19th Century Art Color Theory Philosophy Black and White
Whether we please in Eugène Delacroix's elaborate palettes and chiaroscuro or prefer veils of shimmering light in J. M. Due west. Turner's belatedly paintings, we answer to such artists' vast ingenuity with color. These and other nineteenth-century painters dramatically increased the range of what and how we see, both perceptually and symbolically. Unless we are conservators, painters, art historians, or materials historians, however, we routinely practise not nourish closely to technological developments affecting the arts and crafts of painting. All the same the nineteenth century offers us a cardinal moment in the history of color theory. Broadly divers, color theory studies qualities and relations of colour and—nether specific conditions—changes of hue. The industrial revolution and an increasing knowledge of chemistry allowed early nineteenth-century painters to benefit from the almost dramatic increase in the number of new natural and constructed pigments and refined color processing developments in two millenia ("Traditional" 1). Artists experimented with the newly available pigments by contrasting them, mixing them, and combining them with different binding media to vary hue and intensity. They layered colors with glazes or under-painting and explored variations in how to depict shadings, tints, and tones. Increasingly enlightened of the fragility of art, some artists were concerned to find means to make paintings concluding.[ane]
Figure i: 1835 Frontispiece of _Chromatography_
George Field's Chromatography, or, A Treatise on Colours and Pigments, and of Their Powers in Painting &c., (London, January 1835), a seminal nineteenth-century text in color theory, helped modify the grade of British painting aesthetically and practically. (See Fig. i.) Chromatography, in which Field shares his fullest knowledge well-nigh available colors, is less of import for its theory of primaries than for its technological footing and communication. At a time of great expansion in the visual arts, painters had go piece of cake prey to retail color sellers who did not purvey pigments of superior quality. Field, however, was adamant to buttress his theories with reliable information about low-cal-fast, durable pigments, based on his own scientific experiments and manufacturing processes. While he certainly wished to sell his ain pigments, he also sought to secure a lasting fame—through enduring materiality—for Britain's art.
Chromatography was the culmination of Field's many years of colour experiments and manufacture. Between 1804 and 1825 he recorded, in x octavo notebooks, results of experiments concerning the stability of pigments, upon which he after drew for key sections of the 1835 volume. An instant success, helped perhaps past a highly favorable review in The Literary Gazette (Jerden 21), the book went through five editions by 1885. No subscriptions were needed for an enlarged second edition within half-dozen years. In other words, publishing the first edition had been paid for by the prepare capital of would-be readers, listed in the front of the book equally subscribers, through a method of publishing going dorsum to the seventeenth century. Nevertheless the second edition was popular enough not to demand such pre-publication financing. In 1850 an abridged version appeared under the title Rudiments of the Painter'southward Fine art, or a Grammar of Colouring, a copy of which William Holman Chase, already having borrowed an earlier edition, acquired from Charles Roberson in 1856 (Gage, George Field 33).[2] This version was reissued ii years later with notes on color symbolism, edited by John Weale. A 3rd edition was set up when Field died. Afterward editions of the volume, edited by T. Due west. Salter and J. Scott Taylor in 1869 and 1885, updated information on pigments but dispensed with Field's comments on the relations and symbolism of colors (Gage, George Field 33). While this publication history confirms Field'due south major affect in the area of color for over forty years, the after editing shows that his practical knowledge greatly outweighed his theories.
Color theories and practices assumed an increasing importance amongst nineteenth-century fine art critics, theorists, and scientists. A damning Athenaeum review of Chromatography, which disagrees with Field's claims for the importance of color, illustrates the poles of the debate in the 1830s: "We consider the whole of Mr. F's harangue upon this subject, as a most unwise pandering to the public taste for that gay lady—Colour. Instead of the offset, colouring is the very last amongst the great requisites. Expression, blueprint, invention, are all earlier it" (Darley 638). Every bit the century continued, notwithstanding, an art critic such as John Ruskin, who initially stressed the primacy of form over colour in Modernistic Painters (1843), expanded his views. His comments on Turner, Fra Angelico, the Pre-Raphaelites, and his handbook on drawing certificate his developing ideas well-nigh the importance of colour.[3]
The number of commercially available pigments dramatically increased during the century. By processing heavy metallic ores into a wider range of colors and working with lake pigments by extracting dyes and fixing them onto an insoluble base such as hydrate of aluminum or sulphate of calcium, color-makers gradually introduced, over the century, such new colors as cobalt blue (1806-07), French ultramarine (1827), viridian (blue-green) (1830s), cadmium yellows (1851), and alizarin cerise (1868) ("History" 1; Harley, Artists 57; Church 194).[4] Yet pigments were still often unstable, and artists could not be sure of degrees of purity. For colormen could unscrupulously adulterate pigments with cheaper matter. Manufacturing methods, therefore, critically affected how useful a paint might exist to painters; only the finest methods, like George Field's, based in the wisdom learned from chemical experiments, produced superior colors.
Fine art-lover, Technologist, Inventor, Color-maker, Theorist

Figure 2: George Field by David Lucas, 1845; after Richard Rothwell mezzotint (1839) © National Portrait Gallery, London. Used with permission
When George Field (1777-1854) arrived in London from Hertfordshire at eighteen, the art earth was in a country of ferment and expansion ("Mr. George Field" 343). (See Fig. 2.) The profusion of apprentice equally well as professional painters, especially in the area of watercolors, had led to the financial security of creative person suppliers. New pigments, more efficient and sophisticated machines for extracting dyes, scientific theories of vision, optical devices, and refined theories of color (psychological, moral, chemical, physical) had emerged dramatically—and often co-temporaneously—at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Field was poised to take advantage of this historical moment by wedding science and applied science with commercial transactions, a religious vision, and artistic expression.
Founder and i of iii Directors of the British School (1802-04), a commercial exhibiting guild for British art, and writer of Chromatics (1817), a volume on the harmony of colors based on the Christian Trinity, Field'due south prominence had become indisputable. Past the time he published Chromatography in 1835, Field was recognized by professional person painters as London'southward most of import color-maker and supplier. A color-maker, as opposed to a colorman, is the person who really manufactures pigments to sell to a colorman, one who prepares the pigments and binding media for artists. Field'due south early interactions with painters and his knowledge of their concerns well-nigh how quickly paints could fade instigated his experiments with the chemical science of dyes and pigments. In turn, those experiments informed his treatise writing and led to his commitment to better available colors by altering the way they were manufactured. While, as Joyce Townsend notes, "the manufactured painting materials of the nineteenth century were circuitous and ever-irresolute, and practise not evidence any clear lines of evolution towards improved stability" ("Materials" 5), Field countered this trend past producing many durable colors and advising on quality. He was remembered in the art world at his decease in 1854 for producing "colouring affair surpassing everything of the kind that had earlier been seen" ("Mr. George Field" 343).
As an anti-Newtonian, Field believed that colors emerged from the polar opposites of black and white. That is, blue volition occur if darkness is strongest; yellow will occur if light is strongest; red will occur if darkness and light are balanced. Throughout all his writings, Field held to a theory of triads in nature—of which the primary colors of scarlet, yellow, and blue were earthly manifestations of the Divine Trinity. Due to his Christian vision, Field devoted himself largely to the evolution of the colors he considered sacred: madders, lemon yellow, and ultramarine.[v] Moreover, Field attended closely to how pigments reflect lite, and he favored pure colors. Since blending pigments subtracts wavelengths from white light, each time another color pigment is added to a mix, more of the spectrum is subtracted from the reflected light, with a outcome of less transparency, less brilliance. "At present the more than pigments are mixed," writes Field, "the more they are deteriorated in color, attenuated, and chemically set at variance" (qtd. in Ball 41).[half dozen] Field's business organisation with color, harmony, and purity every bit universals included his attempt to link them analogically with the musical harmony system in Chromatography, as well equally in his earlier Chromatics.
As a researcher, Field gear up out to test the pigments he bought from colormen, and, equally a manufacturer, he supplied them ameliorate pigments. Field'due south notebooks (1804-25) indicate detailed noesis of the properties of pigments, from madder to orange vermilion to ultramarine, derived from numerous chemical experiments concerning their qualities and permanence.[7] In one of the nearly important sections of Chromatography, affiliate twenty-two "Tables of Pigments," Field classifies pigments in terms of their backdrop and effects under certain circumstances (such every bit what ground is chosen or by what varnish they may be covered).
Shortly after Field began experiments with color, he based his manufacturing activities on the scientific knowledge he had acquired. He built factories (which he called "elaboratories") to make lake pigments; lake does not refer to a body of water merely derives from lac, which refers to a resinous secretion. He invented machinery to refine the processes of extraction and drying. Historically, lake pigments have typically included reds and browns from the madder root (Rubia tinctorum), indigo from the plant woad (Isatis tinctoria), and ruddy from the cochineal insect ("Lake pigment" 1; Chenciner 68, 154). Field's kickoff factory was 1808 Conham in Due east Bristol, his second 1813 at
Hounslow Heath, and his third 1826 at
Syon Hill Park in
Isleworth (Gage, George Field 28; Chenciner 161). From these sites he supplied several of the finest colormen in England, including Charles Roberson and Rudolph Ackermann, and subsequently William Winsor and his partner the artist Henry Newton, who founded together in 1832 the (even so) world-famous firm of artists' supplies Winsor & Newton (Chenciner 161). In fact, the notebooks were acquired by Winsor & Newton afterward Field's expiry, so that his production methods and commitment to purity would not pass into oblivion. To this twenty-four hour period, the house relies upon the Field method of extracting rose madder (Chenciner 161, 167; "History" 1). A technical innovator as well equally a chemical researcher and manufacturer, Field invented a percolator that relied on steam pressure to extract pigments efficiently, and a drying stove and press. For these inventions, which improved the durability of lake pigment, Field received the Society of Arts golden Isis medal in 1816 (Pierce 37).
Different other color makers, Field, whom John Cuff describes fittingly as an "eminently practical theorist and an eminently theoretical practitioner" (George Field 8), had a long and shut relationship with leading British and American painters (Harley, Artists 27, 224n24). He had met many when he exhibited their art in London; he met others through sales of his pigments. Although his contact with leading chemists was slight (Gage, Color 215), Field was fully aware of the information painters needed virtually their materials. The review of Chromatography in The Literary Gazette, in fact, cites Field'southward reputation among not only oil painters only also water colorists who praised him for the "brilliance, transparency, depth, and durability" of many of his colors (Jerden 21). Not only was his madder excellent, but also his white lac varnish was "of unrivalled purity, splendor and compactness" (21). Field discussed colour with painters, directly supplied colors and varnish to specific artists, and tested samples given to him by artists. For instance, Turner brought for testing a sample of Roman white, "whiter than Blanc d'Argent, lead white. . . much prized past Turner" (qtd. in Gage, Turner 92, 248n42).[8] From her shut analysis of Field's notebooks, R. D. Harley reports that Field mentions eighteen artists by name, some in terms of conversations or purchases and others in terms of their having given him pigments to test. In addition to Turner, we find Sir Thomas Lawrence, David Wilkie, William Collins, and Benjamin West ("Field'due south Manuscripts" 82). Artists' business relationship books, such every bit those of John Linnell, also signal purchases from Field. Moreover, subscribers to Chromatography include some of the key artists of the mean solar day: John Lawrence, Turner, David Wilkie, John Lawman, and William Mulready, as well every bit the creative person, soon-to-be English language translator of Goethe's Zur Farbenlehre (1810; tr. English 1840), Charles Lock Eastlake.
In Chromatography Field does non forget these notable subscribers or the many professional person artists with whom he closely worked during his years of experiments, whether named or unnamed in his notebooks. He dedicates the book to them: "To Sir Martin Archer Shee, President of the Royal Academy and to The Artists of Britain." Paying further homage to subscribers, Chromatography announces itself every bit written with the deepest respect for the artists whom Field hopes to help "consummate a school of colouring which is already historic and followed throughout Europe" (dedication). He promises that as the Greeks bequeathed a perfection of form "you will bestow to posterity standards of perfection in color" (dedication).
While Field'due south own love for a Romantic palette of tertiary colors precluded his full appreciation of a primary and secondary palette, he hoped to influence Victorian painters to think again about the quality of their colors and to learn to mix them with care. How much they took his advice is another thing. As a subsequently art theorist and painter has noted, "it is no more possible to learn to paint from books than to acquire to swim on a sofa" (Doerner 7). All the same, those artists who could afford to buy Field'south colors, though costly, were glad they did. Both the purity of the pigments themselves and Chromatography influenced the Pre-Raphaelites, who persistently favored bold, bright primaries. In fact, in her 1844 translation of Cennino Cennini's fourteenth century artist's handbookIl libro dell'arte (The Book of Fine art), detailing the Renaissance technique of fresco and discussing in detail available pigments of the One-time Masters, Mrs. Merrifield refers to Chromatography seven times, explaining where Field and Cennini overlap or disagree most colors and drying methods.

Figure 3: William Holman Hunt, Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus, 1851
Field's manufacturing of pure pigments is in keeping with his advice about the best means to preserve colors. That Pre-Raphaelite paintings, such as Chase's Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (1850-51) (Fig. iii)—showing no sign of e'er having been cleaned (Townsend, Pre-Raphaelite 117)—or John Everett Millais' Ophelia (started 1851), lasted into the xx-beginning century, without even greater fading, discoloring, or cracking than they practice show, pays tribute to the beingness of Field'due south colors, supplied by the colorman Roberson, and to a growing consciousness near the relationship of science to painting.
Accounts kept by Roberson ostend that Chase purchased orange vermilion and extract of vermilion from Field betwixt 1842-54 and that Millais purchased Field'southward chrome green in 1850 (Townsend, Pre-Raphaelite 42-43). Hunt, who chose supplies very carefully, went and so far as to write down the colors, media, and varnishes used, on some of his painting spandrels, in lodge to familiarize future restorers with his original materials. For example, on The Awakening Conscience (1853) Hunt wrote in the left spandrel: "Painted with Copal (oil) weak originally, diluted in employ with R. [? for 'rectified'] S[pirit] of Turps/for cartoon out parts/Eastward[merald] Greenish & Gamboge in transparent/function of leaf. flick retouched/with aforementioned Vehicle in 1864/W Holman Hunt/Delight copy the in a higher place/Note before/obliterating it." Millais wrote later to Hunt that they were fortunate to have had "the choicest of our colours prepared for us past George Field" (qtd. in Gage, George Field 76).[ix] Hunt'due south and Millais' own selections of ground, paint, and varnish, therefore, contributed to the staying ability of some of the colors, just then did Field'south influence as a pharmacist, technologist, and advocate of pure, vivid, unmixed colors.
Fine art Treatises: Form or Color?
One might wonder why a handbook on color such every bit Chromatography would be necessary in 1835. For centuries, the cognition of painting was transferred, not by books primarily, but through long-term training from master to educatee and from workshop to workshop, where apprentices had, until the eighteenth century, spent many years learning how to fix the materials for painting. From time to time, of course, painters would write downwardly their ideas in treatises. Such handbooks, some emphasizing the practical and some the theoretical, are of great historical importance. Nevertheless, those that emerged from highly specific historical moments and available art materials had a more limited influence than watershed texts such as Leon Battista Alberti's 1435-36 Della pittura (On Painting), which introduced single-point perspective and ideas about colour, light, and infinite, or Leonardo da Vinci's later writings on chiaroscuro. Notwithstanding by the nineteenth century, when art reached thousands more viewers and was practiced by amateurs too every bit professionals, techniques were less and less passed on from master to pupil. Fifty-fifty at the Imperial University in the nineteenth century, training in "studio secrets" remained weak, as opposed to a strong emphasis on composition and theory, so much then that Chase complained nigh his lack of knowledge of Old Master techniques (Townsend, Pre-Raphaelite 10).
Field came to London at a watershed moment, characterized by what Cuff calls a "new set of circumstances" when professional painters were "driven increasingly to written handbooks and to retailers of artist's materials (oft their publishers), neither of them necessarily very reliable guides to their craft" (George Field vii). A growing number of art practitioners, served by a proliferating group of retail colormen, meant that professional painters were now being served by men who introduced pigments and media to the mass market that artists themselves had not had either the "capacity or opportunity" to test (vii). The gaps in knowledge intensified for painters who were condign alarmed at the rapid deterioration of work by predecessors such equally Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose binding media yellowed or darkened and whose declared utilize of bitumen resulted in cracking. Materials and chemical science became increasingly of import for artists who, like the Pre-Raphaelites from 1848, sought to create a new schoolhouse of British art, to rival European schools, based on specific techniques.[10]
Hunt, who corresponded with Field and bought his products, became, possibly, the virtually song of Victorian artists regarding materials. He informed himself through reading and his own experiments from the 1840s onward, somewhen arguing in public for artists' oversight with regard to materials. He read Eastlake'southward Materials for a History of Oil Painting (1847), an edition of Goethe's Zur Farbenlehre/Theory of Colors (1810, tr. Eastlake 1840), Mrs. Merrifield'southward Original Treatises in the Arts of Painting (1849), Theophilus'south Essay Upon Diverse Arts (tr. R. Hendrie 1847), and Cennino Cennini'southward The Craftsman's Handbook (1437, tr. Merrifield 1844) (Jacobi 119; Gage, George Field 77). Chase corresponded, too, with Frederick Barff, Asst. Prof. of Chemical science at University College, London, who, in 1870-71, lectured to the Society of Arts on colors and pigments (Jacobi 119).
Hunt even seems to take kept rail of adulteration in pigments he purchased. In a now pregnant letter of the alphabet of 1875, Hunt complained to Roberson most the failings of both an orange vermillion from 1873 and madders from 1875, which darkened prematurely and were not, according to his ain chemical experiments, what Hunt had bought from the aforementioned source under the same name a quarter century previously (Jacobi 119; Hunt two: 455). In April 1880, Chase argued for consumer rights and the reform of mass product in a famous accost to the Society of Arts—"The Nowadays Organisation of Obtaining Materials in Employ by Artist Painters as Compared with that of the Old Masters," a talk afterwards summarized in Hunt'south Pre-Raphaelitism (2: 453-56) and reprinted in The Builder of 1880. He chosen for an artists' society to look subsequently the cloth interests of painting and to plant a library of works on artistic practice. He farther endorsed a plan to purchase and put on brandish strange samples of colors in a museum and urged the creation of a technical school to train artists. In June of the same year, Hunt shared his own pigment experiments at the Grosvenor Gallery. Highlighting the superiority of Field's colors and standards, Arthur Westward of Winsor & Newton displayed the colour-fading samples from Field'south octavo notebooks, which were "as perfect in tint now as when kickoff put in" (qtd. in Gage, George Field 35).[11] Hunt excitedly borrowed the notebooks.
The interdisciplinarity of science and fine art with regard to color meant that professional painters could turn to scientific treatises as well as art handbooks. Sir Isaac Newton's magisterial Opticks, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light (1704)—a written report based in experiments of dispersion, the separation of white light into a spectrum of component colors—was bachelor in English. In creating the field of physical optics, Newton had illustrated how colors arise from absorption, reflection, or manual of parts of calorie-free. While Opticks was aimed at scientists, and few artists probably read it, information technology would be shortsighted to think it had no influence at all on artists or color theory.[12] At the same time, it is likely that nineteenth-century painters concerned with color and pigment preferred to read the more experientially based, anti-Newtonian Zur Farbenlehre past Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German 1810, English tr. 1840). Newton'due south and Goethe's treatises were but ii of those that spawned farther scientific and quasi-scientific fine art treatises in the nineteenth century in Europe, amid them J. F. L. Mérimée'south De la peinture a l'huile… (1830; tr. The Art of Painting in Oil. . . 1839), Michel Eugene Chevreul'south De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs et de l'assortiment des objets colorés (1839, tr. The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors, and Their Applications to the Arts, 1854).
Treatises on colour offered ideas and/or scientific experiments, simply the connection to artistic practice itself was non e'er spelled out, which meant artists did not find much use in them. Those handbooks that did offer technical advice did not always base of operations information technology on experimentation and thus purveyed inconsistent or flawed advice. Field'southward Chromatography, however, prepare forth ideas about color, pigments, drying, preserving, and viewing color through new optical instruments. Having conducted scores of tests, he offered a rare "account of about all the artists' pigments commercially available at that fourth dimension" (Harley, "Field'south Manuscripts" 76). In so doing, Field not merely provided the nearly trustworthy handbook for practicing painters available in 1835 but likewise created the footing for revisions that informed artists for years to come up. While it is true that some of Field's subscribers did non all endorse his views on color harmony or share his gauge of specific pigments, fundamental figures such as Owen Jones did rely on Field for decoration in the Crystal Palace (1851). Ultimately, the experiments of James Clerk Maxwell on kinds of colored light (scarlet, blue, and green), Herbert von Helmholtz on color vision, and other scientists on color measurement, proved Field's theories about light, primaries, and harmony to exist ill-founded.[13] Nonetheless, the popularity of his book persisted for 2 decades and, in revised versions, virtually until to the end of the century.
The Components of Color and the Psychology of Coloring
Chromatography weds science and art, only Field goes further to explore the psychological effects of coloring in painting with reference to the sister art of poetry. Drawing on a broad number of poetry quotations, Field links colors to specific emotions equally expressed by central Greek and Latin writers, such every bit Homer and Horace, and by British writers from the Medieval to Romantic periods. As i might suspect, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton frequently appear, simply mixed in with afterwards writers such every bit Dryden, Pope, Swift, Charlotte Smith, and Lord Byron. Field'southward notes on red might offering a skillful example of the sister-art dimension of his work with color.
Field get-go places reddish in terms of primary colors as "standing betwixt xanthous and blue" and in an "intermediate" relation to white and black (85). "Pre-eminent" amid colors, ruddy, he explains, is the most "positive"—forming with yellow the secondary colour of orangish and with blueish the secondary colour purple (85). One of the noteworthy aspects of carmine is that when information technology is combined with yellow its hue becomes hot, but with blueish its hue becomes cool. Illustrating his ideas about color, light, and darkness, he states that red is closer to yellowish in its relationship to light and distance and in its effect on the heart: "the power of vision is diminished upon viewing this color in a strong lite; while, on the other hand, ruddy itself appears to deepen in color chop-chop in a failing calorie-free every bit night comes on, or in shade" (85). Field warns that these properties make crimson hard to manage rightly and mean that, no thing how tempting its beauty, cerise should be kept as subordinate in painting equally it is in nature. He notes that nature uses far more dark-green than ruddy, but that one red object placed with due regard to lite, shade, and altitude can be striking.
Treating the cultural heritage of cherry symbolism, Field focuses on two poles: that of powerful feelings such equally anger and that of the positive affections of joy, love, hope, and pleasure. Every bit a peculiarly military colour, he notes, red was worn by warrior-heroes in ancient times, is included on flags of disobedience, is the emblem of blood, and thereby indicates fierceness and courage. This "most constructive of colors" incites the bull to rage (87). Noting that scarlet produces emotions in viewers of awe, fearfulness, and veneration, he too links information technology to royalty and to martyrs.
Field documents that poets have often called to use the colour red, or its offshoot colors such as "rose," and sometimes have chosen the metonymy of purple for red, to decorate figures or equally epithets. While he acknowledges that occasionally the words themselves, such as coral redden (Pope, Windsor Forest) or ruby sin (Shakespeare, Henry 8), might be chosen for their sounds and not their visual intensity, however, he opines that many writers illustrate the "refined taste, true judgment, and cultivated feeling of the painter" (87-88). Providing a catalogue of literary reds, Field offers eleven sets of poetry examples to illustrate the "relations, attributes, and uses of this colour" (88)—quoting passages that feature the color ruby-red as conveying beauty, dignity, dear, and other emotions or qualities and—with analogy to his color theory—noting where poets utilise information technology in conjunction with white or black, in harmony with light, in contrast with other colors, and in dissimilarity with black (91-92).
While it is no great surprise that Field would consider good pigments of cherry-red the most indispensable, given his belief in the universal importance of the primaries and ruby-red as the instance of residual, he outlines eight main red pigments from vermilion to ruby-red orpiment, discussing the origins, tones, qualities, and the upshot of light, time, and air on them. This highly detailed and helpful summary for artists also delves into subtypes when he arrives at the lake pigments. In that section, for instance, he likewise differentiates betwixt carmine derived from cochineal and Madder, or Field's carmine. Carmines from cochineal, varying from rose to warm red, work in water and oil merely are destroyed in light. Carmines from madder, varying from rose to ruddy, are superior as the just "durable carmines for painting either in water or oil" (Field 101, sic). Field also classifies some pigments as fugitive, such as French rouge, a species of carmine prepared from safflower, which is very expensive, if beautiful, and used to dye silks or produce cosmetics. Although, due to its richness of color and transparency, it is often used to heighten lake and ruby-red pigments, Field advises that it is not worthy of the artist's attention.
Field's honey of the sister fine art of poetry, demonstrated throughout Chromatography, allows him to expand his study of color, driving it into realms both moral and psychological.[14] Although Field does non quote his Romantic contemporaries Wordsworth or Coleridge, he resembles them in that he wishes to ground his audition in the natural, pure world of God's cosmos. Field's philosophy of harmony in all parts of the universe, based on 1 unitary process in nature, which he applies analogically to painting, poesy, and music, was idealistic. Nevertheless his deep understanding of colors and pigments in their chemic combinations proved crucial to the innovative strides of many oil paintings in the period and, even more importantly, to their color permanence. While his theory almost primary colors was quickly disproved by scientific advances and while new colors have been invented, his importance to the Victorian art world and to the history of British painting remains undeniable.
published September 2012
HOW TO CITE THIS Branch ENTRY (MLA format)
Shires, Linda M. "On Color Theory, 1835: George Field's Chromatography." Co-operative: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. [Here, add your concluding appointment of access to BRANCH].
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—. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Alliance. Vol. two. New York: Macmillan, 1905. Print.
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"Traditional Pigments of the 19th Century." Winsor & Newton. Web. 18 June 2012.
ENDNOTES
[1] As John Cuff reports, by 1862 "when William Sandby published the get-go history of the Royal Academy," he asked for "instruction in the chemistry of colours," due to the "concrete decay of many pictures" past Sir Joshua Reynolds, J. G. W. Turner, William Etty, and the late works of Sir David Wilkie (Colour and Meaning 153).
[ii] Listed in Roberson's Ledgers (fifteen Sept. 1856).
[three] See Modern Painters vol. ane. sect. 2. part 5.iii.67; vol. 1. sect. ii. part 2.xx.168; Stones of Venice 2: 144-45; Pre- Raphaelitism 37-52; The Elements of Cartoon 107-75, 181n41.
[4] It is catchy to date pigments in some cases, and sometimes the dates offered exercise non hold. Cobalt bluish had long been used in Chinese porcelain, but in 1802 Louis Jacques Thenard discovered information technology; in 1803 it went into product in France; past 1806-07, information technology was a branch of commerce. Every bit R. D. Harley says, "It is difficult to decide the date of introduction of cobalt blue to England, merely it is unlikely to have been much afterward than in France" (57). Harley goes on to explain that despite the fact that French republic and England were at war, French scientific publications were translated and thought exchanges continued. She too notes that cobalt blue is listed in Field'southward "Practical Periodical 1809" notebook, in an entry she dates to 1815 (57).
[5] See Gage, Color and Culture 216.
[6] Beginning discussed in Field, Chromatography 1869 ed.
[7] Field's Notebooks (1804-25) are held by Winsor & Newton, London, with photographic records in the Cortauld Institute of Art, London.
[viii] Showtime discussed in Field, "Practical Journal" n375.
[9] Showtime discussed in Hunt, Pre Raphaelitism 2: 374-75.
[10] See Townsend, Pre-Raphaelite 10-xi.
[eleven] First discussed in Journal of the Society of Arts, 28 (1880): 669-70.
[12] Meet Gage, "Signs of Disharmony" 360.
[xiii] See Menzies 610.
[14] Goethe had made similar connections in 1810 in Zur Farbenlehre, which was not available to Field in English until 1840, though he may take known nearly the book's ideas from Turner.
Source: https://branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=linda-m-shires-on-color-theory-1835-george-fields-chromatography
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