The research presented in this article has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (CHROMOTOPE - grant agreement No. 818563).

From colour perception to colour reception(s)

1In 1858, ten years before his first term as Prime Minister, William Gladstone published a three-volume study on Homer and the Homeric Age. Gladstone, like many of his political peers, had received a classical education at Oxford and greatly admired ancient Greek poetry. And yet, in the third volume of these studies, he noted, with some surprise, a “paucity” of colour terms in the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as in other texts from this period, which he interpreted as evidence of the perceptual deficiency of the ancient Hellenes.

2In 1877, having read both Darwin’s Origin of Species and the works of Hugo Magnus, who had become interested in colour vision both as an ophthalmologist and as a student of the classics, Gladstone published a second essay on Homer, entitled “The Colour-sense,” in which he went so far as to imply that the Greeks of the Homeric age had been “colour-blind.” On discovering this piece, Charles Darwin immediately wrote to the statesman to correct some of the assumptions that Gladstone and Magnus had made: “early colour naming was a matter of word association, not of colour perception per se; a refined colour vocabulary would tend to develop around some focus of interest” (Darwin qtd in Bellmer 1999, 34). Refusing to read colour terms as direct translations of colour sensations, Darwin directly challenged Gladstone’s conclusions: the issue was linguistic and cultural rather than physiological.

3As noted by Darwin, Gladstone mistakenly read literary colour terms as indicators of perceptual capacities. But the statesman equally overlooked the use of certain technical words such as poikilos (meaning multi-coloured, variegated, especially for fabrics) which refer to specific colouring practices with no direct equivalent to our modern abstract terms like red or blue. In a word Gladstone ignored the cultural dimension of chromatic lexicalization. And as if he had never set foot in the British Museum, Gladstone even went so far as to claim that, in Antiquity:

The art of painting was wholly, and that of dyeing almost, unknown; and we may estimate the importance of this element of the case by recollecting how much, with the advance of chemistry, the taste of this country in colour has improved within the last twenty years. […] The materials, therefore, for a system of colour did not offer themselves to Homer's vision as they do to ours. (Gladstone 1858, 3:488)

4In a word Gladstone anachronistically envisaged colour through a purely ethnocentric, post-Newtonian lens. Writing in the context of a chemical revolution which would soon give rise to a whole new gamut of synthetic pigments and dyes, he deemed his contemporaries’ chromatic sense superior to even that of the Greats of Antiquity. But his attitude was also quite typical of a mid-Victorian classicist whom colour made uneasy because it jarred with his ideal vision of immaculately white antique statues. The year that Gladstone published his Studies, the Parthenon marbles kept in the British Museum were even “scrubbed” (qtd in Jenkins 2001, 5) to look whiter, emphasizing the purity of the Hellenic paradigm that Matthew Arnold would soon praise in terms of “sweetness and light”.

5Gladstone’s theory regarding the supposed deficiency of the Greek “colour-sense” caused much controversy at the time amongst scientists and writers alike, such as Walter Pater who drew on evidence of the rich polychrome material culture of Antiquity to show that in fact it was Gladstone himself who was metaphorically “colour-blind” (Pater 1925, 191) to the dazzling hues of the Hellenic past.

6This example strikingly shows that the way the Victorians apprehended colour was not a matter of “objective” perception but rather of culturally relative “reception”, a reception further complicated by the fact that Gladstone was not simply reading the colours of his own age but engaging with the colours of another era. This is precisely what the exhibition “Colour Revolution : Victorian Art, Fashion and Design” invited visitors to experience as they were presented with a surprisingly colourful Victorian age potentially jarring with their representations of XIX^th-century coal pollution and bleak working-class slums – as if we too, like Gladstone, were somewhat colour-blind to the hues of the past.

7This exhibition, which I co-curated with Matthew Winterbottom, with the invaluable assistance of Madeline Hewiston, is one of the major outcomes of the ERC project CHROMOTOPE (2019-2025). Building on the expertise of an international team of anthropologists, curators, art historians, specialists of Victorian literature, chemists and conservators from Sorbonne Université, the University of Oxford and the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris, this research programme explores what happened to colour in XIXth-century art and literature, following the invention of mauveine, the first aniline, coal-tar based dye in 1856.

8Rather than yet another “history of colour” from antiquity to the modern age, this project offers a synchronic approach to one period only, the XIXth century, which I see as a “chromatic turn” during which scientific innovation in the field of colour perception and production fostered not only abstraction in art but also paradoxically new forms of chromatic nostalgia.

9The Victorians were indeed as obsessed with reviving the past as they were with industrial progress. I chose to read this opposition in chromatic terms, not as a simplistic dichotomy between a bleak present and a colourful past but as a conflation of jarring chromatic timelines, which again further complicates purely chronological approaches to “colour history.” A good example of this is chromolithography, of which numerous examples were displayed in the exhibition. This modern printing technique was extensively used during this period, notably by the chromophile Owen Jones, to reproduce the antique or medieval past in colour (Fig.1).

10This shows that if colour has a history, of which the age of industry was evidently a turning point, it was also used by the Victorians to create stories about history itself, which translated into ideologically-charged visions of colourful bygone ages.

11This chromatic turn came to prominence at the London International exhibition of 1862 when the new dyes were first presented to six million visitors, alongside dazzling tributes to the polychromy of the past, like William Burges’s Medieval Court and John Gibson’s Tinted Venus in its polychrome niche designed by Owen Jones and inscribed with the following lines: Formas Rerum Obscuras Illustrat Confusus Distinguit Omnes Ornat Colorum Diversitas Suavis (“The gentle variety of colours clarifies the doubtful form of things, distinguishes the confused and decorates everything”) and Nec Vita Nec Sanitas Nec Pulchritudo Nec Sine Colore Juventus (“Without colour there is neither life nor health, neither beauty nor youth”). We recreated this “chromatic event” so that visitors could immerse themselves not only in Victorian colour but in the way the Victorians experienced colour. This article sheds light on how the research carried out by the CHROMOTOPE team shaped the narrative of this show which staged colours from the past to a modern audience.

The Colour Revolution: A Preview

12The expression “Colour Revolution” was first used by Regina Blaszczyk to describe the impact on the fashion industry of the invention of synthetic dyes across Europe and the United States. However, it was given a much broader meaning in our exhibition: during the XIXth century, modern science radically transformed the way the Victorians experienced colour which suddenly took center stage in the world of art, fashion and design. The show was not, therefore, limited to painting but addressed all the arts and crafts of colour which flourished during this key period.

13Because many of our visitors were not aware that the age of coal was also the age of coal-tar dyes, we wished to stage this moment of discovery as a chromatic “conflagration” (Ruskin 1903-12, 3:279). The exhibition therefore opened with a dark anteroom drawing on popular representations of the Victorian age as the distorted bleak age of industrial pollution denounced by Ruskin and Dickens alike:

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. (Dickens 1920, 19)

14Moreover, one of Queen Victoria’s mourning dresses was set against a blown-up graphic of Gustave Doré’s “Over London by rail” (Fig.2), representing the somber uniformity of the working-class areas of Victorian London, which inspired Dickens’s description of his fictional “Coketown”.

15But this was only one side of the story: Ruskin himself was a great chromophile who celebrated the “sanctity” of glowing colour (Ruskin 1903-12, 6:69). The first room thus featured a back-lit, recently restored dazzling piece of stained glass by Edward Burne-Jones who, alongside the other fine art workmen of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company, embraced Ruskin’s praise of the colours of the medieval past epitomized by the perfectly preserved jewel-like hues of manuscript illuminations. Chromatically speaking this first room was dominated by vivid heraldic blues, golds and reds and organized around three subsections – all Ruskin-related because of his strong connections with both colour and Oxford.

16The three main themes of this first room were the following: first, Ruskin, Turner and the lure of Venetian colour: Ruskin was drawn to the vivid palette of Veronese and Tintoretto acknowledging “love of pure and bright colour [was] the root of all the triumph of the Venetian schools of painting” (Ruskin 1903-12, 10:172). He often referred to these vivid colours in his ekphrastic prose as well as in his own depictions of the city (Fig. 3).

17Hence our inclusion of Turner’s particularly colourful view of Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute (1835, the MET) of which Ruskin had a reproduction in his Oxford rooms. The second theme was Ruskin and the “gothic school of colour” which he contrasted with his own “Dark Ages”:

[…] it is evident that the title “Dark Ages”, given to the mediæval centuries, is, respecting art, wholly inapplicable. […]. They were the ages of gold: ours are the ages of umber. The Middle Ages had their wars and agonies, but also intense delights. […]. Their gold was dashed with blood; but ours is sprinkled with dust. Their life was interwoven with white and purple; ours is one seamless stuff of brown. (Ruskin 1903-12, 5:321-2)

18Here we addressed the Gothic Revival which influenced John Everett Millais’s jewel-like Mariana (1851, Tate) for instance, in which the colourful stained-glass was inspired by the medieval windows of Merton College Chapel in Oxford. This painting was displayed alongside works by major Pre-Raphaelite “sisters” like Elizabeth Siddal who were artists in their own right, often inspired by the same medieval sources as their male partners.

19The Pre-Raphaelites, whose palette Ruskin championed, were also the focus of the third section exploring Ruskin’s emphasis on “truth to nature” in chromatic terms:

[T]ake a wider view of nature, and compare generally rainbows, sunrises, roses, violets, butterflies, birds, goldfish, rubies, opals, and corals, with alligators, hippopotami, lions, wolves, bears, swine, sharks, slugs, bones, fungi, fogs, and corrupting, stinging, destroying things in general, and you will feel then how the question stands between the colourists and chiaroscurists,—which of them have nature and life on their side, and which have sin and death. (Ruskin 1903-12, 6:69)

20Ruskin’s celebration of the sanctifying colours of nature led into the fourth section of this first room focusing on Science’s “unweaving of the rainbow”, a reference to John Keats’ poem “Lamia” (1820). Just as Keats believed that Isaac Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by decomposing light into the seven colours of the spectrum (Lamb qtd. in Gigante 2002, 433), Ruskin distrusted optical science and chromatic classifications:

I much question whether anyone who knows optics, however religious he may be, can feel in equal degree the pleasure or reverence which an unlettered peasant may feel at the sight of a rainbow. (Ruskin 1903-12, 5:387)

21Similarly, Darwin’s understanding of the colours of flowers as a means of insect fertilization jarred with Ruskin’s romantic experience of the sacred hues of God’s creation here depicted by another of his disciples, Alfred Hunt (Fig.4):

What the colours of flowers, or of birds, or of precious stones, or of the sea and air, and the blue mountains, and the evening and the morning, and the clouds of Heaven, were given for – they only know who can see them and can feel, and who pray that the sight and the love of them may be prolonged, where cheeks will not fade, nor sunsets die. (Ruskin 1903-12, 25:414)

22In this section the influence of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection on the world of fashion was also explored, as nature was increasingly appropriated for women’s seductive needs. Jewelry cruelly ornamented with iridescent humming bird breasts was for instance displayed alongside more humorous blown-up graphics from Punch’s “Designs after nature” (Fig.5).

23This initial foray into colour and science served as an ideal transition into the second room corresponding to the turn of the 1860-70s. This marked the acme of Victorian prosperity showcased at various international exhibitions across Europe from 1851 onwards. Entitled “colour for the masses,” this room reflected how colour was displayed to the Victorian eye. In the first subsection, dominated by mauve tones to recall Arthur Hughes’s April Love (1855-6, Tate) and William Henry Perkin’s discovery of mauveine, we explained how the new rainbow of aniline dyes democratized colour for all sections of society:

The violet mauve led the way, followed by the red magenta, the blue azuline, the yellow phosphine, the green emeraldine, the orange aurine, by purple, and brown, and black. […] The world rubbed its eyes with astonishment; and truly it seemed almost as wonderful to produce the colours of the rainbow from a lump of coal, as to extract sunshine from cucumbers. (Salter 1871, 162-3)

24Colourful socks and undergarments were presented here as if they were part of the fashion displays of the new department stores which appeared during this period. The dyes themselves were displayed as they were shown for the first time at the London International Exhibition of 1862 which the central section of the room aimed to recreate. The point of entry into this exhibition was William Burges’ Great Bookcase (1859-62), one of the key case studies of CHROMOTOPE and the subject of my book William Burges’ Great Bookcase and the Victorian Colour Revolution (Fig.6).

25This three-meter-high piece of furniture, painted by no fewer than 13 different major Victorian artists, was originally displayed in the Medieval Court of the 1862 Exhibition. A colourful chef-d’oeuvre of High Victorian eclecticism, fusing Byzantine gold, Della Robbia blues with motifs inspired by Japanese prints and identifiable Egyptian and Pompeian artefacts, this bookcase is a crucial document that testifies to the reception of the polychromy of the past in the age of modern colour. Placed at the entrance of the recreated exhibition, it shed light on the dazzling works of some of its most famous contributors, such as Edward J. Poynter’s imposing Israel in Egypt (1867, Guildhall Art Gallery). Poynter’s Biblical scene offers a fictional décor, yet referencing the latest archeological evidence on antique polychromy. For the Illustrated London News, the artist gave “every evidence of having fully profited by recent Egyptological research, […] a typical example of the successful application of the modern principle of wedding archaeology to art” (Anon. 1868, 478).

26Similarly, Solomon’s Pygmalion panel (Fig.7) on the Great Bookcase aptly introduced the theme of polychrome statues which G.F. Watts’ own Wife of Pygmalion, exhibited next to the white marble bust which inspired it and John Gibson’s controversial Tinted Venus further illustrated. As noted by Lady Eastlake in her biography of the sculptor, Gibson was a modern Pygmalion in that he also fell in love with his own statue, whose sensual colours appeared to him almost flesh-like:

When all my long labour was complete, I often sat down in quiet before my work, meditating upon it and consulting my own simple feelings. I endeavoured to keep myself free from self-delusion as to the effect of the colouring, which I put to the test of reason. I said to myself: “Here is a little nearer approach to life, therefore more impressive—yes, yes, indeed she seems an ethereal being with her blue eyes looking upon me”. I forgot at moments that I was gazing at my own production. There sat I before her long and often. How can I ever part with her! I am convinced that the Greek taste was right in colouring their sculpture—the warm glow is most agreeable to the feeling, and so is the variety obtained by it. The flesh is one tone, the hair another, the colouring of the eyes gives animation, and the drapery has its colour and all the ornaments are distinctly seen—all these are great advantages. (Eastlake 1870, 211-2)

27In 1862, the red lips of Gibson’s Venus were described as “meretricious” (qtd in Droth et al. 2014, 186), thereby recalling the long chromophobic tradition associating colour with women and deceptive surfaces (Lichtenstein 1999, 47). Equally controversial was John Bell’s A Daughter of Eve (The American Slave) (1853, Cragside, Northumberland), presented at the same exhibition, which addressed the key issue of slavery and skin colour in the context of the American Civil War. Here the blackness of the slave’s body is daringly rendered through the use of bronze electrotype which Bell contrasts with the real iron used for her chains.

29Finally, the last main room introduced the visitor to a new chromatic space and time, a new chromotope: that of fin de siècle “colour for colour’s sake”. Placed at the center of a new type of purely aesthetic, or rather synaesthetic, experience, colour here appeared as autonomous, divorced from Ruskin’s moral precepts explored in Room 1 as well as from all the ideological, political and economic narratives broached in Room 2, in keeping with both Wilde’s belief that “a colour-sense is more important, […] than a sense of right and wrong” (Wilde 2007, 4:204).

30The first section of this room was “greenery yallery” (Gilbert 1881, 38) to quote from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, a satire on Aestheticism first performed in 1881. Subtle, tertiary colours, like “olive” green (Dresser 1873, 32) were among the favourite hues of the Aesthetes, who shunned “the crude primaries of a doubtless more respectable but certainly less cultivated age” (Wilde qtd in Holland 2000, 436).

31In these cosmopolitan circles, green also recalled the toxic verdeurs of decadence (Gautier 1868, 17) described by Théophile Gautier in his 1868 essay on Charles Baudelaire, who were both major influences on the British Aesthetes. In “Pen, Pencil and Poison” subtitled “A Study in Green”, Wilde further defined “that curious love of green” as “the sign of a subtle artistic temperament [which] in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.” (Wilde 2007, 4:108).

32But as some of these Victorian greens were arsenic-based, the toxicity was more than just a metaphor, as shown by Punch’s 1862 cartoon depicting two skeletons about to dance an “Arsenic Waltz” (Fig.8).

33This may well have increased the frisson caused by the artificially green carnation which Wilde and his acolytes flaunted at the première of Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1892. Two years later Robert Hichens dedicated a whole roman à clef to the decadent flower:

Do you love this carnation, Tommy, as I love it? Do you worship its wonderful green? It is like some exquisite painted creature with dyed hair and brilliant eyes. It has the supreme merit of being perfectly unnatural. To be unnatural is often to be great. To be natural is generally to be stupid. (Hichens 1949, 127)

34The Yellow Nineties, on the other hand, referred to the colour of the cover of subversive French novels which shaped the imaginary of these artists and gave its name to the famous decadent periodical as well as to the novel that poisoned Dorian Gray’s imagination. The volume, which has often been identified with J.-K. Huysmans’ À Rebours (1884), acts as a revelation for Dorian who then decides to embrace the “fiery-coloured” life extolled by Lord Henry (Wilde 2005, 3:184):

His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. What was it, he wondered. He went towards the little, pearl-coloured octagonal stand that had always looked to him like the work of some strange Egyptian bees that wrought in silver, and taking up the volume, flung himself into an arm-chair and began to turn over the leaves. After a few minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed. (Wilde 2005, 3:102)

35These “unnatural” colours were given pride of place in the last room, opening up a new cosmopolitan artistic space implicitly contrasting with the more nationalistic and imperialistic considerations evoked previously.

36The third colour represented in this last section of the exhibition was the blue which Whistler and other Aesthetes closely associated with traditional Japan. Although Japan opened up to the West in the early 1860s – its artistic productions were first shown at the Japanese court of the 1862 London International Exhibition –, its impact on the arts was mostly felt from the 1870s. Japanese blues feature prominently in Whistler’s musical “Nocturnes” such as Blue and Gold, St Mark’s, Venice (1880, National Museum of Wales), one of the first paintings he made after winning his libel suit against Ruskin in 1878. Here, as a further provocation against the art critic, Whistler treats Ruskin’s beloved Venice in the simplified tones and forms of ukiyo-e prints. Thanks to this non-Western reference, colour is further severed from any form of legible narrative.

38In a word, “Colour Revolution” was constructed chronologically around different colour-themed rooms. As a further structuring device, the exhibition explored recurring motifs like the peacock, contrasting the precious feather in Ruskin’s teaching collection with Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, the peacock as orientalist motif and Whistler and Dresser’s Japoniste aestheticism – so as to show that a same chromatic reference may convey different culturally-charged meanings.

Colour matters

39In curatorial language, the scenography of an exhibition is often referred to as a discursive event, engaging the Curator as Narrator, the Object as the subject-matter and the Visitor as recipient (Sunier 1997, 202). As a specialist of Victorian literature, I could not but be attracted to this idea of crafting a narrative which would not primarily aim at scientific exhaustivity - which would be impossible with colour anyway – but at telling a story about XIXth-century colour. This was quite a challenge as colour has traditionally been seen as resisting discursive practices (Lichtenstein 1999, 12).

41Our exhibition narrative was also reflected in the texts, captions, and literary quotations which accompanied the coloured artefacts on display, implying a paradigmatic shift from “museography” to “scenography”. My key contribution as lead curator was to give a prominent place to textual materials and in particular to literary texts – from Christine de Pisan’s illuminated poems to Symonds’s In the Key of Blue – in our narrative, so as to show that the way some Victorian writers like Wilde described colour was directly linked to the way their artist friends related to their materials. Moreover, many artists whose works were included in our show wrote extensively about colour, notably Ruskin and Whistler. But displaying texts in a fine arts exhibition is not an easy task because it engages the visitor in a different type of temporality requiring active deciphering as opposed to the supposedly more immediate appreciation of the image, especially if it is vividly coloured.

42This again raises issues of reception. Who were we staging this show for? When I embarked on this project I envisaged the exhibition as a wonderful opportunity to display the results of my team’s new research on XIXth-century colour. But during one of the first meetings to prepare the exhibition, I was asked how I thought it might appeal to a “primary school child or a non-Western visitor”.

43The museum world is indeed rapidly changing with the growing influence of “response studies”. Everything has now become visitor-oriented, from the choice of title to the organization of outreach activities. But how may we appeal to a broader audience? The good news is that everybody loves colour, whatever their age, gender or culture. Pierre Bourdieu partly alludes to this in La Distinction (1979). Quoting the art historian Erwin Panofsky who cared surprisingly little about colour, he explains that a beholder who lacks the specific code to decipher an artwork cannot move from the primary stratum of the meaning we can grasp on the basis of our ordinary experience to the stratum of secondary meanings, i.e. the level of the meaning of what is signified, unless he possesses the concepts to reach beyond “sensible properties” like colour (Bourdieu 1979, 20). So colour here corresponds to the very first level of reading of an art work which is more or less accessible to all. We, however, wished to question this simplistic conception of colour as a mere secondary “sensible property” triggering what Hans Jauss would have called Wirkung or “effect” (as opposed to reception) (Jauss 1978, 247) in order to engage visitors in more complex cultures of colour. This we tried to achieve by the following means:

47Moreover, in the section on Japonisme we showed not only how Western artists received and appropriated these supposedly “traditional” Japanese colours but also how, in turn, Japanese artists drew on Western anilines in their own artistic production. Even the dreamy “blue transparency” of Japanese landscapes celebrated by Lafcadio Hearn (Hearn qtd in Evangelista 2016, 87) and translated into Hiroshige’s and Hokusai’s woodblock prints was in fact a modern Prussian blue pigment imported from Germany.

49But public engagement was not only be limited to the exhibition itself. We organized numerous events outside the exhibition space to generate broader interest in Victorian colour, such as artistic performances in order to show that XIXth-century art and literature could inspire new colourful dialogues, just as the Victorians themselves creatively engaged with both the hues of modernity and the colours of the past.