A world without colour is unthinkable, and archaeologists have proved that the desire to mimic nature’s hues in art is one of the earliest human instincts. In their attempts to create colour, artists, craftsmen and scientists have used every possible source, from the purple tears of sea snails and the blood of crushed beetles, to poisonous white lead and sacred Australian earth. In the process, fortunes have been made and lost, empires flourished and collapsed and our understanding of the world transformed. In this fascinating book, Victoria Finlay traces the astonishing history of man’s attempt to reproduce the rainbow – one colour at a time.

In order to understand the tangled history of individual colours, Finlay undertook a series of ‘travels through the paintbox’. Her quest took her to some of the world’s most inaccessible regions, but Finlay is an ideal travelling companion, light-hearted in the face of difficulty and danger and finding beauty in the most unlikely places. She carries us into Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in search of blue; to a war-torn Lebanon on the trail of Tyrian purple; to Aboriginal lands to discover the secrets of ochre; to Calcutta in search of India’s last indigo plants, and to a Spanish crocus field where she dyes her tongue yellow by mistake.

Throughout history, reproducing the rich palette found in nature has proved a difficult business; craftsmen guarded their secrets closely and some pigments and dyes commanded fabulous prices. Unsurprisingly, therefore, some colours became imbued with the most powerful symbolism and status. Chinese emperors reserved yellow for their exclusive use, while their green porcelain was so sacred that no commoner was allowed even to see it. During the Italian Renaissance, ultramarine, made from crushed lapis lazuli, was the most expensive of paints and therefore reserved for depicting the Virgin Mary; in Holland,where scarlet cloth was the finest, the Virgin was shown with red robes, whilst in Byzantine icons she wore the imperial purple.

Often the creation of colours has owed as much to accident and inspiration as to logic: Prussian blue was invented by a Berlin paint-maker trying to make red; mauve was made by a teenage chemistry prodigy who was looking for a remedy for malaria. Finlay has a gift for uncovering historical oddities, from the dyes used on the imperial toga that meant Roman emperors ‘left a cloud of garlicky, fishy smells in their wake’ to the mystery of Indian yellow paint, said to be made from the urine of cows force-fed with mango leaves.

From the Egyptian mummies ground up to make brown paint in the 19th century to the discovery by scientists that the light of the universe is pale turquoise, the stories in this book are as vivid and entrancing as the subject itself, leaving readers with a renewed sense of awe.

A kaleidoscope of over 100 unforgettable images

This is the first extensively illustrated edition of Colour to be published and The Folio Society has spent months inclose consultation with the author researching the perfect illustrations to publish alongside a newly edited text. The result is a thrilling visual exploration of Finlay’s subject, from aerial photography of Australia’s red centre to chalk frescoes in Pompeii, from Japanese ink drawings to paintings by Monet, Van Gogh and Titian and from the mosaics of Byzantium to woven textiles in Mexico. Famous and little-known works of art lie next to dramatic photographs and fascinating prints in this glorious selection of over 100 illustrations.

INDIGO

Just as ultramarine was so called because it came from ‘beyond the seas’, indigo is derived from the Greek meaning ‘from India’. The cultivation of indigo plants probably began in the Indus Valley more than 5,000 years ago. In the 16th century, British, Portuguese and Dutch traders attempted to introduce indigo into Europe, but they were hampered by the European growers of woad, a pigment used in battle by ancient Britons. In Germany, dyers outlawed indigo as ‘the devil’s dye’, but it soon gained in popularity. Indigo cultivation became amajor colonial industry, and Mahatma Gandhi’s first act of civil disobedience was to support indigo growers in Bihar in 1917. Coal tar-derived blues replaced the use of indigo in the 19th century.

OCHRE

Used on every continent since the earliest humans began painting, the differing shades of ochre mined from the earth are still on artists’ palettes today. Australia has the longest continuous painting tradition in the world, and mining, trading and painting with ochre were crucial elements of Aboriginal culture. Red ochre for example, may be a ceremonial substitution for blood sacrifices, but as ‘men’s business’ it is too important, even dangerous, to be talked about openly. Still used in body painting for sacred rituals, ochre is at the heart of an Aboriginal art renaissance which is reinvigorating whole communities and changing Australian perceptions of their cultural heritage.