victoria finlay colour travels through the paintbox

The efforts of artisans throughout history to reproduce the colours of the rainbow, & its use: from villages where women still wear skirts dyed with purple tears of sea snails to how George Washington obsessed over his green dining room when he should have been busy with matters of state. Hardback Book and Slipcase Condition: As New ConditionRoy.8vo.

Even drab (technically the tone between olive and puce) seems less so when Finlay examines it.' - Jan McGirk. Don't be put off by the twee subtitle: these travels through the paintbox are vivid indeed. a celebration of every colour imaginable.' Finlay pities the cuttlefish that had to be sufficiently scared to yield the exact tone of sepia prized by artists. Still, she rhapsodises about a photograph of the madder root: 'It was orange and blue and red, like kingfishers' wings. Intrigued by tubes of pricey rose-madder paint, still manufactured in Harrow by the firm Winsor & Newton, Finlay tours the factory but is barred from entering one top-secret room. Dutch growers refined it, and made fortunes despite calling the highest grade 'krap'. Madder is a little bush with a pink root used to produce the warm tomato red in Turkish carpets. For ultramarine, semi-precious lapis lazuli gets powdered into whipped egg yolk like some celestial mayonnaise. Those splodges on old palettes turn out to be anything but mundane: they contain real blood, squashed bugs, purple Phoenician seashells, even ground-up Egyptian mummies. She buttonholes Mexican grandmothers who dye skirts purple with the tears of sea snails, and pores over forgers' prison diaries to find out why experts authenticated their mock-medieval masterpieces. She treks to subterranean veins of lapis lazuli in Taliban territory to find the source of Virgin Mary blue, and figures out why there was no need to assassinate Napoleon Bonaparte when killer green wallpaper did the trick. She seeks sacred ochre caches in the Outback, and wonders why Aboriginals used to carry lumps of the stuff thousands of miles for body painting rituals. She doesn't hesitate to draw on lore from art history and her own conjecture about a painter's supply problems to ask all the right questions. What starts as a romantic rainbow chase spurred by a childhood memory of Gothic blue stained glass at Chartres leads her to uncover 'more corruption, poisonings, wars and politics than even the Medicis could have appreciated'.The invention of secret potions for lasting colour, and the traders and users of their arcane ingredients, captivate Finlay. ' With wry humour, Finlay maintains her sense of wonder while she pursues outlandish tales 'about the people who made the things that made the art'.

Final charges may vary depending on size and weight.

Postage quoted is for a standard format octavo book. Royal octavo hardcover pictorial boards with black silver gilt spine titling, map endpapers 424pp., colour illustrations.

Victoria finlay colour travels through the paintbox