We often envision the Victorian era as a period dominated by one color, black, due to Queen Victoria's prolonged mourning period, those 40 years spent wearing black following Prince Albert's death in 1861 cast inded a somber shadow over this time.
We also tend to associate this era with industrialization, bleak landscapes and cities shrouded in smog, as vividly described in Charles Dickens' novels and depicted in Gustave Doré's engravings from "London: A Pilgrimage" (1872).
However, Queen Victoria herself used to don vibrant attire before her husband's passing, and this era was, in fact, quite colorful, thanks to new discoveries in dye technology that sparked fresh fashion trends.
The painting "A Decadent Young Woman, After the Dance" by Ramón Casas (1899) perfectly captures this idea. The artwork features a young woman, the red-haired beauty Madeleine Boisguillaume, a model for Toulouse-Lautrec, wearing a black dress, resting on a green sofa after returning home from a night out, holding in her right hand a book with a yellow cover. Green and yellow create striking contrasts in this painting, but they are also very symbolical.
This painting is part of the "Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and Design" exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (from 21st September 2023 to 18th February 2024).
Organised by Matthew Winterbottom, Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts, Ashmolean Museum, and Prof Charlotte Ribeyrol, Sorbonne Université, Paris, the Ashmolean's autumn exhibition wants to prove that, rather than being a monochromatic era, thanks to new developments in art, science and technology, the Victorian age was a visually vibrant period of time with colour being embraced by artists and designers.
The exhibition presents a variety of artworks, costumes, and designs - 140 items in total from international collections - each of them exploring an aspect of this colour revolution.
Art fans will enjoy John Ruskin's studies, Joseph Mallord William Turner's paintings of Venice, James Abbott McNeill Whistler's colour experiments and Morris & Co.'s intricate designs, but fashion and interior design fans will find even more items to explore, borrowed from Victorian wardrobes and residences in Britain and Europe.
The exhibition opens with Queen Victoria's mourning attire, embodying the preconceptions we all have about this period of time as being bleak.
But curators soon introduce us to a world in colours, showing us how people embraced the innovations of the Industrial Revolution.
When aniline, a by-product of coal-tar, arrived on the scene, new possibilities entered the Victorian wardrobes as proved by the vivid purple dress, crinoline, and shoes dyed with the first aniline colour, Mauvine.
It was an 18-year-old chemistry student, William Henry Perkin (1838-1907), who discovered the synthetic dye in 1856. While attempting to synthesize quinine from aniline, a coal tar derivative, Perkin stumbled upon the vibrant purples produced by this otherwise colorless chemical. He promptly established a factory and his new creation, that he dubbed mauveine, soon sparked a surge of interest among chemists across Europe in finding more synthetic colours.
Alizarin, a synthetic colorant derived from madder root, a traditional source for vegetable red, pink, and brown dyes, was successfully created by Perkin in 1867. This led to the use of new anilines in various applications, including postage stamps, inks, pigments, paints, and even food.
Until then only wealthy people may have afforded more colourful designs made with natural dyes: Empress Eugénie of France, was known for her some extravagant purple gowns and Queen Victoria had worn an expensive mauve dress to her daughter's wedding.
However, within a few short years, colours once achieved with costly natural dyes became readily and inexpensively available. Aniline dye production expanded, becoming more affordable and making bright colours accessible to the masses.
In September 1859, Punch ironically stated that the "Mauve measles" trend had gripped the nation: "One of the first symptoms by which the malady declares itself consists in the eruption of a measly rash of ribbons, about the head and neck of the person who has caught it. The eruption, which is of a mauve colour, soon spreads, until in some cases the sufferers becomes completely covered with it..."
Soon also working-class women had access to colorful dyed stockings and undergarments (before the advent of synthetic dyes, undergarments typically came in white or blue). A writer for the Lady's Newspaper and Pictorial Times praised the "rainbow-spanned ankle" in 1861, but this trend had some drawbacks, as striped socks caused rashes due to toxic anilines. Yet also men embraced the newfound possibilities, indulging in colorful smoking jackets and slippers within the privacy of their homes.
These scientific achievements were celebrated at the International Exhibition of 1862, a significant cultural event of the 19th century that showcased British, colonial, and scientific products to a global audience, marking the first international presentation of synthetic anilines. Among the highlights were vivid pink aniline colours, Magenta and Solferino, which had recently been named.
Colour was also added to interior design pieces and painted furniture became popular as epitomized by the works displayed at the International Exhibition produced by the firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. such as William Burges's Great Bookcase, a polychrome work of art, inspired by a Gothic cathedral, blending Byzantine, Pompeiian, Egyptian and Japanese influences.
The bookcase incorporated exquisite details and panels painted in eclectic styles and with new materials, such as aniline green, by 13 young artists including Edward Burne-Jones, Simeon Solomon, Edward Poynter and Albert Moore, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Besides, the fascination with nature and Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, led to an interest in colours borrowed from the animal kingdom and in particular from hummingbirds and beetles.
Previously, only feathers were incorporated in a dress or accessory, but Victorian fashion and jewelry designers often integrated entire bird and beetle bodies in their creations. The results were often unsettling (but they find echoes in designs spotted during the '90s on Alexander McQueen's runways) as proved by Harry Emanuel's hummingbird necklace (1865).
A diamond merchant and jeweller, Emanuel mounted three decapitated short-tailed emerald and four ruby-topaz birds on gold backings and integrated them in a necklace; their beak was covered in gold leaf, their eyes replaced with gemstones.
While this is an extremely disquieting oddity for us, Victorians felt hummingbirds were among the nature's most colourful animals, their iridescent feathers were indeed irresistible and this piece perfectly represented the taste of the time.
The hummingbird craze reached its peak in 1888, when 400,000 of bird "skins" were auctioned. This craze for feathers and birds eventually ended also thanks to women who campaigned against it.
Etta Lemon, an anti-suffragist and anti-feminist bird conservationist ended up pushing women's suffrage in Britain, when she stated in a pamphlet, "If women are so empty-headed and stupid that they cannot be made to understand the cruelty of which they are guilty in that matter, they certainly prove themselves to be unfit voters."
Iridescent beetles also proved quite popular during Victorian times: one of the earliest use of the Buprestidae shells as decorations occurred in the late 1800s when actress Ellen Terry wore a gown covered in 1,000 Buprestidae wings when she played Lady Macbeth in 1880. John Singer Sargent painted Terry wearing the gown (the Buprestidae briefly reappeared in art and fashion around ten years ago).
Besides, in 1884 the Portuguese ambassador to London presented Foreign Secretary Lord Granville with a piece of jewellery made of the bodies of 46 iridescent green South American weevils. Granville had these mounted on a tiara and necklace (1885; part of the British Museum's collection) for his wife. This trend extended also to interior design pieces as proved by a decorative vase with a beetle designed by Christopher Dresser for Minton & Co.
Despite injecting a healthy dose of joie de vivre into the Victorian wardrobes, colours also caused death. Skin rashes were indeed only one of the effects of the new dyes.
Fashionable trends often came at a cost (bizarrely, this statement finds correspondences in our time – how many fashionistas suffer from fashion-related illnesses? Ponder about this theme, fashion design students...): the use of certain dyes, such as arsenic-based green dye in artificial flowers, had indeed deadly consequences.
We tend to smile at Alice in Wonderland's Mad Hatter, but in reality milliners who employed a toxic substance, mercury nitrate, as part of the process of turning the fur of small animals, such as rabbits, into felt for hats, suffered from mental health issues. The exhibition recounts of a factory girl who died in 1862 from poisoning while making artificial flowers for women's headdresses. Before dying she was said to have vomited green slime and had green tinged eyeballs. The killer was the main ingredient of the new green dye - arsenic.
The incident was even reported in the USA prompting a review of the use of green in fashion and homeware and green wallpaper soon earned the nickname of "walls of death."
Debates on colour theory and the moral attributes associated with different colours followed and the exhibition showcases artists with contrasting views, such as John Ruskin, advocating for natural colours, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, known for his philosophy of "colour for colour's sake."
Whistler's extravagant use of colour was facilitated by the invention of collapsible metal paint tubes. Besides, "unnatural" colours found favor with the Decadent movement, symbolized by the dyed-green carnation worn by Oscar Wilde.
Yellow, another Decadent favorite, is epitomized in the exhibition by controversial risqué French novels with distinctive yellow covers (as seen in Ramon Casas's painting) that also inspired the avant-garde periodical, The Yellow Book.
Characterised by a yellow cover designed by Aubrey Beardsley that alluded to the yellow jackets of French novels as well as to the themes of sickness (think also about Eugène Samuel Grasset's painting "La Morphinomane" [The Morphine Addict]), this publication defined the decade as the "Yellow Nineties" (fashion design students, can we attribute just one colour to our times? Yes? No? Why? Think about this question and ponder on controversial colours in our times and what they represent in society).
The exhibition also looks at the revolutionary impact of photography and electricity on Victorian culture: innovators like Anna Atkins, one of the earliest female pioneers, used for example cyanotypes to create ethereal photograms of British algae.
The exhibition concludes with another pioneer, Loïe Fuller, the vaudeville performer who became an overnight sensation with her "Serpentine Dance" in 1892. Colour played a central role in the performances of the "electric fairy" and her voluminous costumes made from diaphanous silk and illuminated by electric lights projected vibrant colours all around her.
The exhibition even offers a recreation of her performance using a Victorian illusion device known as Pepper's Ghost (the same technique employed by video maker Baillie Walsh during Alexander McQueen's Autumn-Winter 2006-07 catwalk show to conjure up a dreamy image of model Kate Moss wrapped up in an ethereal and billowing dress).
"Colour Revolution" is accompanied by a rich programme of events and a catalogue jam-packed with information and inspirations, that also features essays about the return of Medieval hues, natural colours in art and design, the British orientalists, and queer colours in the Victorian age, with particular reference to a Wilde's green carnation.
The exhibition is one strand of the European Research Council funded Chromotope: The 19th-century Chromatic Turn project. An international, cross-disciplinary investigation into the chromatic turn of the 1850s in the arts, science and technology throughout Europe, the research is an illuminating journey into the fascinating world of colours during a pivotal period in history.
Images credits for this post
1. Ramon Casas (1866-1932), A Decadent young woman, After the dance, 1899. Museu do Montserrat, Barcelona
2. Queen Victoria's mourning dress, c. 1898. Historic Royal Palaces, London
3. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute, c. 1835. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
4. John Ruskin (1819-1900), Study of a Kingfisher, with dominant Reference to Colour, 1871, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
5. Day dress, English, late-1860s, aniline dyed silk and glass beads, Manchester Art Gallery
6. Woman's boots, English, 1870s, Manchester Art Gallery
7 – 8. Folders of dyed woollen samples, The Berline Aniline Company, 19th century. History of Science Museum, University of Oxford
9. The Great Bookcase, 1859-62, designed by William Burges (1827-81), Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
10 – 13. Details from The Great Bookcase, 1859-62, designed by William Burges (1827-81), Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
14. Frederick Sandys (1829-1904), Vivien, 1863. Manchester Art Gallery
15. Minton vase with beetle design, England, 1870-90. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
16. Lady Granville's beetle parure and case, 1884-5. British Museum, London
17. Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98), front cover of The Yellow Book, published 1894-97, Trinity College, Oxford
18. Exhibition catalogue spread
19. Chromotope logo
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