It all started when a German occultist by the name of Johann Konrad Dippel bungled a recipe for an illicit elixir that he believed could cure all human ailments. Had it not been for an accident in an alchemist's lab in Berlin in 1706, such works, and countless others besides by Edgar Degas and Claude Monet, would never have pulsed with such enduring mystery or power. Colour, we discover, is never what it seems.Ĭonsider, for instance, Prussian Blue, the captivating hue that unexpectedly connects Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa, 1831, with Pablo Picasso's The Blue Room, 1901. This fascinating and forgotten language that paintings and sculptures use to speak to us is the subject of my new book, The Art of Colour: The History of Art in 39 Pigments. These histories unlock surprising layers in masterpieces we thought we knew by heart. Every colour we encounter in a great work of art, from the ultramarine that Johannes Vermeer wove into the turban of his Girl with a Pearl Earring to the volatile vermillion that inflames the fiery sky of Edvard Munch's The Scream, brings with it an extraordinary backstory.
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