Linda M. Shires On Color Theory 1835 George Fields Emchromatographyem PDF

Linda M. Shires, On Color Theory, 1835: Ge...
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Linda M. Shires, On Color Theory, 1835: George

Fields Chromatography
Whether we delight in Eugne Delacroixs elaborate palettes and chiaroscuro or prefer veils of shimmering light
in J. M. W. Turners late paintings, we respond 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
do not attend closely to technological developments affecting the craft of painting. Yet the nineteenth century
offers us a key moment in the history of color theory. Broadly defined, color theory studies qualities and relations
of color andunder specific conditionschanges of hue. The industrial revolution and an increasing knowledge of
chemistry allowed early nineteenth-century painters to benefit from the most dramatic increase in the number of
new natural and synthetic 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 aware of the fragility of art, some
artists were concerned to find ways to make paintings last.[1]
Figure 1: 1835 Frontispiece of _Chromatography_
George Fields 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 alter the course of British
painting aesthetically and practically. (See Fig. 1.) Chromatography, in which Field shares his fullest knowledge
about available colors, is less important for its theory of primaries than for its technological basis and advice. At a
time of great expansion in the visual arts, painters had become easy prey to retail color sellers who did not purvey
pigments of superior quality. Field, however, was determined to buttress his theories with reliable information
about light-fast, durable pigments, based on his own scientific experiments and manufacturing processes. While
he certainly wished to sell his own pigments, he also sought to secure a lasting famethrough enduring
materialityfor Britains art.
Chromatography was the culmination of Fields many years of color experiments and manufacture. Between
1804 and 1825 he recorded, in ten octavo notebooks, results of experiments concerning the stability of pigments,
upon which he later drew for key sections of the 1835 volume. An instant success, helped perhaps by 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 six years. In other words, publishing the first
edition had been paid for by the ready capital of would-be readers, listed in the front of the book as subscribers,
through a method of publishing going back to the seventeenth century. Yet the second edition was popular
enough not to need such pre-publication financing. In 1850 an abridged version appeared under the title
Rudiments of the Painters Art, or a Grammar of Colouring, a copy of which William Holman Hunt, already having
borrowed an earlier edition, acquired from Charles Roberson in 1856 (Gage, George Field 33).[2] This version
was reissued two years later with notes on color symbolism, edited by John Weale. A third edition was ready
when Field died. Later editions of the book, edited by T. W. Salter and J. Scott Taylor in 1869 and 1885, updated
information on pigments but dispensed with Fields comments on the relations and symbolism of colors
(Gage, George Field 33). While this publication history confirms Fields major impact in the area of color for over
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forty years, the later editing shows that his practical knowledge greatly outweighed his theories.
Color theories and practices assumed an increasing importance among nineteenth-century art critics, theorists,
and scientists. A damning Athenaeum review of Chromatography, which disagrees with Fields claims for the
importance of color, illustrates the poles of the debate in the 1830s: We consider the whole of Mr. Fs harangue
upon this subject, as a most unwise pandering to the public taste for that gay ladyColour. Instead of the first,
colouring is the very last among the great requisites. Expression, design, invention, are all before it (Darley 638).
As the century continued, however, an art critic such as John Ruskin, who initially stressed the primacy of form
over color in Modern Painters (1843), expanded his views. His comments on Turner, Fra Angelico, the
Pre-Raphaelites, and his handbook on drawing document his developing ideas about the importance of color.[3]
The number of commercially available pigments dramatically increased during the century. By processing heavy
metal 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 crimson (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
pigment might be to painters; only the finest methods, like George Fields, based in the wisdom learned from
chemical experiments, produced superior colors.
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 world was in a state of
ferment and expansion (Mr. George Field 343). (See Fig. 2.) The profusion of amateur as well as professional
painters, especially in the area of watercolors, had led to the financial security of artist suppliers. New pigments,
more efficient and sophisticated machines for extracting dyes, scientific theories of vision, optical devices, and
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refined theories of color (psychological, moral, chemical, physical) had emerged dramaticallyand often
co-temporaneouslyat 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 technology with commercial transactions, a
religious vision, and artistic expression.
Founder and one of three Directors of the British School (1802-04), a commercial exhibiting society for British art,
and author of Chromatics (1817), a book on the harmony of colors based on the Christian Trinity, Fields
prominence had become indisputable. By the time he published Chromatography in 1835, Field was recognized
by professional painters as Londons most important color-maker and supplier. A color-maker, as opposed to a
colorman, is the person who actually manufactures pigments to sell to a colorman, one who prepares the
pigments and binding media for artists. Fields early interactions with painters and his knowledge of their
concerns about how quickly paints could fade instigated his experiments with the chemistry of dyes and pigments.
In turn, those experiments informed his treatise writing and led to his commitment to improve available colors by
altering the way they were manufactured. While, as Joyce Townsend notes, the manufactured painting materials
of the nineteenth century were complex and ever-changing, and do not show any clear lines of development
towards improved stability (Materials 5), Field countered this tendency by producing many durable colors and
advising on quality. He was remembered in the art world at his death in 1854 for producing colouring matter
surpassing everything of the kind that had before 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 will 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 natureof which the primary colors of red,
yellow, and blue were earthly manifestations of the Divine Trinity. Due to his Christian vision, Field devoted
himself largely to the development of the colors he considered sacred: madders, lemon yellow, and ultramarine.[5]
Moreover, Field attended closely to how pigments reflect light, 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 result of less transparency, less brilliance. Now the more
pigments are mixed, writes Field, the more they are deteriorated in colour, attenuated, and chemically set at
variance (qtd. in Ball 41).[6] Fields concern with color, harmony, and purity as universals included his attempt to
link them analogically with the musical harmony system in Chromatography, as well as in his earlier Chromatics.
As a researcher, Field set out to test the pigments he bought from colormen, and, as a manufacturer, he supplied
them better pigments. Fields notebooks (1804-25) indicate detailed knowledge 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 most important sections of Chromatography, chapter twenty-two
Tables of Pigments, Field classifies pigments in terms of their properties and effects under certain
circumstances (such as 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 but 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 carmine from the cochineal insect
(Lake pigment 1; Chenciner 68, 154). Fields first factory was 1808 Conham in 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 later William Winsor and his partner the artist Henry Newton, who founded together in 1832 the
(still) world-famous firm of artists supplies Winsor & Newton (Chenciner 161). In fact, the notebooks were
acquired by Winsor & Newton after Fields death, so that his production methods and commitment to purity would
not pass into oblivion. To this day, the firm relies upon the Field method of extracting rose madder (Chenciner
161, 167; History 1). A technical innovator as well as 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 gold Isis medal in
1816 (Pierce 37).
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Unlike other color makers, Field, whom John Gage describes fittingly as an eminently practical theorist and an
eminently theoretical practitioner (George Field 8), had a long and close 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 about their materials. The review of Chromatography in
The Literary Gazette, in fact, cites Fields reputation among not only oil painters but 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 firmness (21).
Field discussed color 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
dArgent, lead white. . . much prized by Turner (qtd. in Gage, Turner 92, 248n42).[8] From her close analysis of
Fields 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 (Fields Manuscripts 82).
Artists account books, such as those of John Linnell, also indicate purchases from Field. Moreover, subscribers
to Chromatography include some of the key artists of the day: John Lawrence, Turner, David Wilkie, John
Constable, and William Mulready, as well as the artist, soon-to-be English translator of Goethes Zur Farbenlehre
(1810; tr. English 1840), Charles Lock Eastlake.
In Chromatography Field does not forget these notable subscribers or the many professional 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 as written with the deepest respect for the
artists whom Field hopes to help consummate a school of colouring which is already celebrated and followed
throughout Europe (dedication). He promises that as the Greeks bequeathed a perfection of form you will
bequeath to posterity standards of perfection in colour (dedication).
While Fields 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 matter. As a later art theorist and painter
has noted, it is no more possible to learn to paint from books than to learn to swim on a sofa (Doerner 7).
However, those artists who could afford to purchase Fields 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 Cenninis fourteenth century artists handbook Il
libro dellarte (The Book of Art), detailing the Renaissance technique of fresco and discussing in detail available
pigments of the Old Masters, Mrs. Merrifield refers to Chromatography seven times, explaining where Field and
Cennini overlap or disagree about colors and drying methods.
Figure 3: William Holman Hunt, Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus, 1851
Fields manufacturing of pure pigments is in keeping with his advice about the best ways to preserve colors. That
Pre-Raphaelite paintings, such as Hunts Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (1850-51) (Fig. 3)showing no
sign of ever having been cleaned (Townsend, Pre-Raphaelite 117)or John Everett Millais Ophelia (started
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1851), lasted into the twenty-first century, without even greater fading, discoloring, or cracking than they do show,
pays tribute to the existence of Fields colors, supplied by the colorman Roberson, and to a growing
consciousness about the relationship of science to painting.
Accounts kept by Roberson confirm that Hunt purchased orange vermilion and extract of vermilion from Field
between 1842-54 and that Millais purchased Fields chrome green in 1850 (Townsend, Pre-Raphaelite 42-43).
Hunt, who chose supplies very carefully, went so far as to write down the colors, media, and varnishes used, on
some of his painting spandrels, in order 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 use with R. [? for rectified] S[pirit] of Turps/for drawing out parts/E[merald] Green & Gamboge in
transparent/part of foliage. picture retouched/with same Vehicle in 1864/W Holman Hunt/Please copy the
above/Note before/obliterating it. Millais wrote later to Hunt that they were fortunate to have had the choicest of
our colours prepared for us by George Field (qtd. in Gage, George Field 76).[9] Hunts and Millais own
selections of ground, pigment, and varnish, therefore, contributed to the staying power of some of the colors, but
so did Fields influence as a chemist, technologist, and advocate of pure, brilliant, unmixed colors.
Art Treatises: Form or Color?
One might wonder why a handbook on color such as Chromatography would be necessary in 1835. For centuries,
the knowledge of painting was transferred, not by books primarily, but through long-term training from master to
pupil and from workshop to workshop, where apprentices had, until the eighteenth century, spent many years
learning how to prepare the materials for painting. From time to time, of course, painters would write down their
ideas in treatises. Such handbooks, some emphasizing the practical and some the theoretical, are of great
historical importance. Still, those that emerged from highly specific historical moments and available art materials
had a more limited influence than watershed texts such as Leon Battista Albertis 1435-36 Della pittura (On
Painting), which introduced single-point perspective and ideas about color, light, and space, or Leonardo da
Vincis later writings on chiaroscuro. Yet by the nineteenth century, when art reached thousands more viewers
and was practiced by amateurs as well as professionals, techniques were less and less passed on from master to
pupil. Even at the Royal Academy in the nineteenth century, training in studio secrets remained weak, as
opposed to a strong emphasis on composition and theory, so much so that Hunt complained about his lack of
knowledge of Old Master techniques (Townsend, Pre-Raphaelite 10).
Field came to London at a watershed moment, characterized by what Gage calls a new set of circumstances
when professional painters were driven increasingly to written handbooks and to retailers of artists materials
(often their publishers), neither of them necessarily very reliable guides to their craft (George Field 7). 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 (7). The gaps in knowledge intensified for painters who
were becoming alarmed at the rapid deterioration of work by predecessors such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose
binding media yellowed or darkened and whose alleged use of bitumen resulted in cracking. Materials and
chemistry became increasingly important for artists who, like the Pre-Raphaelites from 1848, sought to create a
new school of British art, to rival European schools, based on specific techniques.[10]
Hunt, who corresponded with Field and bought his products, became, perhaps, the most vocal of Victorian artists
regarding materials. He informed himself through reading and his own experiments from the 1840s onward,
eventually arguing in public for artists oversight with regard to materials. He read Eastlakes Materials for a
History of Oil Painting (1847), an edition of Goethes Zur Farbenlehre/Theory of Colors (1810, tr. Eastlake 1840),
Mrs. Merrifields Original Treatises in the Arts of Painting (1849), Theophiluss Essay Upon Various Arts (tr. R.
Hendrie 1847), and Cennino Cenninis The Craftsmans Handbook (1437, tr. Merrifield 1844) (Jacobi 119; Gage,
George Field 77). Hunt corresponded, too, with Frederick Barff, Asst. Prof. of Chemistry at University College,
London, who, in 1870-71, lectured to the Society of Arts on colors and pigments (Jacobi 119).
Hunt even seems to have kept track of adulteration in pigments he purchased. In a now significant letter of 1875,
Hunt complained to Roberson about the failings of both an orange vermillion from 1873 and madders from 1875,
which darkened prematurely and were not, according to his own chemical experiments, what Hunt had bought
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from the same source under the same name a quarter century previously (Jacobi 119; Hunt 2: 455). In April 1880,
Hunt argued for consumer rights and the reform of mass production in a famous address to the Society of
ArtsThe Present System of Obtaining Materials in Use by Artist Painters as Compared with that of the Old
Masters, a talk later summarized in Hunts Pre-Raphaelitism (2: 453-56) and reprinted in The Architect of 1880.
He called for an artists society to look after the material interests of painting and to establish a library of works on
artistic practice. He further endorsed a plan to purchase and put on display foreign 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 paint
experiments at the Grosvenor Gallery. Highlighting the superiority of Fields colors and standards, Arthur West of
Winsor & Newton displayed the color-fading samples from Fields octavo notebooks, which were as perfect in
tint now as when first put in (qtd. in Gage, George Field 35).[11] Hunt excitedly borrowed the notebooks.
The interdisciplinarity of science and art with regard to color meant that professional painters could turn to
scientific treatises as well as art handbooks. Sir Isaac Newtons magisterial Opticks, A Treatise of the Reflections,
Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light (1704)a study based in experiments of dispersion, the separation of
white light into a spectrum of component colorswas available in English. In creating the field of physical optics,
Newton had illustrated how colors arise from absorption, reflection, or transmission of parts of light. While Opticks
was aimed at scientists, and few artists probably read it, it 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 by Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe (German 1810, English tr. 1840). Newtons and Goethes treatises were only two of those
that spawned further scientific and quasi-scientific art treatises in the nineteenth century in Europe, among them
J. F. L. Mrimes De la peinture a lhuile (1830; tr. The Art of Painting in Oil. . . 1839), Michel Eugene
Chevreuls De la loi du contraste simultan des couleurs et de lassortiment des objets colors (1839, tr. The
Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors, and Their Applications to the Arts, 1854).
Treatises on color offered ideas and/or scientific experiments, but the connection to artistic practice itself was not
always spelled out, which meant artists did not find much use in them. Those handbooks that did offer technical
advice did not always base it on experimentation and thus purveyed inconsistent or flawed advice.
Fields Chromatography, however, set 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 virtually all the
artists pigments commercially available at that time (Harley, Fields Manuscripts 76). In so doing, Field not
only provided the most trustworthy handbook for practicing painters available in 1835 but also created the basis
for revisions that informed artists for years to come. While it is true that some of Fields subscribers did not all
endorse his views on color harmony or share his estimate of specific pigments, key 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 (red, blue, and green), Herbert von Helmholtz on color vision, and other scientists on
color measurement, proved Fields theories about light, primaries, and harmony to be ill-founded.[13]
Nonetheless, the popularity of his book persisted for two decades and, in revised versions, almost until to the end
of the century.
The Components of Color and the Psychology of Coloring
Chromatography weds science and art, but Field goes further to explore the psychological effects of coloring in
painting with reference to the sister art of poetry. Drawing on a wide number of poetry quotations, Field links
colors to specific emotions as expressed by key Greek and Latin writers, such as Homer and Horace, and by
British writers from the Medieval to Romantic periods. As one might suspect, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton
frequently appear, but mixed in with later writers such as Dryden, Pope, Swift, Charlotte Smith, and Lord Byron.
Fields notes on red might offer a good example of the sister-art dimension of his work with color.
Field first places red in terms of primary colors as standing between yellow and blue and in an intermediate
relation to white and black (85). Pre-eminent among colors, red, he explains, is the most positiveforming
with yellow the secondary color of orange and with blue the secondary color purple (85). One of the noteworthy
aspects of red is that when it is combined with yellow its hue becomes hot, but with blue its hue becomes cool.
Illustrating his ideas about color, light, and darkness, he states that red is closer to yellow in its relationship to light
and distance and in its effect on the eye: the power of vision is diminished upon viewing this colour in a strong
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light; while, on the other hand, red itself appears to deepen in color rapidly in a declining light as night comes on,
or in shade (85). Field warns that these properties make red difficult to manage rightly and mean that, no matter
how tempting its beauty, red should be kept as subordinate in painting as it is in nature. He notes that nature uses
far more green than red, but that one red object placed with due regard to light, shade, and distance can be
striking.
Treating the cultural heritage of red symbolism, Field focuses on two poles: that of powerful feelings such as
anger and that of the positive affections of joy, love, hope, and pleasure. As a peculiarly military color, he notes,
red was worn by warrior-heroes in ancient times, is included on flags of defiance, is the emblem of blood, and
thereby indicates fierceness and courage. This most effective of colors incites the bull to rage (87). Noting that
red produces emotions in viewers of awe, fear, and veneration, he also links it to royalty and to martyrs.
Field documents that poets have often chosen to use the color red, or its offshoot colors such as rose, and
sometimes have chosen the metonymy of purple for red, to decorate figures or as epithets. While he
acknowledges that occasionally the words themselves, such as coral redden (Pope, Windsor Forest) or scarlet sin
(Shakespeare, Henry VIII), might be chosen for their sounds and not their visual intensity, nevertheless, 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 red as conveying beauty, dignity,
love, and other emotions or qualities andwith analogy to his color theorynoting where poets use it in conjunction
with white or black, in harmony with light, in contrast with other colors, and in contrast with black (91-92).
While it is no great surprise that Field would consider good pigments of red the most indispensable, given his
belief in the universal importance of the primaries and red as the example of balance, he outlines eight principal
red pigments from vermilion to red orpiment, discussing the origins, tones, qualities, and the effect 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 example, he also differentiates between carmine derived from cochineal and
Madder, or Fields carmine. Carmines from cochineal, varying from rose to warm red, work in water and oil but
are destroyed in light. Carmines from madder, varying from rose to crimson, are superior as the only 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 carmine pigments, Field advises that it is not worthy of the artists attention.
Fields love of the sister 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 not quote his Romantic
contemporaries Wordsworth or Coleridge, he resembles them in that he wishes to ground his audience in the
natural, pure world of Gods creation. Fields philosophy of harmony in all parts of the universe, based on one
unitary process in nature, which he applies analogically to painting, poetry, and music, was idealistic. Yet his deep
understanding of colors and pigments in their chemical 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 about
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.
Linda M. Shires is David and Ruth Gottesman Professor of English at Yeshiva University and the author, most
recently, of Perspectives: Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England (Ohio State, 2009).
Author, co-author, and editor of seven other books, including Rewriting the Victorians (Routledge, 1992, re-issue
2012), she is currently working on Thomas Hardy.
HOW TO CITE THIS BRANCH ENTRY (MLA format)
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Shires, Linda M. On Color Theory, 1835: George Fields Chromatography. BRANCH: Britain, Representation
and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net.
Web. [Here, add your last date of access to BRANCH].
WORKS CITED
Ball, Philip. Bright Earth, Art and the Invention of Color. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Print.
Cennini, Cennino. A Treatise on Painting. Trans. Merrifield. Ed. Cavaliere Giuseppe Tambroni. London: Lumley,
1844. Google Books. Web. 23 June 2012.
Chenciner, Robert. Madder Red: A History of Luxury and Trade, Plant Dyes and Pigments in World Commerce
and Art. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000. Print.
Church, A. H. The Chemistry of Paints and Painting. Rev. 3rd ed. London: Seely, 1901. Print.
Darley, George. Chromatography, or a Treatise on Colours and Pigments, &c. Athenaeum 408 (22 Aug. 1835):
637-38. British Periodicals. Web. 25 June 2012.
Doerner, Max. The Materials of the Artist and Their Use in Painting: With Notes on the Techniques of the Old
Masters. Rev. ed. New York: Mariner 1949. Print.
Field, George. Chromatography or a Treatise on Colours and Pigments and of their Powers in Painting, &c.
London: Tilt, 1835. Print.
Gage, John. Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction. Berkeley: U of California P,
1999. Print.
. Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. Print.
. George Field and His Circle: From Romanticism to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Cambridge: Fitzwilliam
Museum, 1989. Print.
. J. M. W. Turner: A Wonderful Range of Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991. Print.
. Signs of Disharmony: Newtons Opticks and the Artists. Perspectives on Science 16.4 (2008): 360-77. Print.
Harley, R. D. Artists Pigments c. 1600-1835, A Study in English Documentary Sources. London: Archetype, 2001.
Print.
. Fields Manuscripts: Early Nineteenth Century Colour Samples and Fading Tests. Studies in Conservation
24: 2 (May 1979): 75-84. JSTOR. Web. 18 June 2012.
History and Production of Rose Madder and Alizarin Pigments. Winsor & Newton. Web. 18 June 2012.
Hunt, William Holman. The Awakening Conscience. 1853. Tate. Web. 23 June 2012.
. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Vol. 2. New York: Macmillan, 1905. Print.
Jacobi, Carol. William Holman Hunt: Painter, Painting, Paint. New York: Manchester UP, 2006. Print.
Jerden, William. Chromatography; or, a Treatise on Colours and Pigments, and of their Powers in Painting
&c. Literary Gazette and Journal of Belle Lettres 938 (10 Jan. 1835): 21. British Periodicals. Web. 25 June 2012.
Lake Pigment. Wikipedia. Web. 18 June 2012.
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Menzies, James. M. The Composition of Light and Fields Law of Harmonious Colouring. Athenaeum 1880 (7
Nov. 1863): 610. British Periodicals. Web. 25 June 2012.
Mr. George Field. Art-Journal 6.71 (Nov. 1854): 343. British Periodicals. Web. 25 June 2012.
Pierce, Frederick. Genealogy: Being the Record of All the Field Family. Vol. 1. Chicago: Conkey, 1901. Library of
Congress. Web. 24 June 2012.
Ruskin, John. The Elements of Drawing. 1857. Project Gutenberg. Web. 13 Aug. 2012.
. Modern Painters. Volume 1. New York: Wiley and Halstead, 1856. Print.
. Pre-Raphaelitism. London: Smith, Elder, 1851. Print.
. The Stones of Venice. Vol. 2. 1853. Project Gutenberg. Web. 13 Aug. 13. 2012.
Townsend, Joyce H. The Materials Used by British Oil Painters in the Nineteenth Century. Tate Papers , Tates
Online Research Journal (Autumn 2004): n. pag. Web. 31 Jan. 2012.
. Pre-Raphaelite Painting Techniques. London: Tate, 2004. Print.
Traditional Pigments of the 19th Century. Winsor & Newton. Web. 18 June 2012.
ENDNOTES
[1] As John Gage reports, by 1862 when William Sandby published the first history of the Royal Academy, he
asked for instruction in the chemistry of colours, due to the physical decay of many pictures by Sir Joshua
Reynolds, J. M. W. Turner, William Etty, and the late works of Sir David Wilkie (Color and Meaning 153).
[2] Listed in Robersons Ledgers (15 Sept. 1856).
[3] See Modern Painters vol. 1. sect. 2. part 5.3.67; vol. 1. sect. 2. part 2.20.168; Stones of Venice 2: 144-45;
Pre- Raphaelitism 37-52; The Elements of Drawing 107-75, 181n41.
[4] It is tricky to date pigments in some cases, and sometimes the dates offered do not agree. Cobalt blue had
long been used in Chinese porcelain, but in 1802 Louis Jacques Thenard discovered it; in 1803 it went into
production in France; by 1806-07, it was a branch of commerce. As R. D. Harley says, It is difficult to determine
the date of introduction of cobalt blue to England, but it is unlikely to have been much later than in France (57).
Harley goes on to explain that despite the fact that France and England were at war, French scientific publications
were translated and idea exchanges continued. She also notes that cobalt blue is listed in Fields Practical
Journal 1809 notebook, in an entry she dates to 1815 (57).
[5] See Gage, Color and Culture 216.
[6] First discussed in Field, Chromatography 1869 ed.
[7] Fields Notebooks (1804-25) are held by Winsor & Newton, London, with photographic records in the Cortauld
Institute of Art, London.
[8] First discussed in Field, Practical Journal n375.
[9] First discussed in Hunt, Pre Raphaelitism 2: 374-75.
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raphy
[10] See Townsend, Pre-Raphaelite 10-11.

[11] First discussed in Journal of the Society of Arts, 28 (1880): 669-70.
[12] See Gage, Signs of Disharmony 360.
[13] 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 have known about the books ideas from Turner.
The text of this article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 3.0). For more
information, go here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/. See above for "HOW TO CITE THIS
BRANCH ENTRY."
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