Death, heresy, slavery and extinction once the price of bright art
The Arts Society Newbury Lecture: Alchemy and Adventure: A history of exotic colours and poisonous pigments
by Lynne Gibson
at Arlington Arts, Snelsmore
on Tuesday, November 19
Review by ALAN CHILDS
WE take the vibrant colours around us for granted, but it was not so long ago that death, heresy, slavery and extinction were the price of bright art.
Historically, dyes – water based and mostly used for clothing – were frequently poisonous while pigments, powders that could be used for painting, were often so deadly that licking a brush could kill, artist and art historian Lynne Gibson told The Arts Society Newbury.
It was alchemists – taking a money-making break from trying to turn lead into gold or discovering the Philosopher’s Stone – who mixed the ingredients.
To keep their monopoly on a colour, as well as to avoid being burnt as heretics who were messing around with God’s creation, they often wrote in code. So, said Ms Gibson, the ingredients for the yellow called Moorish gold included a mythical basilisk and blood from a red-headed man.
To create Orpiment – the yellow next best to gold – convicts and slaves were used to mine the basic ingredient of arsenic sulphide because the mortality rate was so high. King’s yellow had to be carefully mixed so it didn’t eat through vellum or attack the other colours. So obviously it was also sold as a hair restorer.
Cinnabar red was mercury sulphide, another death sentence to mine. Women used it as lipstick, presumably to look drop dead gorgeous.
Tyrian purple didn’t actually kill anybody – although clothing laws meant you could be executed for wearing it - but it used so many molluscs crushed for their mucous that the species became extinct.
As trade routes expanded other substances became available – cochineal from South America, Lapis lazuli from Afghanistan – but always the ingredients and alchemy skills were so expensive that painters tried do-it-yourself, with the inevitable result.
Then came real chemistry which managed to create dyes and colours without necessarily poisonous bases.
But even in Victorian times the colour called Mummy brown was still just that – dead Egyptians embalmed in bitumen and ground up, said Ms Gibson.
At least nobody was actually killed for it – or by it.
Next lecture: January 21, 2025
Peder Severin Krøyer: Painter of Northern Light
theartssocietynewbury.org.uk