The Colours of the Past in Victorian England (Cultural Interactions: Studies in the Relationship between the Arts)

Description

The experience of colour underwent a significant change in the second half of the nineteenth century, as new coal tar-based synthetic dyes were devised for the expanding textile industry. These new, artificial colours were often despised in artistic circles who favoured ancient and more authentic forms of polychromy, whether antique, medieval, Renaissance or Japanese. However faded, ancient hues were embraced as rich, chromatic alternatives to the bleakness of industrial modernity, fostering fantasized recreations of an idealized past. The interdisciplinary essays in this collection focus on the complex reception of the colours of the past in the works of major Victorian writers and artists. Drawing on close analyses of artworks and literary texts, the contributors to this volume explore the multiple facets of the chromatic nostalgia of the Victorians, as well as the contrast between ancient colouring practices and the new sciences and techniques of colour. Cover Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction (Charlotte Ribeyrol) Part I. ‘Faded by exposure’: The Temporality of Colour 1. ‘A magic web with colours gay’: W.H. Hunt’s Chromatic Nostalgia (Charlotte Ribeyrol and Philippe Walter) 2. Whistler and Whiteness (Caroline Arscott) 3. Symphonies in Haze and Blue: Lafcadio Hearn and the Colours of Japan (Stefano Evangelista) Plate 1 Part II. ‘Chromatic deviations’: ‘Foreignizing’ Colour 4. The Orient in Chromolithography: Owen Jones and the Colours of Islamic Art (Isabelle Gadoin) 5. Colour and its Reconstruction in the Nineteenth-Century Rediscovery of Assyrian Art (Michael Seymour) Plate 2 Part III. ‘The violet shades, the hard cobalt’: Material and Abstract Colours 6. ‘Like fragments of the milky sky itself’: The Late Nineteenth-Century Revival of Luca della Robbia’s Coloured Terracottas (Lene Østermark-Johansen) 7. ‘Popularity’ in Blue (Marc Porée) 8. Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater’s ‘Key to the Meanings of Colours’ in "Thought-Forms" (1901) (Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière) 9. ‘White Alb and Scarlet Camail’: The Colours of Catholicism in Fin-de-Siècle Literature (Claire Masurel-Murray ) Plate 3 Note on Contributors Index