure 1 Monaco, Coronation of the Virgin (The National Gallery, London.)
10
The history of colour in art
artificial form of the mineral cinnabar) or lake pigments
-
made by
adsorbing natural dyestuffs on to a white base.
Lake pigments were sometimes very fugitive when exposed to light
and we have in this painting a dramatic example of how a colour can
change and alter the appearance of an entire work. The Virgin's robe was
originally a deep mauve-pink, not white as it appears today. The evidence
is satisfyingly exact. A minute sample of paint from the main area of the
robe, seen in cross-section, shows many colourless particles which were
once mauve. A sample taken where the robe passes below some mordant-
gilfing
-
where it was protected from the light
-
shows the particles still
with their original colour.
Painters sometimes made precise decisions about their pigments which
suggest a sophisticated knowledge of material properties. In his Santa
croce altarpiece, the Sienese painter ugolino fi Nerio deliberately chose
azurite blue for its greenish tonality, instead of the ultramarine that
might have been expected for such a prestigious commission: even the
virgin's robe is azurite. This conscious choice set up a whole series of sub-
tle colour contrasts and harmonies that mark out Ugolino as one of the
most innovative colourists of the trecento.
cennino's treatise mentions one other colour system for draperies that
was used widely right through the Italian Renaissance and later became
firmly associated with Michelangelo and the Mannerist painters. This was
the system of cangiantismo
-
of showing shot or cangiante fabrics that
appear to change between the lights and the shadows. Cennino lists a
number of colour combinations appropriate for cangiante effects and one
of them can be seen in in Nardo di Cione's Altarpiece: Three Sain*,
painted around 1365. One saint has a greenish robe, yellow in the high-
lights and ultramarine blue in the shadows, painted just
as Cennino
described.
This is quite a subdued example of cangiantismo
-
much more brilliant
hue-shifts can be seen in, for example, Mantegna s Virgin and Child taith
Sain*, painted towards the end of the fifteenth century in tempera on
canvas, in essentially Cenninian colouring.
11
David Bomford
Della Pimtm: the use of black and white and colour chords
The colour systems described by Cennino set the basic pattern for tem-
pera painting in the quattrocento. Then, in 1435-6 Leon Battista Alberti
published his Della Pittura, most famous for its revolutionary systematic
description of single-point perspective. Suddenly, three-fimensional space
could be realistically draurn on a two-dimensional surface
-
and represen-
tational art was changed forever.
Alberti also had a number of things to say about colow. His actual
definition of colour primaries
-
which he listed as blue, red, green and
earth colour
-
was based on the old Aristotelian trafition and was not
very helpful. His remarks on modelling and relief are much more useful.
His method assumes that light will strike an object from one side only,
forming clearly defined areas of light and shade:
'Note
the middle of it
with a very fine line so that the method of colouring it will be less in
doubt.' A clear example of this subfivision into light and dark halves is
Fra Angelico's predella panel of the Miracle of St Nicholas, painted in the
late 1430s.
Then we come to the manipulation of colour itself:
'the
same colour,
according to the light and shade it receives will alter its appearance
-
we
must consider how the painter ought to use black and white ... with
great restraint you will commence to place the black where you need it
and at the same time oppose it with white.'
Alberti's system is unmistakably fifferent from Cennino's. Cennino
constructs forms simply by modelling up from the pure colour with
white: Alberti recommends modelling up with white and down with
black by equal amounts, the pure colour now being positioned some-
where in the middle. Alberti was, however, very conscious of the fact that
both white and black desaturate and diminish colours and exhorted his
readers to be sparing with them:
'I
cannot overemphasise the advantage
of the frugality to painters. It would be useful if white and black were
made from those large pearls that Cleopatra destroyed in vinegar so that
painters would be miserly with them and their works would be truthful,
sweet and pleasing.'
The influence of Alberti's system on tempera painters of that period is
debatable. Certainly Cennino's method remained the standard one, and
L2
The history of colour in art
without detailed analysis it is difficult to be sure just
which painters
mixed black in with their shadows. However I would mention just
one
example in which both systems seem to be present on the same panel. In
the Trinity Alnrpiece (Figure 2), mainly by
pesellino
but finished by Fra
Ffippo lippi
after Pesellinob death in L4sr, the orange-red cloak of the
right hand saint (ignoring the bottom half which is a later restoration)
appears to be up-modelled with white by the cennino method, while the
red robe of the spint towards the left appears to be up- and dornm-
modelled with white and black according to the Alberti method. Notice,
Figure 2 Pesellino and Fra Filippo r'tppi, Trinity Altarpiece. (The
National
Gallery, London.)
13
David Bomford
how much more subdued is the Albertian colouring
-
reminding us of his
strictures about frugality in the use of black and white.
Alberti explored another aspect of colour in Della Pittura and this was
what we now call the colour chords, colours that enhance each other
when placed togethea a phenomenon that in later centuries developed
into a theory of complementary colours:
'There
is a certain friendship of
colours so that one
joined with another gives dignity and grace.'Amongst
other colour combinations, he says,
'rose
near green and sky blue gives
both honour and life'. This is exactly the sort of colour combination that
Alberti would have seen and admired in Masaccio's fresco paintings in
the Brancacci Chapel, and exactly this combination of colours is found in
Cosirno Turas Roaerella Aharpiece (of around 1475) wrth its fantastic
architecture mirroring the pink and green robes of the angels and the
whole scene improbably constructed against the deep blue sky. Tura was
just
the sort of academic painter who might have read Alberti.
The development of oil painting
Alberti's colour system did offer painters more control of their pigments
in tempera, but the whole technical basis of painting was about to
change. The development of oil painting in northern Europe introduced a
use of colour that was eventually to sweep away egg tempera completely.
By the early fifteenth century oil for painting had been around for two
centuries or more. Indeed, there are grounds for thinking that oil was the
indigenous painting medium in northern Europe, only temporarily dis-
placed during the fourteenth century by the Italianate egg tempera tech-
nique of the International Gothic style. By the I420s and 30s,
Netherlandish painters such as Van Eyck and Robert Campin were using
it in an extraordinarily refined way for panel painting. They had not
abandoned the use of egg entirely
-
most of these panel paintings have
underpaints of egg and finishing layers of oil
-
a fact that had been long
suspected but only recently proven using microanalytical techniques.
The properties of oils, such as linseed, wal:rut or poppy, that make
them so desirable for painting, are that they are glossy, viscous, slow-
dryug and highly refractive. Paint layers can be made thick or thin,
opaque or transparent and individual brush strokes can be sharp and
t4
The history of colour in art
dramatic or blended imperceptibly
until they disappear. Most impor-
tantly for colour, the same pigments that are opaque and high-key in egg
can, in oil, become rich, semi-transparent glazes.
The implications for colouring within paintings were immefiately
apparent. Shadows no longer had to be unrealistic pure pigments or dully
down-modelled with black. Now they could have infinite subtlety; they
could be dark and full of colour at the same time. HaIf tones could be
modelled with infinite softness. Highlights could be lushous or dazzhng.
The transition from egg tempera to oil as the principal panel-painting
medium was a much faster process in northern Europe than in Italy. By
the mid fifteenth century the switch from egg to oil was almost complete
in the Netherlands; in Italy it had only just
begun. The precise mecha-
nism by which the assimilation of oil painting into Itarian practice
occurred is still not clear. Vasari's account of Antonello da Messina travel-
ling to Flanders to learn the technique from van Eyck is chronologically
impossible, but clearly Antonello was an early practitioner.
one recent clue has been provided by the analysis at the National
Gallery of the Ferrarese painter cosimo Tura's Allegorical Figure (Figure
3), painted for the studiolo at Belfiore in the late l-450s. The lowest layers
are of egg tempera and may relate to a different composition; but the lay-
ers corresponfing to the finished composition are solely of oil, used in an
unequivocally Netherlandish technique of opaque underlayers modelled
with glazes. The intricate brocade sleeve is strikingly similar to that of
one of the kings in Rogier van der weyden's columba Aharpiece of
around L455
-
and indeed, other paintings by Rogier were known to be
in Ferrara by that date. Some historians have even cited the possibility
that Rogier himself may have visited Ferrara and instructed Tura on a
pilgrimage to Rome in 1450, but this cannot be verified.
The transition from egg to oil in Italy is difficult to chart, except by
microchemical
analysis of the paintings themselves, because many
painters used oil in much the same way as they had used egg, and there is
iittle visible difference in the appearance of their works.
But, essentiully, by 1500 the predominant painting medium was oil,
and its versatile properties prompted painters to explore a whole range
of colouring systems that led European painting in various firections
over the following centuries. Let us look briefly at one or two examples.
15
David Bomford
Figure 3
'lwa,
Allegorical Figure. (The National Gallery, London.)
16
Ihe history of colour in art
Chiaruscuto andsfumaa
The essential truth of Alberti's observations on the modelling of relief
persisted and became the basic chiaroscuro mode of colouring in the six-
teenth century. In Sebastiano del Piombo's Raising of Lazarus (1518), we
can see how areas of high-key colour are set against sharp, deep shadows.
The whole effect is highly contrasted, precise and crisp, but essentially
fragmented.
A century later, Caravaggio was to refine the chiaroscuro mode into
something altogether more abarospheric. Meanwhile, Leonardo da vinci
developed his own method of achieving a magical dark harmony at first
glance derived, but in reality quite fifferent, from chiaroscuro, this was
Figure 4 Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of thc Kings. (Galleria degli Uffizi,
Florence.)
t7
David Bomford
the colouring mode known as sfumnto (literally, smoke-like) in which
finely modulated forms emerge from soft shadows.
In such pairrtings as the Virgtn of the Rocks (of about 1508) the sub-
dued tonality is based on an extensive undermodelling in monochrome
black, brorvn and grey. Such an undermodelling had been used by Piero
della Francesca in his oil paintings from the L470s, but Leonardo went
much further. His colours were thinly applied and low in key and, muted
by the deep monochrome below that, virtually eliminated any luminosity
from the white ground. We can see this dark underpaint directly in the
unfinished hand of the angel where it touches St John's back. We can see
it completely uncovered in the unfinished Adoration of the Kings (Figure
4) of L482.
Cangiantismo: the Sistine Chapel
Almost exactly contemporaneous with the Virgin of the Rocks, but as fif-
ferent as it is possible to be is Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel vault,
revealed in its astonishing colours by recent cleaning. The scheme of
colouring here is cangiantismo on an unprecedented scale. There can be
no doubt that these are the brilliant colours that Michelangelo intended
-
needed, indeed
-
to make the dark vault of the chapel light up and to
render the individual scenes visible from far below. Carried out in true
fresco, the colouring is essentially derived from Cennini
-
up-modelling,
vvith cangiante draperies evenrwhere. The extraorfinary turquoise-violet
or orange-blue hue-shifts anticipate the complementary contrasts of the
Impressionists by three and a half centuries.
Titian: disegno versus coTore
Any history of colour in art must take as its central point the emergence
and flowering of the sixteenth century Venetian school culminating in
Titian, generally considered the greatest colourist of all. It is no surprise
that Venice, the centre of the pigment trade in Europe, should foster a
group of painters who delighted in colour and filled their paintings with
an abundance of the finest pigments available. We might take as our first
example The Inteduli4t of St Thomas by Cima (painted around 1500),
18
The history of colour in art
which has been found to contain virtually every pigment available at that
date
-
including some which were rarely used, such as orpiment, re"lgar
and haematite. Moreover, he used different grades of azurite and ultra-
marine for different colour effects, and highly unusual organic glazing
colours. The general sense is one of great sophistication, both in pigment
Figure 5 Til:'ar+ Bacchus and Ariadne. (The National Gallery, London.)
19
David Bomford
use and colour composition. There is only one repeated colour in the
entire work
-
the green worn by St Thomas and the apostle at the far
right.
Like Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, Titian's Bacchus
qnd
Ariadne (Figure 5) has been revealed in its trrre colours by cleaning in
recent years. It is one of the most rafiant images in art, made so by the
extraordinary range and purity of the pigments. Almost every pigment
available in Venice is here, all of unparalleled quality and used at full
strength. The ultramarine in the sky is the purest found it urry painting
yet exarnined at the National Gallery.
What is so striking about the use of strong competing colours here is
that the composition could so easily have fallen apart visually, Iike the
Sebastiano Raising of Lazarus. Yet Titian has achieved an overall harmony
effortlessly, knitting everything together with a subtle framework of quiet
greens and earth colours.
Titian's paintings of this period are complex in their layer structure,
largely because he worked out many of the details of his compositions
only at the painting stage. Let us look at the figure of Ariadne, for exam-
ple, standing against the sea and sky, the vivid red scarf across her shoul-
der. You or I
-
or indeed Michelangelo
-
would probably have drawn it
all out and then carefully filled in the colours to each area. But not Titian
-
he made it up as he went along: a cross-section shows that he painted
the sea first, Ariadne's bare shoulder next and finallv the scarf in the
pwest vermillion on top of that.
Titian's paintings became, more and more, acts of spontaneous
!cre-
ation on the canvas itself. It was this tendency that led to a farnous
instance of the perennial disegru versus colare quarrel. Ever since
Aristotle, scholars. had debated whether drawing or colour was more
important in painting. Cennino and Alberti had sensibly allowed them
equal importance. But Vasari could not resist
joining
in the fray
-
espe-
cially if, as a good Tuscan, he could score a few points off a Venetian.
In his Life of Titian he described a conversation with Michelangelo
about Titian's method in some paintings they had just
seen:
'Buonarroti
commended it highly, sayrng that his colour and style pleased him very
much, but it was a shame that in Venice they fid not learn to draw well.'
Vasari was especially scathing a-bout Giorgione who, he said,'failed to see
20
The history of colour in art
that, if he wants to balance his compositions ... he must first do various
sketches on paper to see how everything goes together.'
The opposition of disegno and cohre was not simply drawing versus
colour: as we have seen, Michelangelo, the greatest exponent of disegno,
was also capable of astonishing colour. It is, rather, the method of cre-
ation: Titian's habit of creating his compositions directly in paint on the
canvas is the essence of colare.
We can only imagine how much more aghast Vasari would have been
to read Palma Giovane's celebrated account of the older Titian at work on
such paintings as the Late Death of Actaeon.
He used to sketch in his pictures with a great mass of colours as a bed or
base for his compositions ... then he used to turn his pictures to the wall
and leave them there without looking at them, sometimes for several
months. When he wanted to apply his brush again, he would examine
them with the utrnost rigour. as if they were his mortal enemies to see if
he could find any faults. Then he gradually covered these forms and in the
last stages he painted more with his fingers than his brushes.
Titian paved the way for the great alla prima painters of the Baroque:
Rubens, Yelilzquez and Rembrandt. All three fell under his spell, Rubens
making copies of the great Bacchanals in Madrid, Yelilzquez seeing his
paintings daily at the Court of Philip IV and Rembrandt basing his 1640
self-portrait on Titian's Man zuith a Blue Sleeue, seen brieflv in
Amsterdam.
Each of them developed colour in highly personal ways. Rubens per-
sisted with white grounds in such luminous and brilliant works as the
L609 Samson and Delilah, painted immefiately after his return from
Italy and influenced strongly by the
jewel-like
colours of Adam
Elsheimer.
Rembrandt and Velizquez painted with much more limited palettes
but with a sophisticated control over their materials that is only now
being fiscovered. They used both light coloured and dark tinted grounds
and experimented with unorthodox pigment mixtures to achieve extra-
ordinarily subtle effects. In his wonderful portrait of his wife Saskia in
Arcadian Costume, Rembrandt has added the highly unusual azurite to
many parts in order to give a cool greenish tint to the whole picture. And
Saskia's waistband is a notable piece of Rembrandt bravura, testing the
21.
David Bomford
properties of oil paint to their limit, challenging us to see the illusion
beyond the reality.
Throughout the seventeentJr century, great painters all over Europe
developed their infividual styles and produced masterpieces of astonish-
ing diversity. The colnre versus disegno debate raged on, with the battles
between the Poussinistes and the Rubenistes in the French Academy in
the 1660s and 1670s
-
battles that had more to do with spontaneity and
formality than with colour and drawing. Technically, the processes of
painting varied little from place to place or from painter to painter. It is
worth remembering that, despite the extraordinary richness and variety
of seventeenth-century paintings, all
were pioduced using essentially sim-
ilar materials and techniques.
The introduction of synthetic pigrnents
br terms of painting materials, the modern era began in 1704, with the
invention of Prussian Blue. This is a date that every student of painting
techniques knows as a terminus post quern and because it marks the
beginning of the synthetic pigment industry that was to lead to a com-
plete rethinking of the artist's palette in the early nineteenth century.
Prussian blue became widely used within twenty or thirty years.
Canaletto, who in his earliest works used ultramarine for his skies, was
certainly using Prussian Blue by the time he painted the Stonemnsonb
Yardin the late 1720s.
The precise dating of pigment inventions gives us a formidable
weapon in the matter of determining authenticity. A number of appar-
ently old paintings have been betrayed by the presence of Prussian Blue:
and Entrance to ihe Cannaregio (Figure 6) once firmly attributed to
Francesco Guardi was hurriedly relabelled
'Imitator
of Guardi' when it
was found to contain Cobalt Blue, invented nine years after Guardi's
death.
In the first three decades of the nineteenth century an extraorfinary
number of new pigments appeared, the direct result of a rapidly expand-
ing chemical industry. The discovery of cobalt, chromium and cadmium,
the synthesis of artificial ultramarine in 1826 (following a competition
sponsored by the French government) and the first slmthesis of alizarin,
22
The history of colour in art
Figure 6 Imitator of Guarfi, Venice: Entrance to the Cannaregio. (National
Gallery, London.)
the red colrruring of the madder plant in 1868, were
just
some of the
notable landmarks in the history of modern pigments.
Nineteenth century painters adopted these new materials as soon as
they became commercially availa.ble. Moreover, the development of the
flat-ferrule brush, and
-
even more important
-
collapsible metal paint
tubes made of lead or tin (available from about 1840), transformed
painting practice. Brilliant, mostly stable colours were plentifully avail-
able and it was now easier than it had ever been for painters to work out
of doors.
23
David Bomford
The Impressionists
All painters benefited from these developments, but it is the
Impressionists that we think of automatically, and I want to look now at
the use of colour by the Impressionist group. So much has been written,
so many myths have been constructed about their art that it is fifficult to
know where to begin. Perhaps the best, the simplest, the truest definition
of how they painted is Monet's famous remark to his chronicler Lila
Cabot Perry:
when you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a
tree, a house, and a field or whatever. Merely think here is a little square
of blue, here an oblong of pink, h"r" . streak of yellow, and paint it just as
it looks to you, the exact colour and shape, until it gives your olvn naive
impression of the scene before you.
There is as succinct a description of Impressionist practice as you will
encounter: observe and record. Until we get to Seurat and neo-
Impressionism it is inappropriate to speak of any uni{ying colour theory
of Impressionism. It is true that Cheweul's Principles of Harmony and
Contrast of Colaurs (published in 1839) was influential in a general way,
but the principles of colour contrast that he proposed were only acknowl-
edged in Impressionist paintings in the simplest terms: indeed, such use
of colour had long been implicit in the practice of Delacroix and others.
Impressionist use of colour is quite straightforward. They rejected the
prevailing academic notions of chiaroscuro
-
modelling in light and shade
-
and constructed their images in terms of pure colour, heightened in
many cases with white, the technique known as peinture claire.
The most striking feature of many of these pictures is the bold
juxta-
position of complerrientary colours
-
blue with orange, red with green,
yellow with violet
-
all seen in Monet's dazzlnng Regatta at Argenteuil
(Figure 7) of 7872. Chevreul had described how such complementary
pairs mutually enhance each other by simultaneous contrast. It has to be
said that the idea was anything but new; it goes all the way back to
Alberti's colour chords and the
'friendship
of colours'.
Renoir's Boating on the Seine (of 1879 or 1880) shows a vivid
blue-orange pairing
-
and the pigments. here are nearly all nineteenth
century inventions: cobalt blue, chrome yellow, chrome orrulge, lemon yel-
24
The history of colour in art
'lt
,,*llt
. , , , . t
,j r
r.f
$b
''
'T*:
'
. .\;
Figure 7 Monet, Regatta at Argenteuil (Mus6e d'Orsay, Paris.)
low and viridian, used almost unmixed, as they carne from the tube.
The Impressionists were captivated by the purity and brilliance of the
new pigments. Their avowed dislike of the old dark colours led to a prin-
cipled rejection of black and the earth pigments that was more propa-
ganda than fact.
'There
is no black in nature' they cried, but black
Iingered on their palettes long after they claimed to have given it up.
Nevertheless, they sometimes went to extraordinary lengths to avoid
using dull earth colours. In his Gare Saint Lazare (1877; Figure 8) Monet
has mixed no less thal seven high-toned pigments together to make the
dark station canopy that could easily have been painted with brornm and
biack. Throughout the 1870s he adopted this procedure, clearly intrigued
by the almost imperceptible shimmer of powerful colours in the darks of
his compositions.
The use of coloured shadows by the Impressionists is a well-knov''m
*",i
","1+
t tEl'*.i {q-
- : :
:i:!
,:li:l
n
'',
25
David Bomford
Figure 8 Monet, Gare Saint Lazare (The National Gallery, London.)
characteristic of their work, and is something much more general than
Monet's elaborate pigment mixtures. Goethe, Delacroix and others had
long before noted violet shadows in yellow drapery and greenish shadows
cast by a red sunset and had realised that these phenomena are caused
by the physiological reaction of the human eye to powerfrrl colours.
'Every
decided colour', said Goethe, in his Theory of Colaurs,'does a certain vio-
26
The history of colour in art
lence to the eye and forces it to opposition'. In other words, after Iooking
at a strong colour for a while, everything becomes tinged with its comple-
mentary.
Coloured shadows in Impressionist paintings generally contained
blue/violet tones as the complementary to yellow sunlight. Much fun was
had at their expense, and the derisive term'violettomania'was coined to
describe their
'collective
sickness' of painting
'people
in violet woods' and
'purple-tinted
corpses in a state of decay'.
Monet in his Rouen Cathedral series pursued the complementary
coloured shadow to its ultimate point: almost abstract patterns of blue
and orange, shimmering before us.
The use of colour by the Impressionists was essentially empirical and it
is only when we reach Seurat and the neo-Impressionists that we have to
consider a theoretical or scientific underpinning for their art.
Seurat
Seurat presents an enonnous problem to students of art history and sci-
ence alike. In the century since he painted, numerous scholars have
accepted the premise, first disseminated by his {riend the critic F6lix
F6n6on, that Seurat's technique of
'chromo-luminarism'
imitated the very
behaviour of light itself: that dots of pure spectral colour could re-form
into the colours observed in nature with a brilliance and luminosity
unobtainable with conventional pigment mixtures. Seurat, we were told,
had based his method firmly on the scientific principles of such colour
theorists as Cheweul and Ogden Rood.
In recent years a distinct reaction has set in to this mythology. We now
know that Seurat misunderstood much of current colour theory and that,
in many cases, the optical mixtures he so carefully calculated simply do
not work, and they are certainly no more luminous than ordinary pig-
ment mixtures.
This then is our problem. Scientifically speaking, there is a great deal
less to Seurat than meets the eye: but his flawed and partial theories have
given us some of the most haunting images in European art and all our
reservations about his science must not blind us to that fact.
If we peer through the complex web of myth and pseudo-science that
27
David Bomford
has been endlessly spun around his work, we can see that Seurat was, in
fact, applying just
two simple principles of contrast derived directly from
Cheweul. Enhanced contrast of tone is seen very clearly in the light and
dark'haloes around the boys in the centre and at the right of the great
Baignadc d Asniires (p. 53)
-
painted in 1884 before Seurat's pointillism
had begun, but retouched with some pointillist details in 1887. Next to
the lit sides of the boys' bofies the water has been consciously darkened
and next to the shadowed sides of their bodies it has been lightened.
The other contrast, that of complementary colours, is used ever5rwhere
in Seurat's optical mixtures, both for coloured shadows and for mutual
enhancement of adjacent areas. Around many of his later pictures, he
included a painted pointilliste border in which the dominant colour con-
stantly changed and became the complementary of that part of the paint-
ing nearest to it
-
orange next to the blue sky, red next to green grass and
so on. Irr his picture of. La Crotoy of 1889 (now in Detroit) the original
painted frame, with just
such a colour scheme, still survives.
But obsessive pointillism killed spontaneity and careless optical mix-
tures actually killed colour as Signac, Seurat's fellow neo-Impressionist
was later to admit. Writing in 1894, he said:
Pointillage simply makes the surface of the paintings more lively, but it
does not guarantee luminosity, intensity of colour or harmony. The
complementary colours which are allies and enhance each other when
juxtaposed,
are enemies and destroy each other if mixed, even optically. A
red and a green if juxtaposed
enliven each other; but red dots and green
dots make an aggregate which is grey and colourless.
As many have since observed, that greyness is palpably there, hovering
over many neo-Impressionist paintings. To some it is part of their magic;
to others it
just
adds a further dimension of unreality.
We have come a long way from the artificial colouring system of Cennino
to the equally artificial system of Seurat. But I want to leave you with a
simple image which, to me conjures up the whole charmed relationship
between painters, their materials and their subjects. It is this small land-
scape painted in 1878 by Camille Pissarro on his own palette (Figure
g).
The six colours he has used for his picture are all there around the edge,
high-toned Impressionist colours out of which he has made something
28
The historv of colour in art
quiet, harmonious, timeless. No elaborate colour theories here, just
a
painter at work, observing and recording in pure colour
-
practising, as
Paolo Pino, the sixteenth-century Venetian author called it, the
'true
alchemy of painting'.
Figure 9 Pissaro, Landscape Painted on his Palette. (Sterling and Franctne
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.)
Further reading
Ackerman, J.,
'On
early Renaissance colour theory and practice.'ln Sndies in Italian
Art and Architecture, 75th-18th Centuries, ed. H. A. Millon, pp. J.1-40,
Cambridge, MA, 1980.
Baxandall, M., The Limewood Sculptors of Rensissance Germnny, New Haven, CN: Yale
University Press, 1980.
Bomford, D., Brown, C., and Roy, A., Art in the Making: Rembrandt, London: National
Gallery Publications, 1988.
Bomford, D., Dunkerton, J., Gordon, D., and Roy, A- Art in the Making: Inlian
Painting before 1400, London: National Gallery Publications, 1989.
Bomford, D., Kirby, J., Leighton, J., and Roy, 4., Art in the Making: Impressinnism,
London: National Gallery Publications, 1990.
29
David Bomford
Dunkerton, J., Gordon, D., Forster, S., and Penny, N., Ginxo to Dtirer: Early
Renaissance painting in the Natbnal Gallery,London: National Gallery
Publications. 1991.
Gage, J.,
'The
technique of Seurat a reappraisal', The Art Bull.etia 69(3) (1997),
448-54.
Hall, M., Colour and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Rerwissance
painting,
Cambridge: Cambridge University
press,
1gg2.
Kemp, M., Scierrce and Art, New Haven. CN:
yale
University
press,
1gg0.
Lee, A.,'Seurat and science', Art History,10(2) (1997), 203-26.
30