The Secret Lives of Color &
Researchers Reveal Hidden Details

"The Secret Lives of Color"
By Kassia St. Clair, 320 pages, Penguin Books, 2017
Reviewed by Tom Vogt, May 12, 2020

"Researchers Reveal Hidden Details"
By Theresa Machemer, Smithsonianmag.com, April 29,2020
Reviewed by Tom Vogt, May 12, 2020

From the morning's first glimpse of orange horizon to the last look at the midnight sky, our eyes take in hundreds of hues and shades and tones each day.

But those blues and greens and reds can be more than just describers. Some of them have their own stories to tell, and that's what Kassia St. Clair does in "The Secret Lives of Color." St. Clair takes basic colors that might be found in a 10-crayon box, and a chapter at a time, she writes a mini-bio of each color as well as eight or so variations. The chapter on red segues into scarlet, cochineal, vermilion, rossa corsa, hematite, madder and dragon's blood.

Painting and textiles have been major drivers in developing colors over the centuries, so there is plenty of art and fashion. It's not all high-falutin' fabrics. Indigo, a plant-based dye, fuels the denim industry - blue jeans - that was worth $54 billion globally in 2011, St. Clair wrote.

Her 10 chapters are rich in history and science. St. Clair explains how 2300 B.C. chemistry helped turn strips of lead into a pigment that became a basic item on an artist's palette, lead white. (The process involved fermenting animal dung.)

Another mineral substance was the source of a much more prized color, a shade of blue called ultramarine. The rock, lapis lazuli, was mined in the mountains of Afghanistan and powdered into a pigment. Ultramarine was so valuable, St. Clair wrote, that its cost was often written into artists' contracts.

Living creatures have long been harvested for dyes. Cochineal, one of the colors in the "Red" chapter, is sourced from an insect that lives in Mexico and South America. It takes 70,000 of the dried cocci to make a pound of cochineal. It was so precious that it was one of the tributes the Aztecs demanded from subjugated peoples.

Man-made colors stepped up in the 1850s when an English chemist tried to turn coal tar into a synthetic quinine. William Perkin did not discover a new malaria medicine, but he did create a bright purple dye and spawned an entire new industry.

... Although, to be completely accurate, another man-made colorant predated Perkin's purple by centuries. It literally was made from men. It was called mummy, and it was the powdered remains of Egyptians who had been mummified thousands of years earlier. Described by St. Clair as a rich brown pigment, it was sold in London into the 1960s.

St. Clair's monochrome word portraits show how each of those 85 colors brings something distinctive to our world. But by pure happenstance, I just came across a piece of online writing while finishing her book. Writing for smithsonianmag.com, Theresa Machener shows what happens when a palette filled with those colors winds up in the hands of a master: They can combine to create a treasure.

The story looked at a Dutch museum's investigation of "Girl With a Pearl Earring," painted by Johannes Vermeer in the 1660s. The painting has been called the Dutch "Mona Lisa."

The online article is called "Researchers Reveal Hidden Details in Vermeer's 'Girl With a Pearl Earring.'" The hidden details included the sources of several colors that were featured in "Secret Lives." The vibrant blue in the girl's scarf came from lapis lazuli, and there was a surprising amount of it.

"This blue pigment was more valuable than gold in the 17th century," a researcher said. The red in the girl's lips came from insects gathered from cactus plants in Mexico or South America. The white that highlights her eyes and earring came from lead that was mined in England. And the dark blue in the background came from indigo that was imported from North America or Asia.

Vermeer also made an appearance in St. Clair's book, and the segment also hinged on pigment analysis of a painting. A Dutch art dealer who sold the work claimed it was painted by Vermeer. It was one several the dealer had sold as long-lost masterpieces. But a closer look at a shade of blue sent him to prison for forgery in 1947. Cobalt blue was formulated in 1802 as a cheaper substitute for the ultrapricey ultramarine. That was 130 years after Vermeer died.

And talk about good value. St. Clair got three reveals for the price of one in her cobalt blue segment: the secret life of a painting, the secret life of an art dealer and the secret life of a color.