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Introduction: Colour Materiality in the Nineteenth Century

  • Stefano Evangelista(author)
  • Charlotte Ribeyrol(author)
  • Matthew Winterbottom(author)
Chapter of: Colour Matters: Exploring Chromatic Materialities in the Long Nineteenth Century (1798-1914)
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TitleIntroduction
SubtitleColour Materiality in the Nineteenth Century
ContributorStefano Evangelista(author)
Charlotte Ribeyrol(author)
Matthew Winterbottom(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0501.00
Landing pagehttp://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0501/chapters/10.11647/obp.0501.00
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightStefano Evangelista; Charlotte Ribeyrol; Matthew Winterbottom;
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2026-05-11
Print length20 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
THEMA
  • AGA
  • PDX
  • NHTB
  • DSBF
  • JHMC
BISAC
  • ART015260
  • HIS054000
  • SCI034000
  • LIT004130
  • DES003000
  • SOC002010
Keywords
  • Colour studies
  • Material culture
  • History of science
  • Art history (long nineteenth century)
  • Pigments and dyes
  • Empire and identity
Locations
Landing PageFull text URLPlatform
PDFhttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0501/chapters/10.11647/obp.0501.00Landing pagehttps://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0501.00.pdfFull text URL
HTMLhttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0501/chapters/10.11647/obp.0501.00Landing pagehttps://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0501/introduction.xhtmlFull text URLPublisher Website
Contributors

Stefano Evangelista

(author)
Professor of English and Comparative Literature at University of Oxford
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7967-0768

Stefano Evangelista is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Oxford University and Fellow of Trinity College. He works on nineteenth-century literature and is especially interested in Aestheticism and Decadence, the relationship between literary and visual cultures, and the reception of Japanese and European classical culture. His latest monograph is Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle: Citizens of Nowhere (OUP, 2021). His edited volumes include The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe (2010), A. C. Swinburne: Unofficial Laureate (2013, together with Catherine Maxwell), and Literature and Sculpture in the Fin de Siècle (2018, together with Luisa Calè). Together with Catherine Maxwell, he is general editor of the Jewelled Tortoise series published by the MHRA. He currently holds an Einstein Visiting Fellowship (2023-26) at the Humboldt University, Berlin, where he is also a fellow of the Centre for British Studies.

Charlotte Ribeyrol

(author)
Professor of 19th-century British Literature at Sorbonne Université
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0398-6410

Charlotte Ribeyrol is Professor of 19th-century British Literature at Sorbonne Université in Paris and honorary curator at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Her main field of research is Victorian Hellenism and the reception of the colours of the past in 19th-century painting and literature. Her first monograph entitled “Etrangeté, passion, couleur”, L’hellénisme de Swinburne, Pater et Symonds came out in 2013. In 2014-2016 she co-directed a major interdisciplinary project on chromatic materiality with chemists and archeologists, which led to the publication of a collection of essays entitled The Colours of the Past in Victorian England (Peterlang, Oxford, 2016). Following her Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellowship at Trinity College, Oxford (2016-2018), she was awarded a major ERC grant for her project CHROMOTOPE (2019-2025) which explores the 19th-century ‘chromatic turn’. As part of this research programme she co-curated with Matthew Winterbottom the exhibition Colour Revolution, Victorian Art, Fashion and Design at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (21 September 2023-18 February 2024). She is also the author of William Burges’s Great Bookcase and the Victorian Colour Revolution (Yale University Press) which came out in June 2023.

Matthew Winterbottom

(author)
Curator of Western Art Sculpture and Decorative Arts at Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5639-6249

Matthew Winterbottom is Curator of Western Art Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He has over 35 years’ experience working with and researching European decorative arts. His research interests cover a wide range of European decorative arts from the late medieval to the early twentieth centuries. He has extensive knowledge of metalwork, furniture, ceramics, glass and textiles and sculpture. He is committed to exploring ways of making this material more engaging and accessible to museum visitors. Most recently, Matthew co-curated the exhibition Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and Design at the Ashmolean Museum.

References
  1. Batchelor, David, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).
  2. Baudelaire, Charles, ‘Salon de 1846’, in Curiosités esthétiques, Œuvres complètes de Charles Baudelaire, vol. II (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1868), pp. 193–98.
  3. ——, ‘Exposition universelle, 1855’, in Curiosités esthétiques, Œuvres complètes de Charles Baudelaire, vol. II (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1868), pp. 211–44.
  4. Briot, Eugénie, ‘Imiter les matières premières naturelles. Les corps odorants de synthèse, voie du luxe et de la démocratisation pour la parfumerie du XIXe siècle’, Entreprises et histoire, 78.1 (2015), 60–67, https://doi.org/10.3917/eh.078.0060.
  5. Carlyle, Leslie, The Artist’s Assistant: Oil Painting Instruction Manuals and Handbooks in Britain, 1800–1900, with Reference to Selected Eighteenth-Century Sources (London: Archetype Publications, 2001).
  6. Chevreul, Michel-Eugène, The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours and their Applications to the Arts, trans. by Charles Martel (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1854).
  7. Cobbold, Caroline, ‘Adulation or Adulteration? Representing Chemical Dyes in the Victorian Media’, Ambix, 66.1 (2019), 23–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/00026980.2019.1574385.
  8. Dootson, Kirsty S., The Rainbow’s Gravity, Colour, Materiality and British Modernity (London: Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press, 2023).
  9. Eaton, Natasha, Colour, Art and Empire, Visual Culture and the Nomadism of Representation (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), https://doi.org/10.5040/9780755603534.
  10. Gage, John, Color and Meaning, Art, Science and Symbolism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).
  11. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Goethe’s Theory of Colours: Translated from the German; with Notes by Charles Lock Eastlake (London: John Murray, 1840).
  12. Guichard, Charlotte, Anne-Solenn Le Hô and Hannah Williams, ‘Prussian Blue: Chemistry, Commerce, and Colour in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, Art History, 46.1 (February 2023), 2–34, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12695.
  13. Howes, David, The Sensory Studies Manifesto, Tracking the Sensorial Revolution in the Arts and Human Sciences (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2022), https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487528638.
  14. ——, Sensorium: Contextualizing the Senses and Cognition in History and Across Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009329668.
  15. Hunt, William Holman, ‘The Present System of Obtaining Materials in Use by Artist Painters, as Compared with That of the Old Masters’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 28.1431 (1880), 485–99.
  16. Ingold, Tim, ‘Materials against materiality’, Archaeological Dialogues, 14.1 (2007), 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1017/s1380203807002127.
  17. Kalba, Laura Anne, Colour in the Age of Impressionism, Commerce, Technology, and Art (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017).
  18. Lichtenstein, Jacqueline, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬.
  19. ——, C. Maigné and A. Pierre, eds, Vers la science de l’art, L’Esthétique scientifique en France, 1857–1937 (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2013).
  20. Loske, Alexandra, ‘Introduction’, in A Cultural History of Color in the Age of Industry (London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), pp. 1–31 https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474206211.
  21. Lowengard, Sarah, ‘Prussian Blue: Transfers and Trials’, in The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800, ed. by Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (London and New York: Routledge, 2012) pp. 167–81.
  22. Mosley, Stephen, The Chimney of the World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester (Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 2001).
  23. Pastoureau, Michel, Bleu, Histoire d’une couleur (Paris: Le Seuil, 2000).
  24. Ribeyrol, Charlotte, et al., Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2023).
  25. Roque, Georges, Art et science de la couleur, Chevreul et les peintres, de Delacroix à l’abstraction (Paris: Gallimard, 2009).
  26. —— and Jaqueline Lichtenstein, C. Maigné and A. Pierre, eds, Vers la science de l’art, L’Esthétique scientifique en France, 1857–1937 (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2013).
  27. ——, La cochenille, de la teinture à la peinture. Une histoire matérielle de la couleur (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2021).
  28. Ruskin, John, ‘Modern Painters’, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. V, ed. by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London, 1903–12), pp. 321−22.
  29. Taussig, Michael, What Color is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press [1978] 2009), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226789996.001.0001.
  30. Townsend, Joyce, Jacqueline Ridge and Stephen Hackney, Pre-Raphaelite Painting Techniques, 1848–56 (London: Tate Publishing, 2004).
  31. Travis, Anthony S., The Rainbow Makers: the Origins of the Synthetic Dyestuffs Industry in Western Europe (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1993).
  32. Wicky, Ericka, ‘Perfumes: The Future of Synthetic Colours’, ChromoBase (2024), https://chromobase.huma-num.fr/narratives/perfumes-the-future-of-synthetic-colours/.
  33. Young, Diana, ‘The Colours of Things’, in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. by C. Tilley, K. Webb, S. Kuechler, M. Rowlands and P. Spyer (London: Sage, 2006), pp. 173−85, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781848607972.n12.
  34. ——, Rematerializing Colour, From Concept to Substance (Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2018).

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