The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400-1800 1409429156, 9781409429159

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the materiality of color Although much has been written on the aesthetic value of color, there are other values that adhere to it with economic and social values among them. Through case studies of particular colors and colored objects, this volume demonstrates just how complex the history of color is by focusing on the diverse social and cultural meanings of color; the trouble, pain, and suffering behind the production and application of these colors; the difficult technical processes for making and applying color; and the intricacy of commercial exchanges and knowledge transfers as commodities and techniques moved from one region to another. By emphasizing color’s materiality, the way in which it was produced, exchanged, and used by artisans, artists, and craftspersons, contributors draw attention to the disjuncture between the beauty of color and the blood, sweat, and tears that went into its production, circulation, and application as well as to the complicated and varied social meanings attached to color within specific historical and social contexts. This book captures color’s global history with chapters on indigo plantations in India and the American South, cochineal production in colonial Oaxaca, the taste for brightly colored Chinese objects in Europe, and the thriving trade in vermilion between Europeans and Native Americans. To underscore the complexity of the technical knowledge behind color production, there are chapters on the “discovery” of Prussian blue, Brazilian feather techné, and wallpaper production. To sound the depths of color’s capacity for social and cultural meaning-making, there are chapters that explore the significance of black ink in Shakespeare’s sonnets, red threads in women’s needlework samplers, blues in Mayan sacred statuary, and greens and yellows in colored glass bracelets that were traded across the Arabian desert in the late Middle Ages. The purpose of this book is to recover color’s complex—and sometimes morally troubling—past, and in doing so, to restore a sense of wonder and appreciation for our colorful world. With its nuanced and complex depiction of how color operated within local contexts and moved across the globe, this book will appeal to art historians, social and cultural historians, museum curators, literary scholars, rhetoric scholars, and historians of science and technology. Andrea Feeser is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Theory, and Criticism at Clemson University, USA. Maureen Daly Goggin is Chair in the Department of English, Arizona State University, USA. Beth Fowkes Tobin is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia, USA.

The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950 Series Editor: Michael Yonan, University of Missouri-Columbia, USA The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting provides a forum for the broad study of object acquisition and collecting practices in their global dimensions from 1700 to 1950. The series seeks to illuminate the intersections between material culture studies, art history, and the history of collecting. HMCC takes as its starting point the idea that objects both contributed to the formation of knowledge in the past and likewise contribute to our understanding of the past today. The human relationship to objects has proven a rich field of scholarly inquiry, with much recent scholarship either anthropological or sociological rather than art historical in perspective. Underpinning this series is the idea that the physical nature of objects contributes substantially to their social meanings, and therefore that the visual, tactile, and sensual dimensions of objects are critical to their interpretation. HMCC therefore seeks to bridge anthropology and art history, sociology and aesthetics. It encompasses the following areas of concern: 1. Material culture in its broadest dimension, including the high arts of painting and sculpture, the decorative arts (furniture, ceramics, metalwork, etc.), and everyday objects of all kinds. 2. Collecting practices, be they institutionalized activities associated with museums, governmental authorities, and religious entities, or collecting done by individuals and social groups. 3. The role of objects in defining self, community, and difference in an increasingly international and globalized world, with cross-cultural exchange and travel the central modes of object transfer. 4. Objects as constitutive of historical narratives, be they devised by historical figures seeking to understand their past or in the form of modern scholarly narratives. The series publishes interdisciplinary and comparative research on objects that addresses one or more of these perspectives and includes monographs, thematic studies, and edited volumes of essays.

The Materiality of Color The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400-1800

Edited by Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2012 Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin and the contributors Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The materiality of color : the production, circulation, and application of dyes and pigments, 1400–1800. — The histories of material culture and collecting, 1700–1950) 1. Colors—Social aspects. 2. Symbolism of colors. 3. Dyes and dyeing—History. I. Series II. Feeser, Andrea. III. Goggin, Maureen Daly. IV. Tobin, Beth Fowkes. 306.4'6—dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The materiality of color : the production, circulation, and application of dyes and pigments, 1400–1800 / edited by Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin. pages cm — (The histories of material culture and collecting, 1700–1950) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-2915-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Dye industry—History. 2. Pigments industry—History. 3. Color—Social aspects—History. I. Feeser, Andrea, editor of compilation. II. Goggin, Maureen Daly, editor of compilation. III. Tobin, Beth Fowkes, editor of compilation.

HD9999.D9M38 2012 338.4'766720903—dc23 2012002949 ISBN 9781409429159 (hbk)

Contents

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements

vii xiii xix

Introduction: The Value of Color Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin Part I

Color’s Social and Cultural Meanings

1

Colorizing New England’s Burying Grounds Jason D. LaFountain

2

The Extra-Ordinary Powers of Red in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century English Needlework Maureen Daly Goggin

1

13

29

3

Coloring the Sacred in Sixteenth-Century Central Mexico Molly Harbour Bassett and Jeanette Favrot Peterson

4

The Expense of Ink and Wastes of Shame: Poetic Generation, Black Ink, and Material Waste in Shakespeare’s Sonnets Mitchell M. Harris

65

“Luscious Colors and Glossy Paint”: The Taste for China and the Consumption of Color in Eighteenth-Century England Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding

81

5

Part II

Producing and Exchanging Pigments and Dyes

6

Seeking Red: The Production and Trade of Cochineal Dye in Oaxaca, Mexico, 1750–1821 Jeremy Baskes v

45

101

the materiality of color

7

Red Ochre, Vermilion, and the Transatlantic Cosmetic Encounter Jean-François Lozier

119

8

Indian Indigo Padmini Tolat Balaram

139

9

The Exceptional and the Expected: Red, White, and Black Made Blue in Colonial South Carolina Andrea Feeser

10

Prussian Blue: Transfers and Trials Sarah Lowengard

155

167

Part III Making Colored Objects 11

Glass Bracelets in the Medieval and Early Modern Middle East: Design and Color as Identity Markers Stéphanie Karine Boulogne

185

12

The Colorful Court of Gabriel Bethlen and Catherine of Brandenburg 199 Éva Deák

13

The Evolution of Blackface Cosmetics on the Early Modern Stage Richard Blunt

217

14

Crafts of Color: Tupi Tapirage in Early Colonial Brazil Amy Buono

235

15

Colors and Techniques of Eighteenth-Century Chinese Wallpaper: Blair House as Case Study Elaine M. Gibbs

247

Butterflies, Spiders, and Shells: Coloring Natural History Illustrations in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain Beth Fowkes Tobin

265

16

Bibliography Index

281 319

vi

List of Illustrations

9 Vault painting, Augustinian monastery of Malinalco, Mexico, c. 1571–73: red and black inscription (lower register) and vegetation and bees (upper section). Photo: Jeanette Favrot Peterson

COLOR PLATES

1 Margarett Cumings stone (slate), 1790, Billerica, Massachusetts, carved by a member of the Lamson family. Photo: author

10 Juan Gerson, Noah’s Ark in upper medallion, sotocoro paintings, Franciscan monastery, Tecamachalco, Puebla, 1562. Photo: Jeanette Favrot Peterson

2 Elizabeth Huntington stone (schist), 1751, Windham, Connecticut. Photo: author 3 Colonel Isaac and Elisabeth Dodge tomb (slate, red brick, and mortar), 1785, Ipswich, Massachusetts. Photo: author

11 Chantico with atl tlachinolli glyph on back (note blue water and red burning); from Codex Borbonicus, fol. 18. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale, Paris. Photo: Jeanette Favrot Peterson

4 Mary Flexney, prayer tablet sampler, 1737. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London, T.318-1960 5 Mary Nickolls Exton, prayer tablet sampler, 1755. Courtesy of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, T.155-1928

12 Cabinet, China, c. 1700, 79 × 90 × 53.5 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, FE.39:1 to 21-1981. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

6 Sarah Rogers, sampler, 1772. Courtesy of Witney Antiques, Witney (UK); from Paradise Revisited: British Samplers and Historic Embroideries, 1590–1880 (Witney (UK): Witney Antiques, 2000), p. 25

13 Silk robe, made in London, woven and hand painted in China, 1760–65. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, T.593:1 to 5-1999. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

7 Cheltenham Female Orphan Asylum commemorative sampler, 1842. Courtesy of Witney Antiques, Witney (UK); from Stitched in Adversity: Samplers of the Poor (Witney (UK): Witney Antiques, 2006), cat. no. 29

14 Plate, porcelain, painted in famille rose enamels and gold with coat of arms, China, Qing dynasty, Qianlong reign period, c. 1750. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, FE.64-1978. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

8 Coyolxauqui Stone, (reconstructed) polychrome stone, late fifteenth century, Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlan. Photo: Molly H. Bassett

15 Man’s cloak made of silk dyed red with Spanish cochineal and embroidered with

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silver-gilt threads. Made in France at the end of the sixteenth century when red dyes were expensive. Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 793-1901. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

23 Substrate gray laid paper: 1 Prussian blue wash in gum arabic; 2 Prussian blue wash in milk; 3 Prussian blue with chalk as size and binder 24 Substrate cream laid paper: 1 Prussian blue wash in gum arabic; 2 Prussian blue wash in milk; 3 Prussian blue with chalk as size and binder

16 “Indian Collecting Cochineal with a Deer Tail”; from José Antonio de Alzate y Ramirez, Memoria sobre la naturaleza, cultivo, y beneficio de la grana (1777). Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, Vault Ayer MS l03l

25 Substrate wood panel treated with six gesso layers, dried and polished with pumice stone and sepia between applications. These samples represent Prussian blue used in traditional house paint techniques: 1 Prussian blue in stand oil; 2 Prussian blue oil glaze over an opaque Prussian blue-lead white oil paint mixture; 3 Prussian blue in dead flat oil (boiled linseed oil with turpentine oil)

17 A “paper” of vermilion. By the midnineteenth century much of the vermilion traded in North America was produced and packaged in China. Museum of the Fur Trade Collection, Chadron, Nebraska 18 Chintz palampore with double tree design, cotton, mordant-dyed and resistdyed, Coromandel Coast, c. 1725–50. Made in South-East India for the European market. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, No. IS.10-1976. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum

26 Canvas given various preparations. These samples represent Prussian blue used in eighteenth-century easel painting techniques: 1–3 Prussian blue mixed in boiled linseed oil with a little beeswax added; 4–6 Prussian blue in linseed oil (4 on a pinkish ground layer, 5 on a yellowish ground layer, 6 on a white ground)

19 Fragment of indigo-resist-dyed cloth, Gujurat, fifteenth century; textile with alternating elephant and flowering tree with geese and deer design. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, No. T.253-1958. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

27 Until the end of the eighteenth century, Prussian blue was more commonly used as a textile paint than as a dyestuff. It was used to create the blue and green colors on this silk fabric, imported from China to France in the 1770s. Chinese painted-silk fabric, detail showing the flower and leaf pattern. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Accession # 1942-033-02. Photo: S. Reiter and B. Price, 1995. Courtesy of the Textile Conservation Department, PMA

20 Indigo resist-dyed fabric designed by author. Photo: author 21 Indigo making in colonial South Carolina, from Henry Mouzon Jr., A Map of the Parish of St Stephen, in Craven County (London, 1773), from the collections of the South Carolina Historical Society 22 Reproduction of colonial slave garment made by Kendra Johnson, dyed with indigo. Photo: Anderson Wrangle

28 Polychrome medieval glass bangle fragment from Masyaf (Syria) castle’s excavations (Syrian antiquity soundings). Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Stéphanie Boulogne, Sorbonne (Paris IV). Stored in situ. 4.6 cm × 0.4 cm. Photo: author

Plates 23–26 The color created with Prussian blue depends on both the quality of the pigment and the surface preparation. All images © Elsbeth Geldhof

29 Six colored glass bangles fragments from Shabwa, Hadramaut, Yemen. (C. Darles’ private collection, France). A: length: 4.5 cm, width: 1.3 cm; B: length: 3.8 cm, width: 1.1 cm;

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C: length 2.4 cm, width: 0.9 cm; D: length: 1.7 cm, width: 0.4 cm; E: length: 3.5 cm, width: 1.2 cm; F: length: 4.5 cm, width: 1.3 cm. Photo: author

centuries. Courtesy of Blair House, US Department of State. Photo: Louise Krafft 40 Similar to the Blair House wallpaper, the Green Room of Winfield House in London displays a jade-like green background to its eighteenth-century hand painted Chinese wallpaper. This wallpaper came from Townley Hall, County Louth, Ireland. Courtesy of Winfield House, US Department of State

30 A Polychrome medieval glass bangle fragment from Shabwa, Hadramaut, Yemen (C. Darles’ private collection. France), 3.6 cm × 0.8 cm. Photo: author 31 Gala dress of Catherine of Brandenburg, Hungarian National Museum, cat. no. 1954. 664

41 A brightly colored parrot rests on a tree branch surrounded by multicolored leaves. Courtesy of Winfield House, US Department of State

32 Mente of Gabriel Bethen, Hungarian National Museum, cat. no. 1950. 177

42 A striking pink background to a hand painted eighteenth-century Chinese wallpaper shows off a pair of birds rendered in a framed architectural element. This unusual wallpaper is in the home of New York interior designer, David Kaihoi. Courtesy of David Kaihoi. Photo: Ngoc Minh Ngo, New York

33 Distribution of textile colors in the Account Book 34 Comparison of colors worn by Gabriel Bethlen and Catherine of Brandenburg 35 Distribution of textile colors worn at the court of Catherine of Brandenburg

43 Upside-down bird perching on a tree branch shows off cinnabar-colored features. Courtesy of Blair House, US Department of State. Photo: Louise Krafft

36 Unknown Italian artist, Tupi feathered cape with bonnet from illustrated inventory of Manfredo Settala’s collection: Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, Modena, Codice Campori, 338 · H.1. 21 fol. 5 recto. The later title to the Codex includes the words “disegni originali del Museo Settala” (Original Drawings of the Settala Museum)

44 Perched on rockery, a chalk-whitecolored cock gazes toward its partner. Courtesy of Blair House, US Department of State. Photo: Louise Krafft 45 Moses Harris, “Scheme of Colours,” in An exposition of English insects including the several classes of Neuroptera, Hymenoptera, & Diptera, or bees, flies, & libelullae Exhibiting on 51 copper plates near 500 figures, accurately drawn, & highly finished in colours (London, 1776). By permission of the Linnean Society of London

37 Example of tapiraged feather of a scarlet ibis (Eudocimus ruber), specimen from The Division of Birds, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Museum. Photo: Amy Buono (2007) 38 Tupi bonnet, Nationalmuseet Etnografisk Samling, Copenhagen, #EH5932, 29 cm, down parrot feathers. Photo: Amy Buono (2004)

46 Moses Harris drew and engraved this illustration of butterflies for Dru Drury’s Illustrations of Natural History; wherein are exhibited upwards of two hundred and forty Figures of Exotic Insects, according to their different Genera (known as Exotic Insects), 3 vols (London, 1770–82), plate V. The engravings were colored by Henry Seymer. By permission of the Linnean Society of London

39 Colorful overall double panel, 12 × 8 feet (3.66 × 2.44 meters), featuring a golden pheasant and blue heron with their mates amidst magnolia tree blossoms of pink and white. Past and present, the wallpaper has delighted dignitaries and guests over the

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47 Two views of the Duchess of Portland’s Mitre Shell, copied and colored by students of Martyn’s seminary, fig. 19 in Thomas Martyn, The Universal Conchologist (London, 1784), 37.g.8 (2). © The British Library Board

black inscription (lower register) and vegetation and bees (upper section). Photo: Jeanette Favrot Peterson 3.3 Sacrificing priests covered in black unguent, and Tlaloc ixiptla in black and bluegreen (above), from Codex Borbonicus, fol. 31 (detail). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale, Paris

48 Frontispiece by Thomas Martyn and his Academy for Illustrating and Painting Natural History to Aranei; or the Natural History of Spiders, by Charles Clerck and Eleazar Albin (London, 1793). University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center

5.1 Artist unknown, trade card for “[Richard] Masefield’s … Manufactory in the Strand, London,” uncolored etching, c. 1760. D, 2. 3231. © The Trustees of the British Museum, London

BLACK AND WHITE FIGURES

5.2 Artist unknown, trade card for “J. Cockerill … Chair Manufacturer,” uncolored etching, c. 1797. D, 2. 626. © The Trustees of the British Museum, London

1.1 Anna Cooper stone (slate), 1712/13, Woburn, Massachusetts, carved by a member of the Lamson family. Photo: Farber Gravestone Collection. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society

Graph 6.1 Price and output of cochineal in Oaxaca, 1758–1821. Memoria del gobierno libre y soberano de Oaxaca, 1859, AGEO

1.2 Daniel Conant stone (slate), 1753, Townsend, Massachusetts, attributed to William Park. Photo: Farber Gravestone Collection. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society

Graph 6.2 Output and value of cochineal post-independence, 1822–58. Carlos Maria de Bustamante, Memoria Estadistica de Oaxaca … (Veracruz: Imprenta Constitucional, 1821), 24 (for the year 1820)

1.3 Cotton Mather, letter to Richard Waller containing drawings of celestial phenomena (detail), Royal Society Early Letters vol. M2: 29, 25 November 1712. The Royal Society, London. Photo: Matthew Hunter 1.4

7.1 A variety of Mohave women’s facepainting patterns, each of which bore a name such as “Rainbow,” “Coyote Teeth,” “Yellowhammer Belly,” “Butterfly,” etc. After Alfred L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 78 (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1925)

Solar halo. Photo: Geoff Cloake

2.1 Matilda Ridley, marking sampler, 1854. Courtesy of Witney Antiques, Witney (UK) 2.2 M.A. Tipper, marking sampler, 1868. Courtesy of Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, T.11-1952

Table 8.1 Area under cultivation and productive of dye

3.1 Coyolxauqui Stone, Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlan, late fifteenth century. After Mary Miller and Karl Taube, An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993)

8.1 Harvesting author

indigo

plants.

Photo:

8.2 Boiling the extracted indigo to thicken the indigo paste. Photo: author 8.3 Cutting the indigo extract into cake form. Photo: author

3.2 Vault painting, Augustinian monastery of Malinalco, Mexico, c. 1571–73: red and

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list of illustrations

10.1 The formula for Prussian blue included by Peter Shaw in his book of Chemical Lectures (London, 1734) was a translation of the publication in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. A version in modern English is included at note 57. Image courtesy of Smithsonian Institution Libraries

der wilden, nacketen, grimmigen Menschfresser Leuthen, in der Newenwelt America [The True History of his Captivity …] Gedruckt zu Marpurg: Im Kleeblatt, bei Andres Kolben, Im Jar M.D.LVII [1557], woodcut. © John Carter Brown Library, Providence RI 15.1 Prior to its installation in the Lee Drawing Room of Blair House, this elegant and lively hand painted eighteenth-century Chinese wallpaper dressed the boudoir walls above the dado in Ashburnham Place, Sussex (UK). Ashburnham Place was demolished in the 1950s. Country Life 39, January–June (1916)

11.1 Locations of glass bracelet sites and workshops in Bilad al-Sham, twelfth to eighteenth centuries. Source: H. David and S. Boulogne Table 12.1 Distribution of colors in textiles measured by the ell in the Account Book Table 12.2 Distribution of colors in textiles measured by the bolt in the Account Book

15.2 Blair House as it appeared c. 1960. Courtesy of Blair House, US Department of State

Table 12.3 The colors of Gabriel Bethlen’s garments (left) and their linings (right) in his Last Will and Testament Table 12.4 Distribution of colors Catherine of Brandenburg’s clothes

15.3 Lee Drawing Room, c. 1962, before the installation of the Chinese wallpaper. Courtesy of Blair House, Office of the Curator, US Department of State

in

16.1 “Explanatory Table,” showing shells and their collectors, from Thomas Martyn, The Universal Conchologist (London, 1784), 37.g.8 (2). © The British Library Board

Table 12.5 Colors of textiles in the court of Catherine of Brandenburg 14.1 Hans Staden, frontispiece to Warhaftige Historia vnd Beschreibung eyner Landtschafft

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Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Notes on Contributors

Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding is a lecturer in British eighteenth-century studies at the English Department of University Lille 3, France. Her research focuses on eighteenthcentury British art and cultural history, visual and material culture, and in particular the fashion for chinoiserie in English decorative arts and the representation of the Orient in British art. Publication of her research on the representation of China in English art and culture and on the Anglo-Chinese taste includes articles in Women’s History Review, Bulletin de la Société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, the exhibition catalogue Chinoiseries (2009), and the exhibition catalogue Pagodes et dragons: Exotisme et fantaisies dans l’Europe rococo (2007). Her book La Chine dans l’imaginaire anglais des Lumières (1685–1798), which investigates the impact of chinoiserie on eighteenthcentury English imagination, is forthcoming. Padmini Tolat Balaram is a textile researcher and designer. She is Senior Professor and Head Extension at the D.J. Academy of Design. She is a textile designer who has been a pioneer in conducting research and experiments in dyeing using natural dyes and creating innovative textile arts with natural dyes. She also works as a consultant, researcher, and designer, specializing in natural dyes, natural fibers, traditional Indian textiles, and the textiles of Japan, Korea, China, and other Asian countries. She was introduced to natural dyes while conducting field research for the book Kalamkari Tradition of South India. Her other major researches on natural dyes in India include work on indigo and its use in India (1979–1980), the natural dyes of North-East India (1984–1990), and the natural dyes of Madhya Pradesh (1997–2000). She was awarded a Japan Foundation Fellowship to study natural indigo and its use in Japan in 1995– 1996, and a Fellowship from the Asian Scholarship Foundation to study cross-cultural research on Chinese and Korean indigo in 2003. In 2006–2007 she was again awarded a Japan Foundation Fellowship to conduct research on the textile routes from India to Japan via China and Korea. Jeremy Baskes is Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies at Ohio Wesleyan University. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Latin American Studies, the Journal of Economic History, and the Colonial Latin American Review. xiii

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He is also author of a Stanford University monograph titled Indians, Merchants and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the Repartimiento and Spanish–Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750–1821. He is currently completing a book focusing on risk and the economic behavior of long-distance merchants in eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic world commerce. Molly Harbour Bassett is Assistant Professor in the Religious Studies Department of Georgia State University in Atlanta. She holds a Master of Divinity degree from the Harvard University School of Divinity and a PhD from the University of California Santa Barbara in religious studies. She has published on Aztec concepts of the human body and is working on a book on Mexica-Aztec deities and their representation. Richard Blunt holds both a Master of Letters and a Master of Fine Arts in Renaissance Literature in Performance from Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, VA. His MLitt thesis was the source for his contribution to this volume and his MFA project was on the role of Toby Belch in Twelfth Night. He currently performs as a troupe member with the American Shakespeare Center. Since 2007, he has played 47 roles in 25 productions, including Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Banquo in Macbeth, and Parolles in All’s Well that Ends Well. Stéphanie Karine Boulogne holds her PhD (2007) from the University of ParisSorbonne and the Laboratory of Medieval Islam, CNRS, Paris. Her doctoral work was supported by a scholarship from the French Foreign Ministry at Institut Français du Proche-Orient. Since 2008, she has been an independent researcher and an associate of CNRS Lamm Aix en Provence. She was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship from the Corning Museum of Glass, New York, in 2009, and collaborated as a glass specialist on different projects in the Arabian peninsula; for example, the French excavations at Shihr, and the work at Julfar Nudud where she was consultant for the Oxford Brooks University project headed by R. Carter. She lectures at a private high school of art in Paris. Amy Buono is Assistant Professor of Art History in the Rhetorics of Art, Space, and Culture program at Southern Methodist University, where she is a specialist in the visual culture of early modern Latin America and the Lusophone world. Dr Buono trained at the University of New Mexico (BA) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (MA and PhD). Among Dr Buono’s awards are fellowships from FulbrightHays, the Social Sciences Research Council, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC), the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies (Ascona), and the Getty Research Institute. Her research interests include the intersections between early modern visual cultural and natural history, cultural performance, and the socio-politics of museums in Latin America. Amy has published articles on Jean-Baptiste Debret, Tupinambá featherwork and art, and the environment in sixteenth-century Rouen. Her current book projects include Feather Techné: Tupinambá Interculture in Early Modern Brazil and Europe, and a critical edition and xiv

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translation of the Collecção de varias receitas de segredos particulares (1766), an illustrated Jesuit medicinal book from missions in Brazil, Goa, and Macau. Éva Deák is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Ethnology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She received her PhD from the Central European University in Budapest. Her dissertation, “Expressing Elite Status through Clothing in Early Modern Europe: The Examples of Gabriel Bethlen and Catherine of Brandenburg” was published in 2010. Her current research project is on clothing in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Transylvania in the light of sumptuary laws. Andrea Feeser, Associate Professor of Art History in the Art Department at Clemson University, is author of Waikiki: A History of Forgetting and Remembering (with art by Gaye Chan), and is completing a book on South Carolina indigo in the colonial period. She writes on visual and material culture with respect to the history of place, as well as on modern and contemporary art. Elaine M. Gibbs is an independent scholar serving as Curatorial Assistant at Blair House, the President’s guest house in Washington DC. She holds a Master of Arts degree in the history of decorative arts from the Parsons School of Design through its affiliation with the Smithsonian Associates, Washington DC, where she has also lectured on historic wall coverings. Her contributions in the field include research, exhibitions, programs, and publications for Meridian House International Center and Woodrow Wilson House in Washington DC, and Montpelier, President James Madison’s Virginia home. Her article, “The Protocol of Clothing and Presidential Dressing,” about President Woodrow Wilson and Edith Galt Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference, January 1919, is forthcoming in issue 32, entitled “Costume: Dressing for the Presidency,” of White House History, the journal of the White House Historical Association. Maureen Daly Goggin, Professor of Rhetoric and Chair of the Department of English at Arizona State University, is the author of Authoring a Discipline: The PostWorld War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition (2000), co-author with Richard Bullock of The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings (2006; 2nd edn 2009), editor of Inventing a Discipline (2000), co-editor of Racialized Politics of Desire in Personal Ads (2008), and co-editor of three edited collections with Beth Fowkes Tobin on women and material culture: Women and Things, 1750–1950 (2009), Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950 (2009), and Material Women, 1750–1950 (2009). She has also written extensively about history in the fields of rhetoric, gender and race, visual rhetoric and material culture. Mitchell M. Harris (PhD, University of Texas at Austin) is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Augustana College (Sioux Falls SD), where he teaches courses on early British literature, Shakespeare, critical theory, and religious culture. A contributing writer to the Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine and a contributing xv

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editor to the John Donne Variorum, he is currently co-editing a collection on the Church Fathers in early modern England and finishing a manuscript on Augustinian ethics in Tudor and Stuart literature. His previous work has appeared in Christianity and Literature and Intersections in Christianity and Critical Theory (2010). Jason D. LaFountain is a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University. His dissertation, entitled “The Puritan Art World,” analyzes a discourse issuing from English and American Puritan practical theology that describes godly living as a work of art. Sarah Lowengard is a historian of technology and science who studies the chemistry and physics of the early modern West. Her work combines art, material culture, and materials science with more typical historical concerns of social, economic, political, and intellectual life. Current research includes an examination of the technologies of color printing before 1800 and a comprehensive history of the social and scientific transformations of ferric ferrocyanide (Prussian blue). Lowengard was granted a PhD from SUNY-Stony Brook and has been a Fellow at the Huntington Library, the Max-Planck-Institut-für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Berlin), the Smithsonian, and the National Science Foundation. She teaches at the Cooper Union, was an associate member of The Pigmentum Project (London/Oxford), and serves as an advisory editor for the journal Technology and Culture. Jean-François Lozier, Curator of Pre-Confederation Canadian History at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, earned his doctorate from the University of Toronto. His research centers on the multifaceted encounter of Native and European peoples during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a special emphasis on the French experience. The material culture of these encounters—from vermilion and other trade goods to peace medals and enemy scalps—numbers among his interests. Jeanette Favrot Peterson is Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California Santa Barbara. She has published extensively on the iconography and imagery of Aztec culture, authoring an exhibition catalogue, Sacred Gifts: Precolumbian Art and Creativity (1994). Her book on the colonial art of Mexico, The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (1993), won the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, which was bestowed by the College Art Association. Her current work focuses on the imagery and textile relics of the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Beth Fowkes Tobin, Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia, is the author of Picturing Imperial Power (1999) and the award-winning Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760–1820 (2005), and has published widely on the art, literature, and science of colonialism. For her research on the representation of the tropics, she received a fellowship from the National Endowment of Humanities and a Caird Fellowship from the National Maritime xvi

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Museum, Greenwich, and is currently studying eighteenth-century natural history collections, for which she has received a National Science Foundation Scholars Award. She also co-edited three edited collections with Maureen Daly Goggin on women and material culture, Women and Things, 1750–1950 (2009), Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950 (2009), and Material Women, 1750–1950 (2009).

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Acknowledgements

The editors would like to acknowledge the many people and institutions that have made this book possible. At Ashgate we are indebted to Senior Editor Ann Donahue who first considered this collection for potential publication. We are especially grateful for the help and encouragement we received from Meredith Norwich, Commissioning Editor for Visual Studies at Ashgate, who took on responsibility for the book. In turn, we owe our thanks to Michael Yonan of the University of Missouri, editor of Ashgate’s The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950, who added our collection to this series. Equally, we appreciate the careful proofreading provided by Jane Read. We would like to acknowledge the fine index work by Jonathan Hoare. Also at the press, we thank Emily Ruskell and her staff for their layout and production work. We are indebted to those who provided our authors with illustrations and permissions for their use as well as to the Clemson University Project Completion Grant and the Institute of Humanities Research at Arizona State University for a subvention grant, which made the reproduction of color images possible. We first explored the possibilities for a publication on the material histories of color through sessions we organized and papers we gave at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and are grateful to those who supported these projects. We also value the comments and suggestions that we received from the anonymous reviewer who read the manuscript in its initial stage. Typically, acknowledgements end with a gesture of gratitude toward family support. We follow this convention because family support is so critical to the fruition of a project. Andrea thanks Tim for his generosity; Maureen thanks Peter for his unwavering intellectual, physical, and emotional support; and Beth thanks Joe for his patience and wisdom.

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Introduction: The Value of Color Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin

Since colour has a vivid life outside the realm of art, its problems even within that realm cannot be understood exclusively from within the history and theory of art itself; … in respect of colour, that history and the theory must be seen to be part of a larger picture.1

The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800 examines the “value” of color in the material world. The value that color possesses operates in three distinct but overlapping categories of human activity: the aesthetic, the economic, and the social. Value as it relates to the visual quality of colors—its tints, shades, hues, and tones—is evoked within aesthetic and art historical discourses and by practitioners who as producers and users of colored pigments and dyes have developed several vocabularies to describe the visual impact of color. This kind of value finds expression in such definitions as “the lightness or darkness of a color— giving tints and shades in relation to black and white. Color with black added become shades, with white added they become tints.”2 Another kind of value ascribed to color is economic value: the labor, capital, and expertise invested in the production, circulation, and application of pigments and dyes as well as in the production of colored objects that are consumed as commodities within historically specific systems of economic exchange and distribution. Color’s ultimate value, however, is conferred through the multiple and sometimes conflictive social, religious, and cultural codes that determine the value of color as an aesthetic property and as a desirable commodity. The social and cultural meanings attached to color range widely, and while there are some meanings that are held across cultures and historical periods, color functions within semiotic codes that were developed by socio-cultural agents in response to the exigencies of specific times and places. Such exigencies—the kairos of color—make color both a tremendous source of visual pleasure and of visual anxiety. This volume’s approach to the problem of studying the multiple values associated with color is to provide case studies of how color was produced, used, consumed, and circulated within particular and specific historical, social, and cultural contexts. The collection is organized into three parts: Color’s Social 1

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and Cultural Meanings; Producing and Exchanging Pigments and Dyes; and Making Colored Objects. Certainly some of the chapters in one section might be just as easily placed in another since categories of value are porous. However, we arranged the chapters to emphasize two of the interlocking values: the socio-cultural values, which serve as the focus of the first section, and the economic values, which are attended to in the second and third sections. Through case studies of particular colors and colored objects, our volume demonstrates just how complex the history of color is by focusing on, in some chapters, the diverse social and cultural meanings of color; in other chapters, the trouble, pain, and suffering behind the production and application of these colors; or in still other chapters, explaining the difficult technical processes for making and applying color, along with the intricacy of commercial exchanges and knowledge transfers as commodities and techniques moved from one region to another. By emphasizing color’s materiality, the way in which it was produced, exchanged, and used by artisans, artists, and craftspersons, we hope to draw attention to the disjuncture between the beauty of color and the blood, sweat, and tears that went into its production, circulation, and application, and to draw attention to the complicated and varied social meanings attached to color within specific historical and social contexts. As a whole, we reject essentialist notions of color as possessing certain transhistorical and pan-cultural significances (for example: green is soothing; yellow is menacing; red is hot; blue is cool), and seek explanations for the meaning of colors within the social and cultural contexts in which they were made, used, and understood. Before chemicals were harnessed to the color industry in the mid-nineteenth century, color came from natural substances—minerals, animals, and plants.3 Cochineal, the red dye produced in the bodies of insects that feed on nopal cactus, Tyrian purple derived from the glands of a Mediterranean mollusc, Indian yellow gathered from the urine of cows who fed on mango leaves, and indigo, the blue dye wrung from fermented indigo plants, are examples of colors created out of natural objects. Because the processes of making color from nature in the form of dyes and pigments were so labor-intensive and so technologically complex, color was precious. Colored threads and fabric, colored paint for interiors, colored pigments for ceramics, cosmetics, printing, and for artists’ oil paint and watercolors were products that required extensive knowledge and labor and were concocted from materials and techniques that not only traveled long distances and across oceans but also were surrounded by mystery and intrigue. Today, color is cheap. With the Internet, HD TV, and other technological advances, it is becoming less expensive and ever more available in increasing nuances. Thus, we are bombarded by an array of colors, chemically created and now digitally reproduced, and as a result, we cannot fathom a world without color, a world where color was desired to the degree that people were willing to suffer and sacrifice to attain it. The idea that color, which today we tend to regard as a purely aesthetic element, was the source of much anxiety, effort, thought, and even suffering might seem odd to us now. This book seeks to recover color’s complex and sometimes morally troubling past and, in doing so, to restore a sense of wonder and appreciation for our colorful world. 2

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Social and Cultural Value A fundamental experience of perception and materiality bound to historical and current realities, color profoundly impacts affect and produces multiple meanings. As an integral component of ritual, religion, fashion, material culture, art, and architecture, color significantly structures social and cultural formations in history and during present times. From the Incas who are believed to have had a system of colored strings and knots as a way of recording information and data to contemporary electronic engineers who use a ten-color mapping system to represent resistance of resistors, color has been important for serving as language. But it has also been critical for coding experiences. Indeed, makers and thinkers of every sort have worked with color in multiple ways, producing a universe of objects, experiences, reflections, and analyses that stimulate the senses and intellect. “Color is a social phenomenon,” Michel Pastoureau contends. “It is society that ‘makes’ color, defines it, gives it its meaning, constructs its codes and values, establishes its uses, and determines whether it is acceptable or not.”4 It is, of course, a natural phenomenon as well, but the meanings attached to and evoked from color are cultural and social processes. These processes are so complex that few scholars have chosen to tread in the social and cultural waters of color.5 Part of its complexities emerges as a lexicon problem, something Ludwig Wittgenstein observes: What is there in favor of saying that green is a primary colour not a blend of blue and yellow? Would it be right to say: ‘You can only know it directly by looking at the colours’? But how do I know that I mean the same by the words ‘primary colours’ as some other person who is also inclined to call green a primary colour? No—here language games decide.6

Color is a language game because what we choose to say about a color—its hue, value, saturation, texture, lightness and darkness—varies by the conditions under which two or more people look at it, the associations they have with it, the effect it has on them, and the ends they believe it is meant to achieve. Indeed, as Constance Howard points out: Two people may stand very close together but their positions are not exactly the same, their eyes and their focusing powers are different, therefore they cannot see colours in the same way … A colour described by one person is given a different description by another, blues and greens often causing confusion.7

If we perceive color differently in relation to where we stand, then the values we give it are unstable, shifting with our shifting positions. Although color is an extremely important part of historical and current experience, it is difficult to elucidate all of its many features, conditions, applications, and contexts. Its visual qualities are often emphasized in contemporary cultures, and in the increasingly global phenomenon of the Internet, color’s almost disembodied characteristics take center stage. Nevertheless, it is an extremely material matter, and its physical properties defined much of its use and peoples’ understanding of it in earlier times. For example, archaeologists of the prehistoric era and anthropologists and historians who focus on 3

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premodern cultures (some of which continue to flourish in our times) have noted that the names of colors tend to come from things in the natural world first (and this continues in current practice). Consider, for instance, names that evoke place, such as Egyptian blue, Indian yellow, Venetian red, and Vegas gold, or names that call on fruits and vegetables, such as olive green, apple red, and plum, or efforts to brand place through color, such as Duke blue, Columbia blue, and Yale blue. Of course, prior to the nineteenth century, collectors gathered natural agents to produce color and to document its locations in nature and its manufactures, residuals of which show up in some of the names used for color. Peoples from all regions of the world developed technologies to create color from their gathered sources, making many of them increasingly sophisticated in order to produce desired effects when making colored objects and experiences (notably cloth and rituals). Different cultures have developed varied means of evaluating the colors that they produce and use, with European scientific terminology and artistic practices often taking center stage in today’s world of color in industry, the home, fashion, and the art world. However varied, these European models are organized around the terms hue (a gradation or variety of color), chroma (the perceived intensity of color), and value (a color’s lightness or darkness). Like other models, these European ones are useful for the communities that draw on them, provided they have shared objectives. However, European color models are not universal but historical and situated, and they have misrepresented (and perhaps continue to misrepresent) other communities’ values. For instance, “in Japanese perception, it is sometimes less important to know if something is blue, red, or some other color and more important to know whether or not the color is dull or shiny.”8 Similarly, some native peoples of the Americas (ranging from South to North America) valued shininess in color: the extent to which colored objects appeared to radiate color. Such items or ritual experiences were exceedingly valuable, and many American Indians transacted among themselves as well as with Europeans by exchanging feathers, beads, cloth, vessels, and other items whose value was at times determined in relation to brilliance. Language, it seems, is inadequate to the task of naming colors that exist as infinitely divisible and yet as indeterminate points along a continuum of what we can perceive. John Gage points this problem out when he remarks that there is a marked discrepancy between the large number—some psychologists say millions—of perceivable colours and the handful of names we use to identify them. Language labels only those few segments of the continuous colour-space which are important to us and thus the study of colour as we understand it becomes very much the study of colour language.9

Consider, for example, the American Munsell system which divides colors into somewhere over 1,500 chips. While these offer a common way of talking about color, they are woefully inadequate to capturing all that is available in color. As one scholar noted, “a semiotic theory of color universals must take for ‘significance’ exactly what colors mean in human societies. They do not mean Munsell chips.”10 In his book Color and Meaning, John Gage shows the “instability of colour-perceptions” within different cultures over time and within time. There is, therefore, a danger in speaking “confidently of colour meanings and preferences in many cultures.”11 4

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Color systems have been put to various social uses. For instance, color systems have been gendered in diverse ways. In the nineteenth century, “the French theorist Charles Blanc stated categorically that ‘drawing is the masculine sex of art and colour is the feminine sex,’ and for this reason colour could only be of secondary importance.” In the next century, “around 1940, Matisse told a friend that for him the opposite was the case.”12 John Gage recommends that feminists explore the recurrent assumption that a feeling for a color is especially a female trait. Thus, at times color has been associated with the female, while line has been linked to the male. What makes the latter more significant than the former is left unclear, and apparently shifts through time and culture. Several of the contributions to The Materiality of Color explore the social and cultural uses of color. Richard Blunt examines the English Renaissance use of cosmetics for performances, tracing the progress of physical representations of blackface characters between 1522 and 1638 and exploring why they became more realistic over time. He looks at the rigors placed on cosmetics by stage blocking and character interactions. Mitchell Harris also explores the color of black, specifically black ink, in the Renaissance by analyzing Shakespearean sonnets to show how the “material means” of producing poetry, in particular the blackness of the ink, gives this poetry “its material reality.” Focusing on “metaphorical transferences” and “somatic boundaries,” he calls attention to the complexities of the social meanings of color. Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding follows the history of the English taste for Chinese decorative objects in the eighteenth century by examining how sinophilia was either celebrated as an explosion of color in decoration or demonized as an embrace of foreign gaudiness in cosmetics and fashion. Maureen Daly Goggin explores the complex meaning of red in three genres of English needlework samplers from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Molly Harbour Bassett and Jeanette Favrot Peterson focus on the significance of color in the Mexica-Aztec religion and in cultural interchanges in precontact culture and their persistence and adaptation after contact. They investigate the colorful expressions of the MexicaAztec cosmovision in postcontact religion and the role of color and sacred bodies in the making of the New World. Examining glass bracelets in the medieval and early modern Near East, Stéphanie Karine Boulogne shows how patterns and colors in glass bracelets shed light on the various communities associated with these goods as well as their varied locales. Jason LaFountain examines the phenomenology of New England graveyards, focusing on the role of color in shaping aesthetics and sentiments aroused by the headstones made of orangeish and reddish sandstone, purplish or greenish slate, pink granite from Connecticut, and greenish schist from coastal Massachusetts. All these discussions grapple with the complex social meanings of color. The struggle over meanings—the semiology of color—has a long past and continues. Stephen Melville observes: The story of color and its theory within the history of art is a history of oscillations between its reduction to charm or ornament and its valorization as the radical truth of painting. From these oscillations other vibrations are repeatedly set in motion that touch and disturb matters as purely art-historical as the complex inter-locking borders among and within the individual arts and as culturally far-reaching as codes of race and gender and images of activity and passivity.13

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As Michel Pastoureau states, differences in cultural perceptions “underscore not only the profoundly cultural nature of color perception and the lexicon it creates, but also the important role of synesthesia and the mixing of sensory experience in the perception and understanding of color.”14 Colors have intricate social and cultural histories and are difficult to study not only because they engender different physical variations in different lights, positions in relation to them, and materials and dyes, but also because psychological associations with them vary greatly across humanity. The varied meanings of color are much larger than their parts.

Economic Value: Production, Circulation, and Consumption of Color With its array of cultural, semiotic, and aesthetic values, color has economic value. Colorants possess the potential to enrich their producers as well as those who engage in their exchange and circulation. Trade in colorants has a long history stretching back to the trafficking in minerals used by the Assyrians to make the turquoise tiles that studded their triumphal arches, the vermilion dug out of the mountains in Spain and used by the Romans to make rouge, and the dyes extracted from plants to color Chinese silks. The economics of color production, a topic that tends to be overlooked within the field of art history, has been studied by scholars in the history of science who recognize the impact of commercial forces on the development of the technologies of color manufacturing. The history of chemistry is closely linked to the history of color production. For instance, Agusti Nieto-Galan has examined the transactions between commercial dyers and chemists in eighteenth-century Britain, demonstrating how these two trades worked together to make light-resistant dyes.15 Historians of science have also joined forces with historians of empire, particularly those who study Latin America, to recover the history of Spain’s investment in exploring and exploiting Latin American’s natural resources. As Daniela Bleichmar has shown, Spain’s monarch Charles III funded multiple expeditions in the latter half of the eighteenth century to examine and methodically investigate “the natural productions of my America Dominions,” including those plants that produced medicines and dyes.16 Spain was locked in a battle with France, Holland, and Britain over maintaining or undermining monopolies in such natural commodities as cinchona bark (for anti-malarial properties), cinnamon, pepper, indigo, and cochineal. Cochineal has, in fact, received a great deal of attention from Latin American scholars and historians of science who have recovered its history as a commodity produced for global markets. Historians have traced cochineal production on the largescale plantations devoted to growing the nopal cactus that the kermes insect infests as a parasite and have recovered the practices by which indigenous laborers gathered the insects and processed them to produce the bold red dye. Experts on the history of cochineal, among them our contributor Jeremy Baskes, have recovered evidence that imperial authorities exercised strict regulations over cochineal production to ensure Spain’s monopoly on and role as a purveyor of this colorant used in Europe to dye 6

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textiles, to make cosmetics, and to make oil paint.17 Scholars contend that cochineal as a dye and pigment source had an enormous artistic and economic impact on sixteenththrough nineteenth-century Europe and its relations with Latin America. The history of cochineal, including its application to a wide range of luxury goods, the labor practices that produced it, and the economic policies that controlled its circulation and exchange, the topic Baskes examines in his chapter, is a fairly well-documented example of the materiality of color, complete with bugs, Indians, imperial bureaucrats, and Madame de Pompadour’s rouge. Less well known is the story of indigo, which two of our authors tackle. Andrea Feeser focuses on egregious labor practices of indigo cultivation in the New World and Padmini Balaram investigates the entrepreneurial activities of the British East India Company concerning the re-introduction of indigo cultivation in India. Sarah Lowengard examines another blue colorant, Prussian blue, whose complex history has been misunderstood and obscured by popular myths concerning its origins as the happy product of a chemical mistake. She untangles these myths about Prussian blue and tracks its movements across Europe as a viable and desirable commodity among painters and textile manufactures. Vermillion, just as well traveled as cochineal, has not received much scholarly attention, perhaps because it traveled in the opposite direction, from Europe, where it was manufactured in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under very dangerous conditions in small, squalid chemical factories, and shipped to North America as a trade good, specifically targeting the indigenous peoples of Northeastern woodlands. Jean-François Lozier examines what this red pigment meant to the Iroquois and Algonquians of the Old Northwest Territories. The indigenous peoples of the Americas are not often portrayed as a market for European goods as the emphasis in colonial history has been upon the Americas as a site of European exploitation of labor and the expropriation of natural resources. Yet, as several authors demonstrate, it was a vibrant market. Chapters in this volume also trace the movement of particular colored objects across the globe. Stéphanie Karine Boulogne studies the trade in colored glass bracelets between the Arabian peninsula and India, and Amy Buono investigates the Portuguese market for feather capes made by indigenous peoples of Brazil who, through elaborate techniques, altered the color of feathers on living birds. Elaine Gibbs explores the Chinese manufacture and exportation of wallpaper that decorated eighteenth-century houses in Europe and North America, while Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding discusses the taste for chinoiserie and all things Chinese that contributed to the consumer revolution in eighteenth-century Britain. Consumption of colored goods is also examined by Éva Deák, who focuses on the way in which color was used to mark social boundaries through brilliantly dyed fabric within a seventeenth-century central European court. Trade involves not only exchange and consumption of products but also the dissemination of techniques, methods, and craft practices. Technology transfers, often involving cultural brokers, occurred across national boundaries as with Prussian blue dye, across the Atlantic Ocean with the Portuguese interest in and expropriation of Tupi feather techne, and across the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, and Arabian Desert with the Muslim trade in prefabricated glass ingots, which were then made into glass bracelets by local artisans. The labor practices that undergirded the production 7

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of colorants and colored objects are analyzed in Balaram’s study of the zamindar landholding system exploited by the East India Company for indigo growing in India; in Feeser’s investigation of slave and indentured labor on Carolina indigo plantations; and in Tobin’s chapter on natural history painting, which explores the use of children to hand paint engraved illustrations in the English book trade. The cultivation of plants, the exchange of craft secrets, and the circulation and consumption of colored objects— illustrations, wallpaper, bracelets, fabric, feathers, ink, and cosmetics—were ways that people profited, or hoped to profit, from the production and exchange of colorants and colored objects. More importantly, as our case studies show, intense investment of capital, labor, thought, and energy went into the acquisition of color and the insertion of that color into people’s lives as a way to enliven the quotidian or to demarcate social and cultural distinctions.

Attending to Color When scholars address how ideas about color are formed, and interrogate those that have been naturalized, they reveal how other properties of color can be discovered and illuminated, and how the art, culture, and alternative models of the science of color can be explored. Broadly speaking, most of the scholars who study color do so within the following (often overlapping) frameworks: as the product of material conditions; as an element of cultural meaning; in relation to natural history; as a component of visual culture; and as a site of theoretical production. Some of the scholarship on color also focuses on specific hues, historical periods, geographic locations, and cultural formations. So far, this work is largely set within a European perspective and heavy on the modern and contemporary context. Today scholars are increasingly attracted to the cacophony of meanings produced by color, and a body of literature on the myriad subjects color spawns is steadily growing. Questions concerning color have been taken up by a broad range of scholars. As Johannes Itten points out: The physicist who studies electro-magnetic energy vibrations, measuring and classifying colors; the chemist who studies molecular structure of dyes and pigments, color fastness and fugitiveness, synthetic and natural dyes, the physiologist who studies the light and color effects on the eye and the brain, chromatic color vision and after images; while the psychologist studies the influence of color radiation on the mind and spirit, color symbolism and expressive color effects. The art uses both eye and brain to discover the relationships of color agents and their effects on man.18

In the past decade several books on color have been published. In addition to Philip Ball’s Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (2003) and general histories of color, such as Victoria Finlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette (2002) which sets out to “tell the tantalizing true stories behind your favorite colors,” there are also books narrating the history of single colors, such as Amy Butler Greenfield’s A Perfect Red (2005), Michel Pastoureau’s Blue: The History of a Color (2001), Robert Chenciner’s Madder Red: A History of Luxury and Trade Plant Dyes and Pigments in the World of Commerce and Art ( 2000), and Simon Garfield’s Mauve: How One Man Invented a 8

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Color that Changed the World (2002). Our volume seeks to augment and compliment these histories of pigments and dyes by attending to the complexities unveiled through archival research, and by addressing the social dimensions and political implications of color’s fraught history of draconian labor regimes, well-guarded monopolies, tricky technology transfers, and precarious economies of exchange. Foregrounding the materiality of color, this collection provides intellectually rigorous, historically nuanced, and culturally salient examinations of the production, circulation, and application of particular colors. The Materiality of Color does what no singleauthored book can do—it provides detailed, sharply focused treatments of color that emerge from years of study in the archives and in the field. Our authors approach their topics within the wide spectrum of color history from multiple disciplines, including art history and archeology, literary and theater history, history of science and technology, and cultural, social, and imperial history, and in addition are experts who specialize in regions ranging from the Americas to the Near East, Far East, and South Asia. Therefore, this collection, which examines earlier and global armatures for colors’ conditions and meanings, works to fill lacunae in the ranks of existing treatises on color. The book focuses on the early modern world, the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries, as it engages the ages of exploration and imperialism that brought the corners of the globe into both fruitful and fraught interrelationships. These relationships were shaped by color through two intertwined dimensions: peoples of different colors came into contact with one another, and dyes and paints as well as goods colored by them became important trade stuffs among these diverse populations. Thus color affected how cultures defined themselves and related to others, and it also played a part in how people used goods to shape their interior lives and exterior worlds.

Notes 1. John Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 9. 2. Constance Howard, Embroidery and Color (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976), 165. 3. For chemical analyses of natural dyes and the technology associated with their production, see Handbook of Natural Colorants, eds Thomas Bechtold and Rita Mussak (London: Wiley, 2009). See also Robert Fox and Agusti Nieto-Galan, eds, Natural Dye Stuffs and Industrial Culture in Europe, 1750–1880 (Canton MA: Science History Publications, 1999). 4. Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 10. 5. These include, for example: Robert Chenciner, Madder Red: A History of Luxury and Trade Plant Dyes and Pigments in the World of Commerce and Art (Richmond (UK): Curzon, 2000); John Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Singapore: Thames & Hudson, 1993); Gage, Color and Meaning; Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York: Harper Collins, 2005); Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color. Pastoureau calls Gage’s Colour and Culture the most “ambitious history” on color; indeed, he is correct. 6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schättle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), I, 2–3e.

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7. Constance Howard, Embroidery and Color (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976), 163. 8. Pastoureau, Blue, 175. 9. Gage, Color and Meaning, 262. 10. Quoted in ibid., 20. 11. Ibid., 33. 12. Ibid., 35. 13. Stephen Melville, “Color Has Not Yet Been Named: Objectivity in Deconstruction,” in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts, Art Media, Architecture, eds Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 45. Also quoted in Gage, Color and Meaning, 7. 14. Pastoureau, Blue, 175. 15. Agusti Nieto-Galan, Colouring Textiles: A History of Natural Dyestuffs in Industrial Europe (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2001). 16. Daniela Bleichmar, “Atlantic Competitions: Botany in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire,” in Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, eds James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (London: Routledge, 2008), 225–52, 225–26. Neil Safier studies similar dynamics between Portugal and its colony of Brazil in his essay “Spies, Dyes, and Leaves: Agro-Intermediaries, Luso-Brazilian Couriers, and the Worlds They Sowed,” in The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820, eds Simon Shaffer et al. (Canton MA: Science History Publications, 2009), 239–69. See also Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 17. For complex labor practices used to cultivate cochineal, see Carlos Marichal, “Mexican Cochineal and the European Demand for American Dyes, 1550–1850,” in From Silver to Cocaine: Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000, eds Steven Topik et al. (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 76–92. For conditions under which trade in cochineal was conducted, see Jeremy Baskes, “Colonial Institutions and Cross-Cultural Trade: Repartimiento Credit and Indigenous Production of Cochineal in Eighteenth-Century Oaxaca, Mexico,” Journal of Economic History 65, 1 (2005): 186–210. See also R.A. Donkin, Spanish Red: An Ethnogeographical Study of Cochineal and the Opuntia Cactus (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1977); and Greenfield, A Perfect Red. 18. Johannes Itten, The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993), 2.

10

Part I Color’s Social and Cultural Meanings

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

1 Colorizing New England’s Burying Grounds Jason D. LaFountain

Color is not an object out there in space, waiting to be named; it is a phenomenon, an event that happens between an object and a subject. Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green1

In Thoughts for the Day of Rain, published in 1712, the New England Puritan minister Cotton Mather observes that “among the Engines of Piety … the Rainbow is one too much neglected.”2 Mather argues that the rainbow, which is fully dependent upon, indeed a projection from, the Christ-like sun, is a crucial image of exemplary selfhood and a source for further meditation. In this chapter, I analyze the importance of color to the material commemorations of model Christians in early New England burying grounds. Although overlooked in the abundant literature on early New England funerary monuments—with the exception of a brief passage in a book published in 2003 about the history of New England landscape by Christopher Lenney—the types of stone quarried and used for monuments from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century are, more often than not, colored.3 In the Connecticut River Valley, one finds orangeish and reddish sandstones (some of these can be almost blood red); the slates of the seacoast and of northern New England are tinged blue, green, and purple, and there are often pink or orange veins—slate can appear purple in the late afternoon light of the fall or in summer just after a rainstorm, or blue, if seen against green foliage and in diffuse light at noon on a sunny day (see Plate 1). Yellow-green schists are employed on the North Shore of Massachusetts—yellow sandstones are scattered throughout New England, too; pink granites stand in Connecticut’s burying grounds—these will sometimes glitter; and then there are the mica-rich granites and schists of Connecticut, which sparkle brightly in the sunlight (see Plate 2, a Connecticut schist). Glitter and sparkle are formal characteristics closely associated with color-related definitions of beauty, at least as early as the writings of Plato and Plotinus.4 Although all colors of stone do not appear in a single area in New England, collectively speaking early monuments were made in every color of the rainbow. 13

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Past writers have also severed these gravestones from the colorful material realities of the spaces for which the objects were produced and in which they are still situated. By examining the importance of color, among the most relative of formal properties, within early New England burying grounds, I aim to begin to restore to the analysis of the gravestones the importance of their siting(s) within an outdoor landscape, including their relationship to bodies of visitors who view, touch, and/or walk around them, and environmental contingencies such as the weather, time of day, the turning of the seasons, as well as the historicity of the New England landscape. In short, I want to produce a historical phenomenology of the spaces.5 To begin to unpack the importance of color to the meaning of New England funerary monuments and burying grounds, I look at a range of stones and the spaces in which they are positioned, and I also deal with four main texts—Cotton Mather’s essay on the rainbow, which I have already mentioned, as well as part of a short essay by the American modernist Arthur Wesley Dow, who began his artistic career as an antiquarian, studying and drawing New England gravestones during the 1870s and early 1880s. I then turn to sections of an important eighteenth-century book called Meditations and Contemplations by the English clergyman James Hervey. Finally, I examine a number of passages from Henry David Thoreau’s “Autumnal Tints,” an 1862 treatise in which that author derives a theory of color by studying the fall leaves of New England. First, I would like to address a couple of practical matters related to the ways in which we study and interpret early New England funerary monuments and burying grounds. As anyone who has spent time researching this subject knows, Daniel and Jessie Lie Farber spent many years photographing New England gravestones and created an important photoarchive, which exists in hard form at various institutions (for example, the American Antiquarian Society and Yale University Art Gallery) and is now available digitally on the internet (http://www.davidrumsey.com/farber/). The online collection consists of approximately 13,500 images of 9,000 gravestones, and most of the stones were created before 1800. The collection also includes photos taken by Harriette Merrifield Forbes and Ernest Caulfield, who were themselves pioneers in the study of these objects in the earlier twentieth century. The Farber photographs, in many ways a tremendous resource to anyone interested in early New England gravestones, are in black and white. Further, the photos were usually created by means of a particular form of archival photography, with the stones squared to the picture plane, clearly and evenly lit (sometimes artificially, by using mirrors to redirect sunlight), and the objects are often pictorially isolated from the landscape contexts in which they appear. This could be accomplished (as in Fig. 1.1) by placing a board behind a stone to create the appearance of a neutralized environment (something like that of a modern art museum). Or the landscape could even be cut out from behind the stone (as in Fig. 1.2). In a 1976 presentation describing his practice of photographing New England gravestones, Daniel Farber notes, “Sometimes when you photograph a gravestone you see behind it trees, or automobiles and telephone poles, and I’ll show you how I eliminate that problem. I use this blue Formica board …”6 If one is not deploying a board and gets 14

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1.1 Anna Cooper stone (slate), 1712/13, Woburn, Massachusetts, carved by a member of the Lamson family. Photo: Farber Gravestone Collection. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society

“a picture with a bad background,” Farber comments, “its [sic] very easy to take a scissors and cut around the shape of the stone and cut away the background.”7 Farber goes on to say that one should not photograph gravestones unless there is “brilliant sunlight,” and he asserts that photographs made “in cloudy weather, or with snow on the ground” will be “unimpressive.”8 In short, Farber advocates a kind of sealing off of the gravestones from their environment through specific photographic techniques. Interestingly, Farber spent much of his life photographing changeable outdoor phenomena, such as reflections on the surface of the water and sunrises in Provincetown Harbor, as well as fall foliage, in color, but with gravestones and burying grounds he worked to reduce/erase color and other relativities in those photographs.9 What interests me is that he and his wife decided to constitute their “official” archive of early New England gravestone photographs in black and white and according to very particular formal and organizational criteria. The Farber gravestone photographs are informed by archival technologies of collection, clarification or filtration, detemporalization, preservation, and objectification. The Farbers also want to make a claim for the artistic merit of the objects and to class the carvers who created the stones as artists—to “museumize” the stones.10 15

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Their photographic practice typifies the manner according to which these objects have been represented to date. Although some scholars have made efforts to overturn stereotypes regarding the grayness or black-andwhiteness of early New England culture—one thinks, for example, of John Demos’s writing in A Little Commonwealth about the vibrant “daily garb” of the Plymouth colonists, John T. Kirk’s work on the “gaudy” painted furniture of colonial New England, or Peter Benes’s essay about the bright (even garish) coloring of New England meetinghouses during the period 1738–1834—color has been little discussed when it comes to New England burying grounds 1.2 Daniel Conant stone (slate), 1753, and funerary monuments.11 Almost Townsend, Massachusetts, attributed to William no color images of these gravestones Park. Photo: Farber Gravestone Collection. and the spaces they occupy have been Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society published.12 This, no doubt, has very much to do with the high cost of color imaging. Whether intentional or not, the Farbers and other photographers of gravestones tend to eliminate relativities in their representations of these objects to the fullest extent possible, including those of shifting perspective with respect to the human body, color, and an always-changing temporality and landscape. These photographs are, in a sense, memorials (or anti-memorials) to the contingencies of the burying ground landscape, the sited contextualizations of the stones—they constitute and are about a loss (of context, of color). I do not mean to suggest that my photographs of gravestones are necessarily “truer” than those taken by the Farbers. All photographs are constructions, and they do not replicate our phenomenological experience. Although many of the Farbers’ photos are formally quite beautiful, they are also involved in a weighty rhetoric that is in need of deconstruction. Indeed their formal appeal can be said to authorize that rhetoric. I intend my own photographs, reproduced here, to give a better sense of how they appear to me personally, of what it feels like when I visit these burying grounds. Ultimately, though, my discussion and its accompanying images—which are, in a sense, my own archive—manufacture the experience of these burying grounds in ways that are no more natural or innocent than the Farbers’ photographs. As Jacques Derrida writes, “The archivization produces as much as it records the event.”13 To move toward restoring color and other contingencies to the interpretation of these gravestones and spaces, I want to think for a moment about a comment made in 16

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an 1891 publication by the American painter, printmaker, and photographer Arthur Wesley Dow. As I mentioned at the start of this discussion, Dow began his career as an antiquarian, studying and making pictures of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century objects and houses in and around his hometown of Ipswich, Massachusetts. One of the sources of his later Japanist/modernist interest in color was his observation when younger of the striking coloration of blue, green, and orange-, pink-, and purple-tinted slate gravestones in Ipswich’s burying grounds. That a modern artist with such a major investment in color recognized the importance of color in New England gravestones is telling. In 1899 Dow published an artist’s manual called Composition, which would become widely used in art education and which went through many editions—it includes a chapter on color.14 Dow was also interested in cyanotype photography, and during his career he made many wonderful, blue photos.15 In a short essay, entitled “Ipswich as It Should Be: From an Artist’s Point of View,” published in The Ipswich Chronicle in May 1891 following Dow’s “discovery” of Japanese art under the guidance of scholar and Asian art aficionado Ernest Fenollosa, the artist issues an argument for the improvement of the aesthetics of Ipswich. Among his points is the suggestion that a return to the colorism of an earlier period of New England’s history is preferable to the aesthetic trends of the nineteenth century. Dow writes, “The white gravestones [here he is talking about nineteenth-century limestones and marbles] look coldly out of place by the side of the mossy green and purple slates of the first settlers, partaking of the color of ground and sky.”16 Dow refers to monuments such as this blue-purple slate table on a red brick base, which still stands in the Old North Burying Ground in Ipswich (see Plate 3). Note that you can see some of the nineteenth-century white markers that he dislikes behind this tomb. Dow considers the color of the early stones in connection with contingencies, such as the moss that may be growing on them, and other framing factors, like the color of the sky or the appearance of grass or fall leaves on the ground. To return to the cultural context in which these monuments were originally produced and received, I would like to offer some interpretations concerning color and New England’s burying ground landscapes, starting with a further discussion of Cotton Mather’s little-known 1712 essay on the rainbow as an “engine of piety.” I might preface this analysis by noting that during the year in which this essay was published, Mather took observations of celestial phenomena appearing in the sky over Boston.17 He even made several drawings, which he sent to the Royal Society in London (for example, Fig. 1.3). In letters and notes accompanying the drawings, Mather discusses the colors of rainbows, as well as observations of “mock-suns” (parhelia) in conjunction with rainbows. He describes the phenomena as follows: On the second of January, in a clear sky, but an extremely cold season, the sun was from ten o’clock for the best part of three hours, attended well with four mock-suns, through which there passed a white circle; in the midst whereof were two rainbows, according to the representation in the ensuing scheme.

Although very much interested in science, Mather, like many early modern Protestant minister-scientists, was especially concerned to mobilize scientific observations for the 17

1.3 Cotton Mather, letter to Richard Waller containing drawings of celestial phenomena (detail), Royal Society Early Letters vol. M2: 29, 25 November 1712. The Royal Society, London. Photo: Matthew Hunter

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advancement of Christian religion. He ultimately uses these observations of parhelia as a motivation for writing a devotional treatise on rainbows.18 In Thoughts for the Day of Rain, Mather writes, There are some, who would find in the Rainbow it self, some Intimations of the Glories belonging to our Saviour. In the Sun begetting of the Rainbow, some would read a little of that incomprehensible Mystery, The only begotten Son of God. In the Three Colours (for of old, they counted no more) of the Rainbow, others would read, the Three Offices of our Great Redeemer. But these are Strains that I would not insist upon; and I would not Look upon the Clouds too fancifully. One would rather Consider the Sun, as an Emblem of our Saviour; that wonderful Sun of Righteousness.19

So, Mather argues, and in line with a popular seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Protestant simile, Christ is like the sun. He continues, Yet I would rather chuse to turn it so; the Cloud, by Receiving Beams from the Sun, & Reflecting of them, how Beautiful an Appearance is there now produced in it? Lord, Let the Beams of my Saviour fall upon me. Let me receive His Knowledge; Let me reflect His Image; Let me be under His Impressions; I cannot ask for a greater Glory.20

The rainbow, then, for Mather, can be understood as an emblem of the Christian who imitates Christ. Fallen Christians recover the purified image of God within/upon themselves by means of this imitation. Mather proffers an improvement related to humility by means of an observation on the interrelation of Christic sun and Christian-like rainbow, too: But then, I will take Leave, to fetch from the Rainbow, an Instruction of the Humility, that such a man will be adorned withal … The Higher the Sun, the Lesser the Rainbow … The Higher a Glorious CHRIST is with us, and in us, and the more He does for us, the Smaller must we be in our own Eyes; it will Humble us, and Abate our Pride most wonderfully!21

And though beautiful, the rainbow, like fallen human beings, is formally imperfect according to Mather: And since the Rainbow is not a Perfect Circle, if Moreover the Servants of God are Warned from thence, of the Imperfection, which will attend all Sublunary Things, we shall but go on to make an Improvement thereof, that some Wise Men have made before us. Look upon the Rainbow that wants Perfection, [its nearness to the Earth allows it not!] and say, I have Seen an End of all Perfection! 22

All of this is to say that the rainbow, a fragmented arc of the color spectrum, is dependent on and therefore deficient of the sun. We might compare and contrast the fragmentary rainbow with the completely circular optical effect known as a solar halo (Fig. 1.4), or with the “rainbow mandorla,” which is sometimes shown in Western art history encircling Christ, particularly in paintings of the Last Judgment.23 In a cultural context in which God and Christ were virtually never directly represented (that is to say, New England Protestantism), it was usually natural phenomena that stood in for traditional manmade representations of the deity, such as paintings of Christ donning or circumscribed by a halo. In sum, and according to the logic of Mather’s 19

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ruminations on the rainbow as an “engine of piety,” the many-colored gravestones of early New England can be seen to constitute a fragmentation and dispersal of the chromatic spectrum across the region’s landscape—as conditional presentations of the exemplary (indeed saintly) Christian dead, between the eyes of viewers and their surfaces they entertain color and are, in this way, pieces of the solar halo.24 In a similar way, sparkling stones like that for Elizabeth 1.4 Solar halo. Photo: Huntington (Plate 2) can be understood to import or anchor Geoff Cloake bits of the shining sun or other stars. We see how period observations and considerations of natural phenomena, such as the appearance of a rainbow in the sky, might help us to better understand the meanings of manmade objects, such as gravestones. This sense of the exchangeability of manmade things and the landscape/sky is a subject of extensive discussion in James Hervey’s Meditations and Contemplations. Hervey, who lived between 1714 and 1758, was an Anglican divine. Although he was influenced by John Wesley and the Oxford Methodists, theologically he remained a Calvinist.25 First published in England in 1746–47, Meditations and Contemplations went through more than twenty editions during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century—and it was probably the most widely read meditation manual in both England and New England in the period about which I am talking (that is, the long eighteenth century). It contains what is by far the lengthiest treatment of the subject of burying ground meditation published in English in this period. In final form, Hervey’s Meditations and Contemplations comprises two large volumes, divided into six sections—I will discuss here passages from the first two sections, “Meditations among the Tombs” and “Reflections on a Flower-Garden.” First, a few notes on “Reflections on a Flower-Garden,” which I see as a useful indicator of how we might both reimagine and newly analyze early New England burying grounds and gravestones. Throughout this text, Hervey understands the actual physical landscape (whether “natural” or ordered by human beings) as a work drawn and colorfully painted by God or Christ; he repeatedly underlines the comparative dullness of manmade artworks, and even at one point calls manmade painting both “an un meaning Flatness” and “an absolute Blank” when compared to the artistry of God and Christ visible in the landscape.26 These iconoclastic moves enable Hervey to rethink the landscape itself as a kind of three-dimensional painting manufactured by God/Christ. He writes about the sky that it is “dyed in the purest Azure; and beautified, now with Pictures of floating Silver, now with Colourings of reflected Crimson.” He says, further, of the clouds, that they are “rich Paintings” which “hang around the Heavens.”27 He also writes about the “painted Leaves” of autumn.28 I mention these passages in Hervey because they make me wonder to what extent, in studying these gravestones and burying grounds, we should address the landscape as much as the objects sited within it. Indeed, and like Hervey, we might treat the landscape as though it is a painting. If Arthur Dow thought of the tombstones of Ipswich in relation to the landscape that framed them, here Hervey goes a step further and emphasizes the frame over and against that which 20

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is framed. This has important implications for our work on color and these spaces. We want to consider not only the colorations of the monuments, but also the effect of outdoor lighting conditions on their coloring, as well, maybe, as the colors of other stones around them—and it could matter that there were colored fall leaves on the trees adjacent to the burying ground when I visited this or that burying ground, or that, at another time, there were trees with green leaves and that the ground itself was different shades of green and purple—or that sometimes there the sky is bright blue. The matter of fall leaves in the New England landscape is interesting in this regard, since in decaying they become brightly colored. There is, then, a relation between that period of the year aligned with plant life degrading in the landscape and the chromatic manifestations of this process. That is, while death certainly has associations with blackness (and thus a lack of color), it is also sometimes of and about bright coloring. In an essay entitled “Autumnal Tints,” first delivered as a lecture in 1859 and then published posthumously in The Atlantic Monthly in October 1862, Henry David Thoreau advances a new theory of color based on his observations of fall leaves in New England. He helps us to think more expansively about color, death, and New England’s burying ground landscapes.29 Thoreau describes color change in leaves as a form of ripening: Most appear to confound changed leaves with withered ones, as if they were to confound ripe apples with rotten ones. I think that the change to some higher color in a leaf is an evidence that it has arrived at a late and perfect maturity, answering to the maturity of fruits. It is generally the lowest and oldest leaves which change first. But as the perfect winged and usually bright-colored insect is short-lived, so the leaves ripen but to fall.30

Punning on the word “die” (dye), Thoreau goes on to suggest that New England’s autumn leaves are fit models for a good death/coloring (or death-coloring): It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! how gently lay themselves down and turn to mould!—painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us living … They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die.31

He even associates coloration traditionally allied with vice—the red of the red maple, for instance—with virtue: “It flashes out conspicuous with all the virtue and beauty of a Maple,—Acer rubrum. We may now read its title, or rubric, clear. Its virtues, not its sins, are as scarlet.”32 Fall color may fall away, but it is also, to Thoreau, a lofty, if fleeting, fluttering.33 Like Arthur Dow, Thoreau stresses how relationality contributes to our perception of color in the landscape. Of local red maples he writes, At present, these burning bushes stand chiefly along the edge of the meadows, or I distinguish them afar on the hillsides here and there. Sometimes you will see many small ones in a swamp turned quite crimson when all other trees around are still perfectly green, and the former appear so much the brighter for it.34

In certain respects Thoreau, and later Dow, anticipate the color theory of Josef Albers, through which he would demonstrate principles of chromatic relativity as never before.35 21

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More recently James Turrell has extended Albers’s contingency-related color perception experiments in his phenomenologically dynamic light and space works. I think especially of Turrell’s “Skyspaces.”36 Although it is a subject for another study, we might want to think more about what (the development of ) modernism or postmodernism, including their color theories, owe to engagements like that of Dow with colored gravestones, or that of Thoreau with autumn leaves.37 If for Hervey the landscape is a frame worthy of attention—not merely a supplement to what it frames, but its own object—for Thoreau New England’s fall leaves are a living frame to a living painting: What is a gallery in a house to a gallery in the streets, which every market-man rides through, whether he will or not? Of course, there is not a picture-gallery in the country which would be worth so much to us as is the western view at sunset under the Elms of our main street. They are the frame to a picture which is daily painted behind them.38

Of course, the New England landscape has changed so much over time that we can only imagine some possibilities of past experiences of factors as ephemeral as sky or ground color, or the colors of leaves. New England burying grounds were not originally seeded with grass and were generally without trees until at least the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Patterns of deforestation in the period may have meant that there were not many trees in the vicinity either. The guises of the daytime sky do not seem to have changed too much over time. The stones themselves have weathered, and some are damaged; some have been destroyed. Colors of many stones have changed through exposure. While in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were sheep or cows grazing in many burying grounds, there are none today; but there are telephone poles abutting the spaces, and cars may be driving by. Burying grounds were originally home to many wooden grave markers, at least some of which were painted. None of these survive.39 Not to mention the way cultural circumstances condition color perception, which is usually difficult if not impossible to measure.40 Color is a phenomenon at once historical and ahistorical. It is, perhaps, only in opening a more free-flowing dialogue between now and then and by practicing what the British archaeologist Christopher Tilley calls “dreamwork,” or what Bruce Smith has termed an “ambient poetics,” that we can write compelling histories of these spaces and their objects.41 A great deal of attention to and consciousness about the historicity and temporality of landscape are critical to such a project. Among other topics, we would have to consider that early gravestones were almost surely sometimes painted. While documentary sources dangle suggestive remarks about this subject, the weather has washed away overt traces of such painting.42 But in our efforts to historicize color we ought not to lose sight of the fact that color cannot be pinned down. It is irreducible to certitude, and it cannot be objectified.43 Let’s return to James Hervey, who reminds us that there is also the imaginary (colored) landscape to consider. Near the end of his “Meditations among the Tombs,” he suggests that the practice of meditating in burying grounds, viewing the monuments of exemplary Christians, has a therapeutic effect akin to looking at a green field. He addresses the (fictive) lady to whom his book (as a letter) is written: 22

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Now, Madam, lest my Meditations set in a Cloud; and leave any unpleasing Gloom upon your Mind; let me once more turn, to the brightening Prospects of the Righteous. A View of Them, and their delightful Expectations, may serve to exhilarate the Thoughts; that have been musing upon melancholy Subjects, and hovering about the Edges of infernal Darkness: Just as a spacious Field, arrayed in chearful Green, relieves and reinvigorates the Eye …44

The preceding passage implies that the significance of color to burying grounds may depend as much on period forms of (meditational) imagination as on what people actually saw there: the dream of the sight of a green field may matter as much for the meaning of burying grounds as the greens of actual gravestones or the greens appearing in the landscape do. Hervey alludes to the 23rd Psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd … he maketh me to lie down in green pastures.”45 In so doing he suggests that viewing a green landscape, whether real or conjured as an image through writing, is spiritually therapeutic (a salvific sight). And he draws on a larger early modern British cultural equation of good with greenness.46 Paying greater attention to varieties of relativity as they inform the experience and meaning of New England’s burying grounds does not necessarily produce a “truer” analysis of these spaces and the objects they contain. One gets the sense in reading recent phenomenological analyses of the meanings of spaces and objects—and these studies are becoming more and more common—that such accounts are somehow more accurate than the studies preceding them, which did not take a phenomenological approach. But if there is one thing that looking at formal and experiential relationality generally, and color specifically, should teach us, it is that truth has many versions—that it is relative. It was regularly through relationships—of people to objects, of objects to landscape, of earth to sky, of now to then—as well as further, more complex triangulations—that early New Englanders got at their absolutes. In writing of colorizing here, I “make up” my study (as much as anyone else has theirs).47 Plate 1 pictures a gravestone that I have traveled to see several times—a late eighteenth-century slate carved by a member of the Lamson family and standing in the South Burying Ground at Billerica, Massachusetts. It appears blue some of the time. Other times it may be purplish, or even different shades of gray. When I took the photograph in Plate 1, during the summer of 2003, the appearance of the stone matched that of the blue sky. I thought this remarkable, for this stone is, in other respects, a beautiful material rumination on the mirror-like function of gravestones in early New England. The text of the words “Arise ye dead” in the tympanum is carved in mirror reversal, and the verse at the bottom of the inscription is a passage from Corinthians (1 Cor. 15:53) that refers to the virtuous believer’s identification with the reflective image of Christ. I found it both wonderful and fitting that this blue slate appeared as a material fragment of a blue sky. Indeed the stone reminded me of Robert Frost’s poem “Fragmentary Blue,” in which Frost writes of blue things or creatures as small pieces of heaven: “Why make so much of fragmentary blue / In here and there a bird, or butterfly, / Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye, / When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?”48 Upon visiting more and more burying grounds, I have realized how variable the appearances of the spaces and the stones are, and that stones that appear brightly colored sometimes may seem rather gray at others. Although I stated at the start of this 23

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chapter that New England’s early gravestones “are” colored, it is more correct to say that they “can appear” colored. In winter, with bare trees in the landscape and snow on the ground or snow covering the stones, color is very much muted. Color is put on, color is taken off. Color is a bubble, a temporary painting.49 I would suggest, then, that we attend to gray areas in thinking about color. This includes the problem of normalizing the body and the sensory capacities of our imagined observers, past and present. And what about people who are color blind? Thus, while color in these objects and in these burying ground spaces may be occasional, and subject to subjectivity, when it appears there, it can greatly matter.

Notes I would like to thank Beth Tobin and Andrea Feeser for their interest and encouragement, which resulted in the drafting of this chapter. I am grateful, as well, to Matthew Hunter, Jonathan Bordo, and Amanda Douberley for conversations that helped me to improve various aspects of this research. 1. Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 15. 2. Cotton Mather, Thoughts for the Day of Rain. In Two Essay’s: I. The Gospel of the Rainbow. In the Meditations of Piety, on the Appearance of the Bright Clouds, with the Bow of God upon Them. II. The Saviour with His Rainbow. And the Covenant which God Will Remember to His People in the Cloudy Times that Are Passing Over Them (Boston, 1712), first page of Preface (unpaginated). 3. Christopher J. Lenney, Sightseeking: Clues to the Landscape History of New England (Hanover NH: University of New Hampshire/University Press of New England, 2003), 276–77. 4. See Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, with a selection of early Greek poems and fragments about love, trans. Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 38–39; and Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Penguin, 1991), 54–55. 5. The writings of the post-processual archaeologist Christopher Tilley have facilitated my thinking about burying ground phenomenology. See Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 7–34; and Christopher Y. Tilley, with the assistance of Wayne Bennett, The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology: 1 (Oxford: Berg, 2004). For other recent work on early American burying ground phenomenology, see Sally M. Promey, “Seeing the Self ‘in Frame’: Early New England Material Practice and Puritan Piety,” Material Religion 1:1 (March 2005): 10–47; Promey, “Mirror Images: Framing the Self in Early New England Material Practice,” in Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past, ed. Wilfred M. McClay (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 71–128; and Bernard L. Herman, “On Being German in British America: Gravestones and the Inscription of Identity,” Winterthur Portfolio 45:2/3 (Summer/ Autumn 2011): 195–208. 6. Daniel Farber, “Photography of Early Gravestone Art,” in Puritan Gravestone Art, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University Press, 1977), 123. 7. Ibid., 124. 8. Ibid., 124, 128. 9. For examples of Farber’s color photographs of gravestones and burying grounds, see the general views of burying grounds in color, albeit muted color, in the following: Daniel Farber, Reflections on a Trail Taken: The Photographs of Daniel Farber (Boston: David R. Godine, 1991), 128–32.

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10. Resources like the Farber photographic archive are now standing in for the practice of visiting burying grounds in person. This archive is an important resource, but should not replace one’s going to the spaces oneself, not to mention that the archive images only a small fraction of the monuments standing in New England’s burying grounds, with a bias toward recording upright stones with interesting ornamental or pictorial features. 11. See John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 53–54; John T. Kirk, “The Tradition of English Painted Furniture, Part I: The Experience in Colonial New England,” Antiques 117, 5 (May 1980): 1078–83; and Peter Benes, “Sky Colors and Scattered Clouds: The Decorative and Architectural Painting of New England Meeting Houses, 1738–1834,” in New England Meeting House and Church: 1630–1850, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 1979), 51–69. 12. For an exception, popular rather than scholarly, see Gregory Thorp, “Farewell, Bright Soul,” Smithsonian 31, 8 (2000): 102–6. Note that Sally Promey has published color images of New England gravestones in “Seeing the Self ‘in Frame’.” Neither the written contents nor the color photographs in that article highlight the issue of color, however. 13. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 17. On the interrelation of archive and event, see also Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 128–29. 14. See, for example, Arthur Wesley Dow, Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers, 13th edn, revised and enlarged with new illustrations and color plates (Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1929), esp. 100–19. 15. On Arthur Dow’s cyanotype photography, see James L. Enyeart, Harmony of Reflected Light: The Photographs of Arthur Wesley Dow (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, in association with the Anne and John Marion Center for Photographic Arts, 2001); also Trevor Fairbrother, Ipswich Days: Arthur Wesley Dow and His Hometown (Andover MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy; New Haven: Distributed by Yale University Press, 2007). 16. Arthur Wesley Dow, “Ipswich as It Should Be: From an Artist’s Point of View,” The Ipswich Chronicle, Saturday, 9 May 1891. 17. See Cotton Mather, “An Extract of Several Letters from Cotton Mather, D.D. to John Woodward, M.D. and Richard Waller, Esq; S.R. Secr.,” Philosophical Transactions (1683–1775) 29 (1714–16): 66. 18. To get a sense of the difference between Mather’s religious writings and those that are rather more scientific in character, one can compare Thoughts for the Day of Rain with The Christian Philosopher, ed., with intro. and notesby Winton U. Solberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). The Christian Philosopher was originally published in London in 1721. 19. Cotton Mather, Thoughts for the Day of Rain, 23–24. 20. Ibid., 24. 21. Ibid., 25. 22. Ibid., 33. 23. Note: the solar halo has red on the inside and blue on the outside, unlike a single rainbow, which has red on the outside and blue on the inside. 24. For descriptions of the relationship of New England gravestone production and reception to the imitation of Christ/culture of the example, see Promey, “Seeing the Self ‘in Frame’” and “Mirror Images”; also Jason David LaFountain, “Reflections on the Funerary Monuments and Burying Grounds of Early

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New England,” Master’s thesis, University of Maryland, 2004. On the rainbow as halo or frame, see Jonathan Bordo, “The Witness in the Errings of Contemporary Art,” in The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, ed. Paul Duro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 187. 25. For biographical information on Hervey, see Isabel Rivers’s entry for James Hervey in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 26. James Hervey, Meditations and Contemplations, in Two Volumes. Containing. Vol I. Meditations among the Tombs. Reflections on a Flower-Garden; and, A Descant upon Creation. Vol II. Contemplations on the Night. Contemplations on the Starry Heavens; and, A Winter-Piece, 8th edn (Boston, 1778), vol. 1, 147. 27. Ibid., 136. 28. Ibid., 141. 29. On Thoreau’s “Autumnal Tints,” see Koh Kasegawa, “Color in Nature: A View of ‘Autumnal Tints’,” Thoreau Journal Quarterly 7:3 ( July 1975): 20–24; also Randall Conrad, “The Last Annual Pun Survey,” Thoreau Society Bulletin 241 (Fall 2002): 3. 30. Henry David Thoreau, “Autumnal Tints,” in Collected Essays and Poems (New York: Library of America, 2001), 367. 31. Ibid., 381–82. 32. Ibid., 375. Thoreau refers here to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), among the most important texts to Gothicize early New England culture, rendering color and sin synonymous in later imagination of that context. 33. On color as falling, see David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2000), 21–49. 34. Thoreau, “Autumnal Tints,” 374. 35. See Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, rev. and exp. edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 36. On Turrell and color, see Patrick Beveridge, “Color Perception and the Art of James Turrell,” Leonardo 33:4 (2000): 305–13. Dawna Schuld has helped me to appreciate Turrell’s, as well as Robert Irwin’s, interest in the contingent, relational, situational, circumstantial, and conditional. See Dawna Schuld, “Lost in Space: Consciousness and Experiment in the Work of Irwin and Turrell,” in Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science, ed. Roman Frigg and Matthew C. Hunter (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 221–44. 37. It is important to recognize the sheer ambition of Thoreau’s essay. He calls for nothing less than the development of an autochthonous American color theory, based on the qualities observable in New England’s autumn foliage. See Thoreau, “Autumnal Tints,” 384. 38. Ibid., 386. 39. On wooden grave markers in early New England, see Peter Benes, “Additional Light on Wooden Grave Markers,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 111 ( January 1975): 53–64. 40. See Umberto Eco, “How Culture Conditions the Colours We See,” in On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 157–75. 41. Tilley and Bennett, The Materiality of Stone, 217–25; and Smith, The Key of Green, 8. 42. The idea that New England gravestones may have been painted appears here and there in the scholarly literature on these objects, though to my knowledge no substantial study either supporting or rejecting the notion has been published as yet.

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43. Jacqueline Lichtenstein has written that color is “rebellious to all determination.” Jacqueline Lichtenstein, “Making Up Representation: The Risks of Femininity,” trans. Katharine Streip, Representations 20 (Fall 1987): 82. 44. Hervey, Meditations and Contemplations, vol. 1, 71–72. 45. See Smith, The Key of Green, 10. 46. The line “Good is as visible as greene” appears in John Donne’s poem “Communitie” (1633). See Smith, The Key of Green, 2. 47. On color, make-up, and rhetoric, see Lichtenstein, “Making Up Representation.” 48. See Robert Frost, “Fragmentary Blue,” in New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes (New York: Holt, 1923), 79. 49. As with the experience of fashion, “setting, occasion, and outfit” are key for understanding the meaning of these objects. See Karen Tranberg Hansen, “Fashioning: Zambian Moments,” Journal of Material Culture 8:3 (November 2003): 301–9.

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Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

2 The Extra-Ordinary Powers of Red in Eighteenth- and NineteenthCentury English Needlework Maureen Daly Goggin

In her essay on the materiality of colors, anthropologist Diana Young argues that “colour is a crucial but little analysed part of understanding how material things can constitute social relations … [For Young,] colours constitute badges of identity and connect otherwise disparate categories of things … in expanding analogical networks.”1 Such a theoretical frame prompts us to ask: why does an object have the colors it does? What do those colors do for the object? What is the source of color for an object? In this study, I take up these questions by exploring the use and source of red in needlework samplers stitched during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Elena Phipps notes, “Red … has always been one of the most highly prized colors, in part because it is one of the most difficult to achieve” whether in dye, pigment or ink.2 First, I discuss some of the complex meanings of red in Western European embroidery and textiles. Second, I describe the dyeing process of two forms of red, that which is produced from cochineal and that produced from madder. Finally, I end with examining three different genres of needlework samplers in which red is the dominant color.3

Complexities of Red Textile historian Sheila Paine notes that “three colors are basic to the human state: these are red, white and black.”4 Of these, “red is the most powerful, the most vibrant, the most exhilarating of colors.”5 The color of fire, sun, blood, and wine, red has a complicated past. In the Western world, it has been used to invoke life and death, the sacred and the profane, youth and old age, martyrs and demons, purity and corruption. On the one hand, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, red has been associated with wickedness and sin, as this Old Testament verse from the Book of Isaiah suggests: “Come now, let 29

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us set things right, says the LORD: Though your sins be like scarlet, they may become white as snow; Though they be crimson red, they may become white as wool.”6 On the other hand, in early modern English churches, red was used for feasts of the Holy Spirit and martyrs and was the color used in masses for the Sundays between Pentecost and Advent. As John Gage notes, “red was used for the feasts of both Apostles and Martyrs, since it symbolized both blood and the Pentecostal fire.”7 Indeed, the term “red-letter day” originated with medieval church calendars that followed the practice in illuminated manuscripts where the initial capitals and highlighted words in red ink were known as “rubrics.” In 1549, the first Book of Common Prayer printed the names of holy days in red ink. Buildings, especially doors and windows, were painted red to keep away demons. In English coats of arms, dating from the fifteenth century through today, red is the most common color used after gold and silver, “occurring in 55 percent of the arms.”8 Under sumptuary laws in early modern Europe, red was reserved for royal families and the highest nobilities.9 Indeed, the red robes of kings, nobles, clergy, judges, and executioners signaled their power over life and death. In short, red in the early modern period was a complex symbol of power both benevolent and malevolent. In tribal, peasant, and privileged-class embroidery, red is the predominant color most often used but “in two entirely different ways—to protect and to mark.”10 As protection, red embroidery or red fabric appliqué was used on vulnerable areas of cloth—seams, edges, and over the breast. Its stitched patterns were “the symbolic ones of cross, zigzags, triangles, circles, diamonds and squares.”11 Believed to hold secret powers, red was also used during this time for cures and protection. Children wore red coral necklaces to shield them from disease. “Red wool or cloth [kept] rheumatism, small pox or sore throat at bay.”12 In its other use, as marking, Paine notes: “Primitive man’s sealing of contracts with blood, his marking of possessions, and the decorating of graves with red ochre finds an echo in the extraordinary power of red in Western European embroidery … [L]inen articles for the trousseau remain resolutely monogrammed and numbered in red cross stitch.”13 Such markings were important when laundry was done at a village washhouse in order to identify the owner of the linens and clothes. Indeed, “the marking of linen was the motivation for the myriad red alphabet samplers of the schoolgirls of Europe.”14 Hence, linen in Western Europe is marked in red cross-stitch, reflecting the primitive man’s marking of objects in blood. Over time, the color red took on additional meanings as signifying divine love, life, war, martyrdom, the Passion of Christ, and charity, to name the more common connotations.15 On the color spectrum, red is at the lowest of light frequencies discernable to the eye.16 It (along with purple at the other end of the spectrum) is the most difficult, and thus, most costly color to reproduce—one reason why it, like purple, was reserved for royal families and nobility. Given its contradictory web of meanings and uses, I have been curious about its ubiquitous use in early modern textiles, especially in needlework samplers, for red is the dominant color in most samplers stitched during the early modern period up to the nineteenth century. 30

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On Dy(e)ing Until the invention of synthetic dyes in the middle of the nineteenth century, natural— plant, animal or mineral—dyes were used on textiles and threads. 17 Natural dyes date back to antiquity—the earliest record of using such dyes comes from China circa 2600 BCE. The two most common natural sources of red dye were the vegetable dye from madder root and the insect dye from cochineal. Chemical tests on red fabrics discovered in the 3,300-year old tomb of King Tutankhamen in Egypt revealed the presence of alizarin, a pigment extracted from madder.18 And “archaeologists have found cochinealsaturated textiles that date back two thousand years.”19 Madder is the familiar name given to the plant genus Rubia; it was native to the Middle East but spread to northern Europe before 1066 and was used in Europe, Mesopotamia, and Asia.20 Although the plant grows well in southern England and continental Europe, it was traditionally imported to Britain from Holland where large areas of madder were grown. Other major growers included France and parts of the Ottoman Empire. While it is a fairly easy plant to grow, it takes three years before it can first be harvested, and so the up-front costs are high. All parts of the plan contain pigment, but the roots have the greatest concentrations. Madder was versatile as the madder root would yield a range of red colors, from soft pink to a deep rust color. The roots of the plant—which can grow 20–30 cm long, and up to 12 mm thick—are the primary source of the red dye. Processing the roots is a complicated task. These are dug up, washed and steamed, dried, crushed, hulled and then ground into a powder that is prepared and combined with other ingredients to make up the dye. It takes 8 tons of green roots to yield 1 ton (1.016 metric tonnes) of dry roots. In 1765 planters were charging £50–60 per ton, dried, cleaned, and fit for manufacture—this at a time when a spinner earned between 4 pence and 2 shillings for spinning a pound of yarn and an agricultural worker earned between 6 shillings 6 pence and 8 shillings 8 pence per week.21 Britain was a major consumer of madder beginning in the nineteenth century, becoming the largest consumer of it by the middle of the nineteenth century; by the 1860s England consumed 30 percent of the world trade in madder.22 The alizarin component of madder was the first natural dye to be synthetically duplicated in 1868. The new synthetic form of red could be produced for just a fraction of the cost of natural madder, and the market for natural madder quickly collapsed. The other common natural source for red dye was cochineal; this yields a brilliant crimson red, and its hue varies from an orange brown to soft pink to maroon to crimson or black depending on the mordant and other modifiers used in making the dye to fix the color. Cochineal was harvested by pre-Columbian Indians.23 In 1519 Spanish conquistadors found Aztecs making and selling red dye from cochineal, a beautiful, vibrant red color that was not available in Europe. Cortez is credited with bringing it back to Europe from his voyages to the Americas around 1523. With its colonization of the region, Spain held a monopoly on cochineal until the nineteenth century, for though people tried to harvest the insect in Europe, it proved too difficult.24 The cochineal insect, about the size of a large grain of rice, is related to aphids, scale insects, and mealy bugs. It makes its home on succulents, primarily prickly pear cactus 31

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plants. When the female cochineal reaches its full size, it attaches itself to the surface of the prickly pad, and spins out a white cottony substance that envelops it. The red dye comes from the carminic acid the female gives off to protect herself. Processing cochineal is an arduous task. The female cochineal are brushed from cactus pads, dried, and then ground to produce a rich, bright red powder that yields wonderful crimsons and scarlets.25 About 70,000 insect bodies are needed to produce one pound (0.45 kg) of dye. By the late eighteenth century, “British dyers were using about 240,000 pounds of cochineal a year” at a cost of £200,000 per year.26 So precious was this commodity that the British East India company likened its value to that of gold and silver. While madder produces soft warm reds (veering toward the orange side), cochineal produces vibrant cool reds (veering toward the bluish side), although, as Phipps notes, [by the] eighteenth century cochineal was being used in Europe for two colors: crimson, a deep purplish red and scarlet, the brilliant orange red. Crimson … was produced with a number of recipes that enhanced the natural bluish qualities of the cochineal pink, while scarlet … was made, after the Dutch method, by adding tin salts and other chemicals to the dyebath.27

Although madder did not have the brilliance of cochineal dye, what was important about both of these sources for dye is that they held their color in dyed threads and fabrics. The red dye that both yielded did not fade or “bleed” onto the fabric when it was washed.28 At a time when textiles were a major source of wealth—comparable to the biotech industry today, as historian Amy Greenfield rightly points out—dyes and the textile items dyed with them were among the most important trade commodities; these formed the thread that connected disparate cities throughout the globe. Historian Robert Chenciner notes that “madder cultivation changed the economies of Holland, France, Turkey,” Great Britain, India, and Russia.29 As he puts it, “every author who has written about madder became convinced that it was one of the most profitable crops known.”30 Cochineal, as Amy Greenfield’s book-length study shows, had no less impact. As complicated as it was to manufacture the dye, the process of dyeing was even more arduous, not to mention dangerous. As one sixteenth-century poem observes: “the dier … in smoke, and heate doth toile / mennes fickle minds to please.”31 In addition, the caustic mixtures used and the high heat made dyeing a dangerous venture. “Each day, dyers and their apprentices worked with fiery furnaces, boiling water, corrosive acids, poisonous salts, and fuming vats. Accidents were common.”32 People either dyed cloth and threads at home or took them to one of the professional Guild dyers—“literate crafts [people] and artisans traditionally from the lower classes.”33 We find evidence of these two practices in conduct literature of the day, and in how-to manuals. For instance, Gervase Markham’s 1615 The English Hus-wife provides recipes for dyeing cloth but suggests that women take their material to the dyer. Other how-to manuals, such as The Whole Art of Dy[e]ing which appeared in London in 1705,34 provide recipes for dyeing all sorts of materials in all sorts of colors, including textiles. These books joined a long line of books on this subject; the first printed book on dyeing, T’ Bouck van Wondre or The Book of Marvels, appeared in Brussels in 1513; it was so popular that it was reprinted with commentary by H.G.T. Frencken in 1934. 32

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The process of dyeing textiles and threads was quite involved; silk typically called for up to 30 steps of handling and readying the raw material, boiling it with a substance such as alum so it would accept the dye, preparing the liquid in which the silk had to be soaked prior to the dye, and then the dyeing process. Dyeing was not just complicated; it was also quite dangerous. To make the dyes adhere to the textiles and threads, a number of toxic materials were used, including lead, arsenic, mercury, urine, and dung, to name a few. So toxic were some dyes that we have the legacy of the “mad hatter” who became ill from handling dyes and materials already dyed. Phipps notes that “cochineal dye bonds best with animal fibers such as silk, sheep’s wool, or hair from camelids (alpacas, llamas, vicuňas). It was rarely, if ever, used on cotton or other vegetal fibers.”35 Thus, it was a perfect dye for silk threads used in embroidery. Madder was used to dye cotton, wool, and silk, three of the materials common in embroidery—the topic I turn to next.

Samplers By the eighteenth century, samplers became domestic and domesticating spaces— pedagogical devices through which young novice needleworkers were meant to demonstrate not only that they had skill with the needle but also had thoroughly learned appropriate religious and moral lessons.36 Sampler making cut across all socioeconomic classes, from the highly decorative pieces that were suitable for framing and undertaken by those who could afford the materials and the costs of framing through to more functional or utilitarian samplers that served as material CVs for young workingclass women who sought domestic service positions. While there are many genres of samplers, I focus on three types of English samplers stitched between the early 1700s and 1850s: prayer tablet samplers, pictorial samplers, and marking samplers. “The introduction of moral verses into the decoration of samplers,” as Browne and Weardon note, was “well established by the middle of the eighteenth century, as part of a girl’s education”.37 The sampler in Plate 4 by Mary Flexney is a good example. In 1737, Flexney stitched a hymn, what she titled “An Evening Hymn,” in red silk. The verse was most likely from a printed source since she includes punctuation marks, a practice that was not common in needlework. This particular hymn appears in a number of books and was probably well known in 1737. It reads: Lord, who shall dwell above with Thee there on thy holy hill? who shall those glorious prospects see that heaven with gladness fill[?] those happy souls who prize that life above the bravest here, whose greatest hope, whose eagerest strife is once to settle there they use this world but value that that they supremly [sic] love; they travel through this present state, but place their home above Lord! Who are they that thus chuse [sic] thee, but those thou first didst chuse [sic] to whom though gav’est thy grace most free, thy grace not to refuse. we of ourselves can nothing do, but all on thee depend; thine is the work and wages too, thine both the way and end. o make us still our work attend, and wee’l [sic] not doubt our pay;

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we will not fear a blessed end, if thou but guide our way. glory to thee, o bounteous lord! who giv’st to all things breath; glory to thee, eternal word! who sav’st us by thy death. glory, o blessed spirit to thee, who fill’it our hearts with love; glory to all the mystick [sic] three, who reign one god above.

This version of the hymn appears on pages 66–67 in a late seventeenth-century book, Devotions in the ancient way of offices: with psalms, hymns and prayers for every day in the week and every holy day, by George Hickes (1642–1715). Hickes, who authored over 20 books on religion and conduct in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, calls it a “Monday Vespers” hymn. Flexney follows this with a poem stitched in red thread that appears on a number of samplers. In it, she warns her reader that Beauty, Riches, Honors are ephemeral. Only virtue, like an African wildcat, will abide for eternity. Beauty will fade and like the flower decay, Riches take wings and often fly away, Honours are burdens, and there’s many find; In them no true contentment to the mind; But virtue is a servel [sic] will abide When all these fading things are laid aside.

Stitched on wool and embroidered in red silk, these verses are meant as a lesson for both the young needleworker and those who see her piece. Flexney stitched these verses in cross-stitch and used satin and tent stitches in the border that encloses the text. She stitched the outside border first as the words spill over onto it. The border of red and orange flowers is meant to set off the text but also to reveal Flexney’s skill with the needle. In the spaces left by the text, Flexney worked a series of animals—two birds and two flowers frame the title while birds, a fox, and more flowers fill in the righthand side. Flowers were meant to invoke nature, paradise, youth, gentleness, spiritual perfection, innocence, and female beauty. One full flower and one bud was meant to stand for the Holy Mother and Child.38 Foxes often stood for wisdom and artfulness. Textile historian Carol Humphrey explains that samplers in this genre “became increasingly popular in England from the 1720s. Their format was similar to painted boards displayed in churches of the day, with the appropriate religious tract set out for the education of the congregation.”39 As Molly Harbour Bassett and Jeanette Favrot Peterson note in this collection, Western Europeans commonly used black and red movable type in Church literature. Beginning letters or individual words were often done in red ink and remaining letters in black on the prayer board. Information on prayer boards from church records date this practice to at least the seventeenth century and so it is hard to tell which followed which. Did samplers copy prayer boards or were prayer boards copying samplers? What is clear is that stitching these became a moral tract for the education of young middle- and upper-class women. In the next sampler (Plate 5), Mary Nickolls Exton stitches red verses that resonate with painted prayer boards: the Lord’s Prayer and two verses from “The Morning Song” taken from Dr Isaac Watts’s (1674–1748) Divine and Moral Songs for Children 34

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published in the early eighteenth century with subsequent editions published up through the nineteenth century. The Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Creed became increasingly popular on prayer tablet samplers and on prayer boards during the eighteenth century. Also popular on samplers were verses from Watts’s book. Exton “finished this work March yr 20 Anno Domini 1755.” Like Mary Flexney and many others, Exton stitches the verses in red cross-stitch and frames them with vines of flowers. The two verses from “The Morning Song” read: My God who makes the Sun to know His proper Hour to rise And to give Light to all below Doth send him round the Skies When from the Chambers of the East His Morning Race begins He never tires nor stops to rest But round the World he shines

These first two of four verses from Watts’s “A Morning Song” stand well on their own and may be what was typically sung. The flowery border was surely completed first with room left for the text. Unlike Flexney’s sampler, Exton made sure to fit her text within the available space, with breaks in the second, sixth, eighth, and eleventh lines. The one line she misjudged was the first line of the second verse of “The Morning Song,” otherwise the spacing of the song is stitched as it would appear in Watts’s book. Stitched in red silken thread on wool, Exton used only one stitch, cross-stitch, throughout her piece. This is the stitch that would become the most common in samplers.40 Humphrey notes that “the flowing, naturalistic border is unlike the conventional discreet patterns usually found on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century samplers, and very much more like contemporary canvas work embroidery.”41 She points out that this pattern suggests that this piece may have been done with “the oldfashioned purpose of providing a prototype for future embroidery projects.”42 In other words, this sampler may have been stitched by a teacher as an example to follow. Given the carefully executed flowers and the careful attention to placing the text, Humphrey’s suggestion is most likely correct. In addition to moral and religious texts, better accomplished needlewomen stitched pictorial samplers. Pictorial samplers, as the name implies, were highly decorative pieces of embroidery meant for public display, and were typically wrought by middle- and upperclass women who had leisure and the finances to undertake such work. Sarah Rogers (Plate 6) “finished this sampler in the year of our Lord 1772.” Stitching lines broken up by pictures, Rogers stitches in red thread verses common in her time. Her first verse expresses a sentiment like that offered by James Meikle’s43 (1730–1799) book Solitude Sweetened published in the eighteenth century; these first lines invoke the story of Jesus. “The Lot of Saints hath been Afflicsions [sic] Wants and scorns And he that was the Best of Men Was Mockt [sic] and crownd with Thorns: All things change.” The middle lines, “Children like tender Oziers take the Bow / And as they first are fashioned always grow / For what we learn in Youth to that alone / In age we are by Second Nature prone,” are from John Dryden’s (1631–1700) translation of “The Fourteenth Satire of Juvenal,” lines II.50–51. 35

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The last verse is from Alexander Pope’s (1688–1744) poem “Essay on Criticism,” Part II, line 53: “Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see thinks what ne’er was not is not / [and] Ne’er will be.” Humility is the “stand virtue” that will “lead to contentment.” She ends with the words “avoid sin.” Lines like this were often excerpted in primers to teach children how to read and may well be the source for these. They also offer proof of Rogers’s education. In the sampler, contentment is played out by the shepherd girl, a common motif in pictorial samplers where the dress is typically stitched in red, as is this one. Here depicted among sheep, a rabbit, a fox, a squirrel, and birds, the shepherd girl with her staff is framed by two trees that loom large. Above and below her are similar depictions of two birds and vases of flowers. The two birds together represent eternal life.44 Around these pictures of idealized landscape are flowers and vines rendered in red, yellow, blue, and green. The outside border was probably done first to frame the pictures and this needleworker carefully stayed within that border, measuring all but the third line well. In colored silks on wool, this sampler was stitched primarily in cross-stitch and backstitch. It offers evidence of a well-educated young woman who is familiar with contemporary verses and is skillful with her needle. Prayer tablet samplers and pictorial samplers were undertaken and completed by girls from privileged classes who could afford private education and whose samplers served as proof of their good breeding. Compulsory public education in Great Britain was not available until the Education Act of 1870. Prior to this, those from poor and working classes had few opportunities for gaining an education and there were those who feared the girls from the lower classes would be educated above their station. In many villages and towns, the only available opportunities were in Sunday Schools where children were taught to read the Bible to ensure their moral and religious instruction was looked after. And even for those rare choices for the poor, most of these were dedicated to educating boys. Young girls of poor and working class had few options. Some working-class children whose parents could afford it were sent to dame schools. Conducted by a woman usually in her home, dame schools provided day care for young working-class children too young to go to work. The quality of these day care schools varied greatly, their providers ranging from illiterate women to those who taught a variety of foundational subjects. In towns and rural areas for a fee, this private education taught very young children the alphabet and elements of reading via the horn book, also sewing and sometimes other basics such as math and grammar. The horn book consisted of a piece of parchment or paper pasted onto (most commonly) a wooden board and protected by a leaf of horn. The horn book typically began with the Lord’s Prayer, a cross, two alphabets and ended with the invocation to the Trinity. The horn book was often known as the “Crisscross-row” or “Crisscross,” which is probably a reference to the Christ’s cross near the top of it, or perhaps to the way in which the text itself is set up to be read. Before reciting the alphabet, children would say “Christ’s cross be my speed, In all virtue to proceed. Here beginneth.” The “cross preceding the alphabet in hornbooks is handed down from Kufic (Early Egyptian) writing, in which each word begins with a character, an aleph, meaning here begins.”45 Samplers were often stitched with the same text and came to be known as “crisscross samplers” and the alphabet row as the “Christcross Row.” 36

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By the end of the eighteenth century in 1797 a new opportunity for educating the poor was made available by Dr Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster who advocated establishing schools by public subscription and voluntary effort. In separate efforts, the Bell System (National School Society, Church of England) and the Lancasterian System (British School Society, Nonconformists, supported chiefly by Methodists) spread schools throughout England. These schools and those opened by generous philanthropists who left land and funds for maintaining the schools were among the only options for children of the poor. For the young girls who found themselves in these schools, they were fortunate enough to be educated for eventual employment, such as seamstresses, weavers or domestic servants. And for these positions, knowing one’s way around a needle was imperative. In 1806 the Cheltenham Female Orphan Asylum opened under the patronage of Queen Charlotte, as the sampler in Plate 7 commemorates. In this piece, Queen Victoria is hailed, as she “patronized” the orphanage in 1842. The mission of the school is stitched and framed in green: “Religion is our guide and Industry our Support.” In the History of Cheltenham, the aim of the education is stated: [T]o clothe, maintain and educate female orphans; to inculcate the principals of religion and morality; to train them in habits of industry and cheerful obedience; and to instruct them in such a manner as may quality them to act as servants in respectable families: they are therefore taught to bake bread; to milk, to make cheese and butter; to wash and iron; and all household work; to boil or roast a plain joint; to spin jersey; to knit; spin flax, sew and mark, and to cut out and make clothing of every description, which afterward sold to the poor at a reduced price.46

This sampler, while a commemorative piece, shows the kind of stitching done in crisscross samplers, also known as marking samplers; two versions of the alphabet and numbers 1 to 10 appear in the middle in red thread. At the bottom are the words: “When my Father and my Mother forsake me the Lord taketh me up.” This sentiment was no doubt meant to soothe the children. Worked on fine linen in red and green thread, this piece reveals the kind of careful stitching young girls were taught to use for marking samplers to show that they could mark garments neatly. Marking samplers served as a CV to demonstrate to potential employers that the woman before them knew how to ply her needle. Until the nineteenth century with the advent of stamps with changeable type, and new indelible inks, linens were marked in finely worked cross-stitches, typically in red silk. The markings consisted of family initials and nobility symbols such as crowns denoting a family rank. Young girls, primarily of the lower class, undertook marking samplers to demonstrate their proficiency with the needle—a skill necessary for domestic service. Virtually all marking samplers were done on white linen with red silk. Figure 2.1 is an 1854 marking sampler stitched by Matilda Ridley when she was ten years old. It is a good example of a child who was nearly ready for domestic service and could demonstrate she knew her way with a needle. Embroidered in red silk on white linen, Ridley neatly cross-stitched four versions of the alphabet, nine different band patterns, and seven examples of aristocratic laundry marks. The band patterns revealed that she could do decorative stitching on personal and household linens. Stitched in Ipswich, this sampler serves as a good example for securing a position; for with variations of the alphabet and the motifs, Ridley proves she is versatile in marking and decorating linens. 37

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2.1

Matilda Ridley, marking sampler, 1854. Courtesy of Witney Antiques, Witney (UK)

In my final illustration (Fig. 2.2), M.A. Tipper plied her needle using red cotton on fine linen to stitch an amazingly beautiful marking sampler in cross-stitch and four-sided stitch. Her workmanship is beyond question here. Tipper was in the Bristol Orphanage which was founded in 1836 by George Müller (1805–98), a Christian evangelist. He expanded the orphanage to cover 13 acres of ground on Ashley Downs, Bristol by 1870. Tipper stitches that she was in the “New Orphan House / North Wing / Ashley Down / Bristol / 1868.” Recognizing that young orphans needed an education and a trade, Müller prepared young boys until they were 14 and provided them with a job; young girls remained until 17 and prepared for employment as laundry maids, domestic servants, nurses, and teachers. Both girls and boys were instructed in needlework. That needlework was well taught is clear from the surviving samplers of the Bristol Orphanages that are similar in stitching and pattern. These samplers, like Tipper’s, were usually worked in red cotton thread and no corner of the linen was wasted. 38

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2.2 M.A. Tipper, marking sampler, 1868. Courtesy of Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, T.11-1952

The top part consisted of various alphabet fonts, numerals, and border patterns worked in cross-stitch. The bottom part contains numerous small decorative motifs, such as insects, small birds, and animals as well as corner patterns. Many, like Tipper’s, also contained a picture of the Bible and some a moral saying, common on many samplers. Tipper stitched: Jesus, permit thy gracious name to stand, As the first efforts of an infant’s hand,

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And, while her fingers on this canvass move, Engage her tender thoughts to seek thy love, With thy dear children let her have a part, And write thy name, thyself, upon her heart.

Tipper fills her sampler with many variations of band and corner patterns, also 20 variations of the alphabet and several of Arabic and Roman numerals. This work shows that not only can she mark linens but can do decorative work quite well on clothing and household items. The Bible just above the moral verse underscores her as a virtuous Christian.

Conclusion The common thread throughout all of the samplers examined here is the use of red silk or cotton thread to render moral texts and domestic symbols. Given that red was extremely difficult to reproduce and thus one of the most expensive dyes, it is curious why it became so ubiquitous, and so the question is: why red? Textile historians are not clear on the use of red in samplers. While it is tempting to analyze the color red used for these moral and religious verses as a symbol of Christ’s blood (and perhaps for some it was), the use of red as a marking color has a much longer history and goes back to early man’s use of blood in marking. Marking possessions and, later, documents was done, as I noted earlier, with blood. Thus, the use of it in these samplers has a long history that those who made them probably did not know. For some, red might have been considered a sacred color, stemming from the long-established practice of using red ink to indicate holy days in ecclesiastical calendars, a practice that dates back to at least the fifteenth century (a practice perhaps taken from marking with blood). From this practice, we get the term “red-letter day”—which first appears in the early 1700s and which denotes a holy day or church festival but eventually came to signify any memorable or happy day. Sampler makers almost always worked their marking samplers in red thread on white linen, and virtually all prayers as well as biblical and moral verses are stitched in red. Whether a prayer tablet sampler, a decorative picture, or a plain stitch marking sampler, young girls from the past left their mark. Red has a checkered past, a polysemiotic symbol, signaling both benevolent and malevolent power and prestige. In the early modern period, its source—the dye—for textiles created social and economic transglobal strands that tied economies of disparate cities together. Its use in needlework samplers wove together moral threads for sacred verse and identification markings that linked the needleworker in a complex web of analogical networks—but one has to ask: At what cost to the needleworker?

Notes 1. Diana Young, “The Colours of Things,” in Handbook of Material Culture, eds Christopher Tilley et al. (London: Sage, 2006), 173.

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2. Elena Phipps, Cochineal Red: The Art History of a Color (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010), 5. 3. The question of color on textiles and in embroidery is an open one. As John Gage has pointed out, “historians of textiles and costume have not yet given much attention to question of colour, and historians of art have so far used costume almost exclusively as an aid to dating.” John Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 51. 4. Michel Pastoureau points out that “for ancient cultures, red was long associated with dyed cloth, white with undyed cloth and thus purity and cleanliness, and black with undyed cloth that had been sullied.” Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 15–16. 5. Sheila Paine, Embroidered Textiles: Traditional Patterns from Five Continents with a Worldwide Guide to Identification (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990), 148. For an extended discussion of the “power of red” in embroidery, see ibid., 143–78, where Paine details its use in textual objects related to birth, marriage, and death. Also Pastoureau, Blue, 32, where he also points out “white, black, and red … were the basic colors for all social and religious codes.” Also see Phipps, Cochineal Red. 6. Book of Isaiah the Prophet 1:18, New American Bible (Washington DC: Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, 1991). 7. Gage, Color and Meaning, 72. 8. Robert Chenciner, Madder Red: A History of Luxury and Trade Plant Dyes and Pigments in the World of Commerce and Art (Richmond (UK): Curzon, 2000), 292. 9. Phipps explains that the color purple had for centuries been associated with royalty, but “by the end of the fifteenth century, however, on the eve of the discovery of the Americas, the famous shellfish purple dyeworks of antiquity had all but disappeared due to over production and the near extinction of the animal resource. In 1464 Pope Paul II finally officially changed ‘Cardinal’s Purple’ to red” (Phipps, Cochineal Red, 26). 10. Paine, Embroidered Textiles, 148. 11. Ibid., 149. 12. Chenciner, Madder Red, 291. 13. Ibid., 150. 14. Ibid., 151. 15. Patricia Andrle and Lesley Rudnicki, Sampler Motifs and Symbolism (East Aurora NY: Hillside Samplings, 2003), 24. Also see Constance Howard, Embroidery and Colour (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976). 16. At the top end is violet, with ultraviolet beyond the range. In 1666, Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) discovered that all colors are present in natural light and could be separated by passing light through a prism. He brought the two ends of the spectrum together to form a circle of seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. These colors have been open to debate over what is primary, what range natural light holds, and what forms the color wheel. See Gage, Color and Meaning. 17. William Perkin, an 18-year-old chemistry student, while trying to produce an artificial quinine in 1856, instead produced the first aniline dye—a beautiful mauve color—which revolutionized the dyeing industry. See Simon Garfield, Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World (London: Faber & Faber, 2000). 18. One of the most common vegetable dyes used in dyeing textiles red; see Gösta Sandberg, The Red Dyes: Cochineal, Madder, and Murex Purple: A World Tour of Textile Techniques, trans. Edith M. Matteson (Ashville NC: Lark, 1997).

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19. Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 36. 20. Phipps, Cochineal Red, 6. 21. Twenty shillings made up a pre-decimal pound in money; hence, to buy a ton at 50 pounds = 20 × 50 = 1,000 shillings, or a lifetime of work. 22. Chenciner, Madder Red, 290. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to delve into the complex history of madder. For a detailed account of the history, see Chenciner’s account. 23. The color produced was more effective than the form of cochineal (lac or kermes) that was produced and used in the Middle East and was called Armenian or Polish cochineal in Europe. I want to thank our reviewer for this information. 24. For studies on cochineal, see Raymond L. Lee, “Cochineal Production and Trade in New Spain to 1600,” The Americas 4, 4 (1948): 449–73; Raymond L. Lee, “American Cochineal in European Commerce, 1536–1625,” Journal of Modern History 23 (September 1951): 205–24; R.A. Donkin, “Spanish Red: An Ethnogeographical Study of Cochineal and the Opuntia Cactus,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 67 (1977): 1–84; Greenfield, A Perfect Red; and Phipps, Cochineal Red. 25. Cochineal continues to be harvested today and used by those who are interested in maintaining and preserving the tradition of the beauty of the color in threads and fabrics. 26. Greenfield, A Perfect Red, 186. 27. Phipps, Cochineal Red, 36. 28. Most natural dyes are not highly stable and occur as components of complex mixtures; madder and cochineal, however, are the exception. See Deborah Harding, Red and White: American Redwork Quilts and Patterns (New York: Rizzoli, 2000). 29. Chenciner, Madder Red, 296. 30. Ibid., 107. 31. Quoted in Greenfield, A Perfect Red, 11. 32. Ibid., 11–12. 33. Chenciner, Madder Red, 296. 34. Like many books during this period, this one was translated from two different sources. Part II was originally written in French by Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 1669 as Instruction genérale pour la teinture des laines et manufacture de laine de toutes couleurs et pour la culture des drogues ou ingrediens qu’on y emploie, and served as the landmark treaty on dyeing. Part I was originally written by Marx Ziegler in German in 1685. The English version, The Whole Art of Dy[e]ing appeared in 1705 and was printed by William Pearson, and sold by F. Nutt near Stationers Hall. See http://www.elizabethancostume.net/dyes/dyebib. html. 35. Phipps, Cochineal Red, 16. 36. On the history of sampler making, see, for example, Thomasina Beck, The Embroiderer’s Story: Needlework from the Renaissance to the Present Day (Newton Abbot (UK): David & Charles, 1995); Ethel Stanwood Bolton and Eva Johnston Coe, American Samplers (Boston: Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 1921); Claire Browne and Jennifer Wearden, Samplers from the Victorian and Albert Museum (London: V&A Publications, 1999); Pamela Clabburn, Samplers: The Shire Book, 2nd edn (Princes Risborough (UK): Shire, 1998); Mary Jaene Edmonds, Samplers and Samplermakers: An American Schoolgirl Art, 1700–1850 (New York: Rizzo, 1991); Joan Edwards, Sampler-Making 1540–1940: The Fifth of Joan Edwards’ Small Books on the History of Embroidery (Dorking (UK):

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Bayford, 1983); Marcus B. Huish, Samplers and Tapestry Embroideries (London: Batsford, 1990); Carol Humphrey, Samplers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Mary Eirwen Jones, A History of Western Embroidery (London: Studio Vista, 1969); John LaBranche and Rita F. Conant, In Female Worth and Elegance: Sampler and Needlework Studies and Teachers in Portsmouth, New Hampshire 1741–1840 (Portsmouth NJ: Portsmouth Marine Society, 1996); Rozsika Parker, The Subsversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 1989); Betty Ring, Let Virtue Be a Guide to Thee: Needlework in the Education of Rhode Island Women, 1730–1830 (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1983); Betty Ring, Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers and Pictorial Needlework, 1650–1850 (New York: Knopf, 1993); Jane Toller, British Samplers: A Concise History (Chichester (UK): Phillimore 1980). 37. Browne and Weardon, 9. 38. Andrle and Rudnicki, Sampler Motifs and Symbolism, 33. 39. Humphrey, Samplers, 64. 40. Edwards’s study of sampler stitches shows that whereas there were on average about 36 different kinds of stitches on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century samplers, by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the number shrank to about 20 different stitches and continued to decrease, until by the end of the nineteenth century nearly the only type remaining was the cross-stitch. Samplers became known as “cross-stitch samplers.” 41. Humphrey, Samplers, 62. 42. Ibid., 62. 43. James Meikle was a surgeon in the Royal Navy based at Carnwath, Scotland. He wrote Solitude Sweetened, a series of meditations, while on board a warship from 1757 to 1760; it is still in print today. His work offered sampler makers verses for their needlework. 44. Andrle and Rudnicki, Sampler Motifs and Symbolism, 15. 45. Ibid., 23. 46. This quotation appears in Stitched in Adversity: Samplers of the Poor (Witney (UK): Witney Antiques, 2006), n.p.

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Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

3 Coloring the Sacred in Sixteenth-Century Central Mexico Molly Harbour Bassett and Jeanette Favrot Peterson

Far from being symbols, distinct from their referents, the colors are those referents in a deeply organic sense and that is why they are thought of in reference to God no less than to the copulating, procreating, growing and dying human body … color is fundamentally involved in the making of culture from the human body.1 Michael Taussig (2009) Iztacpaltic, aztapiltic, nitlaztalia, nitlaiztalia, nicaztapiltilia. Tliltic, omito. Coztic, omito. Chichiltic, omito. Xoxoctic, omito. Very white, intensely white—I whiten something. I make something white. I make something very white. Black was described; yellow was described; chili-red was described; and blue-green was described.2 Bernardino de Sahagún (c. 1577)

On 21 February 1978 utility workers excavating in the center of Mexico City unearthed a monolith, some ten feet (3 meters) in diameter and in pristine polychromatic condition. The relief sculpture depicts the nude and dismembered corpse of Coyolxauhqui (She with Bells), whose sacrificial death at the hand of her brother Huitzilopochtli (Hummingbird South), the Mexica-Aztec patron deity, facilitated the mythic foundation of their capital Tenochtitlan. In the week between the monolith’s discovery and the public unveiling of this national treasure, Coyolxauhqui received a thorough cleaning that nearly erased her coloration. Recently, Templo Mayor Project associates recovered trace pigments on the stone, enabling art historian Lourdes Cué and archaeologist Fernando Carrizosato reconstruct a full-scale polychromatic Coyolxauhqui (Fig. 3.1).3 This Coyolxauhqui serves as a touchstone for understanding the role of colors, their sources and referents in precontact culture, and their surprising persistence and adaptation in sacred contexts of postcontact visual culture.

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3.1 Coyolxauqui Stone, Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlan, late fifteenth century. After Mary Miller and Karl Taube, An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993)

As a cornerstone of imperial ideology, the Coyolxauhqui Stone depicts the body on which the Mexica-Aztec built their empire in five colors: chili-red, blue-green, fine yellow, white, and black. The Coyolxauhqui Stone belongs to a corpus of monumental sculptures erected in Tenochtitlan’s sacred precinct, many of which shared the same palette found in murals and painted manuscripts. The colors in this scheme signify elements of the natural world, including blood, turquoise, and maize; “the colors are those referents in a deeply organic sense,” in Taussig’s words. Postcontact chronicles and lexicons, such as the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún’s multi-volume General History of the Things of New Spain (c. 1577, also known as the Florentine Codex) contain descriptions of these five colors and their natural sources and provide insights into colors’ referents in Mexica-Aztec religion and state culture. In gathering and recording information on Mexica-Aztec life, Sahagún used Nahuatl-speaking scribes and artists; 46

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we rely heavily on their Nahuatl transcriptions for our interpretations. It should also be noted that we differentiate between the preconquest Mexica-Aztecs (hereafter Aztecs, 1325–1521) and the colonial Nahuas, peoples living in central Mexico who inherited the common language of Nahuatl along with other cultural traits. Three of the five colors identified as precontact carriers of heightened sacrality can also be traced to the early colonial period and will be the focus of our study. The colors black, red, and blue-green appear singly and in various combinations as a triangulated palette with overlapping semantic, symbolic, and material domains.4 Within a cosmovision that inextricably linked the supernatural, natural, and human realms, colors were grounded in their mineral, animal, and vegetative sources; they functioned metonymically as embodiments of the physical world; and they transcended their materiality to assume larger conceptual and symbolic valences. We concur with the early work of Marshall Sahlins who foregrounded the cultural significance of color terms and precepts as “codes of social, economic and ritual value” that can “communicate significant distinctions of culture.”5 We argue further that certain of these colors selectively appear within postcontact religious contexts in the native-authored murals of sixteenth-century mendicant monasteries, pictorial manuscripts, and Catholic sculpture. Although working within a predominantly Euro-Christian style and iconography, indigenous craftsmen and painter-scribes were creative collaborators with their friar-supervisors. This agency, or “native initiative” as Eleanor Wake argues, is visible in specific motifs, stylistic elements, and the continuing use of traditionally sacred colors.6 Color-language is one valuable entry point in exploring the valences that may have persisted from the precontact period, a continuity made possible in part because of the notable stability of color terms in Mesoamerican indigenous languages.7 Yet we are not suggesting a uniform Mesoamerican color code, as symbolic meanings attached to colors shifted across time, space, and cultures; these are usages and meanings that we are only beginning to understand. For these reasons we focus on the material culture and ethnohistoric documentation of central Mexico (New Spain). The rupture caused by the Conquest and the influx of new Euro-Christian chromatic valences is fully acknowledged, as is the uncontestable continuity in a select and sometimes fragmentary use of the traditionally sacred color spectrum. In the following, we discuss the semantic fields, material origins, metaphoric resonances, and ritual contexts of red, black, and blue-green with the intention of illuminating the sacred significance of color in precontact and early colonial Central Mexico.

Nepapan Tlapalli: The Different Colors Tlapalli: icentoca in ixquichnepapantlapalli, chipahuac, cualli, yectli, tlazotli, mahuiztic Tlapalli is the collective term for all the different colors: the pure, good, clean, precious, marvelous.8 Bernardino de Sahagún (c. 1577)

The Aztecs enjoyed a polychromed world and exploited as many hues as they observed in the rainbow.9 White and red stuccoed buildings in Tenochtitlan were also richly 47

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decorated “with pictures on them,” just as the moving canvas of the human body was arrayed with dyed textiles, tropical feathers, and body paint.10 At the center of an extensive trade and tribute system, the thriving markets of the Aztec capital captivated the first conquistadors. It was here that, among the pottery, slaves, and foodstuffs, the baskets of the color-seller offered an astonishing array of raw materials for making pigments from every corner of the empire.11 Among the sellers’ pigments, the blood-red cochineal is a good example of the longdistance travel and expense invested in obtaining more valuable pigments.12 Producing hues that ranged from deep purple red to light pink, cochineal was derived from a tiny female insect (Dactylopius coccus or, in Nahuatl, the nocheztli), a parasite that feeds on the prickly pear or nopal cactus, causing Spaniards to refer to cochineal as grana (insect). A prized colorant used to dye textiles, rabbit fur, and feathers in the precontact period, cochineal continued to be sought after for colonial rugs, garments, and featherwork paintings. By the time Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a lieutenant under Cortés, described with awe the quantities of cochineal in Tenochtitlan’s market, Spain was profiting from a lucrative trade in which tons of cochineal were being exported all over world, including to Flemish weavers.13 Cochineal, however, is only one of nearly thirty pigments described by Sahagún and his informants in Book 11: Earthly Things of his General History.14 They devote Chapter 11 to “nepapantlapalli / the different colors,” highlighting pigments, their natural sources, attributes, production, and uses.15 In the General History, tlapalli both connotes redness as in the term’s appearance in the difrasismo “in tlilli, in tlapalli” (discussed below) and also refers to color or colors collectively.16 The proliferation of Nahuatl words for specific colors stems, in large part, from the ways in which color words were formed.17 According to Danièle Dehouve, “Nahuas had not one, but two color nomenclatures: one descriptive and the other metaphoric and symbolic,” wherein descriptive names denote colors associated with particular objects (for example, chilichiltic, from chili, means “chili-red”) while metaphoric names connote objects, entities, and ideas through reference to color.18 The abstract qualities of metaphor allow for the invocation of colors as signifiers in various forms of indirect speech, including puns, divination, and medicine. As descriptive, metaphoric, and symbolic meanings compound, color words take on a multitude of meanings in precontact and colonial Nahuatl. For our purposes, though, it is important to remember that while the Aztecs discerned and distinguished a multitude of colors, many pigments were derived linguistically (and materially) from the natural environment.19 For example, Sahagún’s informants identify and describe blood-like nocheztli (cochineal), flower-yellow xochipalli, bluegreen matlalli, pitch-black tlilli, mirror-black tezcatetlilli, red ochre tlahuitl, chalkywhite tizatl, and herb-green quiltic. The Aztecs extracted these pigments from a variety of natural sources, including the insect larvae already discussed (nocheztli), also from soil, rocks, and minerals (tlahuitl and tizatl ), and from floral blossoms, stems, and roots (xochipalli, matlalli and quiltic). Once pigment names entered the Nahuatl lexicon, they invariably took on metaphoric and symbolic resonances, many of which link colors from the ordinary (natural) world to the extraordinary. The copious use of flowers as a pigment base is revealing and demonstrates the multivalent and multisensory significations of colors and their referents. In their very 48

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essence colors operated both literally and figuratively as a means to invoke the sacred. The juice of so many flowers was used in the making of colors that the sixteenthcentury friar Motolinía claimed colors were edible: “when the painters wanted to change from one color to another, they cleaned their brushes with their tongues.”20 Not only did the substance of flowers become colors, but also the beauty and aroma of flowers were conjured through their painted signs. Moreover, flowers characterized poetry and florid speech (xochicuicatl or flower-song), the elevated rhetoric for which the Aztec noble class was known. Since Nahua writing was largely pictorial and was recited and performed, words took shape as painted images and, conversely, pictures could be read out loud as a spoken or sung language. Gary Tomlinson has emphasized the bond between glyphs and the things they present (rather than represent), tightly linked in a “network of extraordinary intimacy.”21 The image-texts operated in several sensory modalities; whether spoken, sung, or painted, words provoked hearing, smell, and touch as well as sight. As the lyrics from the Cantares Mexicanos suggest, flowery songs were “recited in colors,” appeared as “turquoise pictures,” and emitted fragrance.22 The profusion of colors the Aztecs identified creates the impression of an everexpanding taxonomy and overwhelming nomenclature. However, from among the many pigments Sahagún’s informants describe, the Aztecs identified a primary palette of five colors: iztac (white), tliltic (black), coztic (yellow), chichiltic (chili-red), and xoxoctic (bluegreen).23 These five colors align with fundamental aspects of the Aztec cosmovision, including the five colors of maize and the quincunx, a five-point cosmogram.24 Red, black, and blue-green occur in significant pairings (or triplings) in both precontact and colonial sacred contexts.

On the Sacrality of Red and Black The colors red and black are best known when they occur together in the phrase “in tlilli, in tlapalli,” “black [ink] and red [ink]” to signify writing, but also, by extension, wisdom. This linguistic pairing constitutes a difrasismo, a Nahuatl construction that expresses a single, often third, idea using two words.25 Red and black inks are in fact represented as the tools of the tlacuilo or scribe-painter, sometimes quite literally as two pots of paint, one red and one black.26 In a few of the preconquest books or screenfold manuscripts that have undergone conservation testing, it appears that the scribes wielded brushes or reed quills using red cochineal dye for initial outlines and then darker lines of carbon black on the gessoed surface (of calcium sulphate or calcium carbonate) of their animal hide or paper surfaces.27 In a larger conceptual sense, however, “the red and the black” express esoteric, often divine, knowledge such as that of the good painter who not only “knows the colors” but “puts divinity into things.”28 As is now well established, the tlacuilo profession that combined scribal and painterly arts continued to play a central role in the production of murals, maps, and pictorial manuscripts well into the seventeenth century. As the primary craftsmen in the construction and decoration of hundreds of mendicant monasteries that were meant to evangelize and Hispanize the indigenous populations, their heritage of the 49

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“red and black” helped shape how Christianity was conveyed to fellow neophyte viewers.29 The murals that covered both exterior and interior walls of these monasteries were frequently based on black-and- white Euro-Christian graphics or book illustrations that were imported from Spain, Italy, and northern Europe and widely available. The fact that many murals are monochromatic is often attributed to their black and white models in the printed sources. However, when color is added even to details, it is a significant intervention by native artisans that is neither random nor decorative.30 In many sixteenth-century monastic complexes in New Spain, biblical inscriptions are inserted as a frieze along the upper registers of the cloister walls and along the 3.2 Vault painting, corridors. At the Augustinian monastery of Malinalco, Augustinian monastery of these liturgical or devotional verses are conventionally Malinalco, Mexico, c. 1571–73: red and black executed in black and white paint, but have the color red inscription (lower register) superimposed, as seen in the lower register of Figure 3.2. and vegetation and bees While European books used black and red movable (upper section). Photo: type common in Church literature,31 the uniqueness and Jeanette Favrot Peterson selectivity of the red coloration at Malinalco suggests more than just a conjunction of Euro-Christian and indigenous traditions; the emphasis on the red and black responds to a double or bicultural reading of sacred knowledge. The twining of red and black not only appeared within the pages of esoteric books and the corridors of sacred places, but it also spilled out into public spaces, streets, and the communal square where, recited as cosmic myth and performed in sacred rituals, the cultural meanings of red and black responded to a wider visual literacy (see Plate 9). In the precontact world, red and black also resonated with the sacred in fiery stories of creation, places of destruction, and duties of teohua (god-keepers). Blackness and redness figured prominently in mythohistoric accounts of creations and destructions involving fire and firelight. These fiery connotations relate to linguistic roots of specific red and black color terms, as well as to the words’ metaphoric resonances and ritual contexts. The semantic field for “reds” in the older Nahuatl text of Sahagún’s General History encompasses a series of terms that share three roots: chili (chili pepper), tlahuitl (red ochre), and ezhuahuanqui (striped blood-red).32 The red of candlelight, firelight, and red ochre (tlahuitl) occurs in ritual contexts where fire acts as a creative force through destruction. Not surprisingly, these “reds” also appear in mythohistoric texts alongside “blacks,” specifically black organic residues: ash, coals, and charred remains. The semantic field of tlāhuitl (red ochre) belies the color’s relationship with fire, and its appearance in mythohistoric descriptions of creation reveals its association with (re) generation. Colonial lexicographer Antonio de Molina associates tlāhuiā (to light a candle, to light the way for people with tapers or torches) with tlatlāhuiā (to redden something with ochre, to turn red, to blush).33 Following Molina, Frances Karttunen 50

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glosses tlāhuiā as “to light a candle, to light the way for people with tapers or torches,” and observes that it is a reduction of the noun tlahuitl (red ochre), an iron-oxide pigment (Fe2O3) derived from clay, and the verbal suffix -huiā.34 Accordingly, the redness of firelight, dawn, and clay earth resonate in tlahuitl and associated terms. In the General History, tlahuitl, the redness of red ochre and firelight, occurs in three significant contexts related to Aztec ritual and religion: the creation of the sun by Nanahuatzin; the description of a teohua’s duties; and in the naming of the place to which Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl fled. In each of these fiery contexts, colors, materiality, and the sacred fuse around creative and/or destructive events, events that establish (or terminate) the presence of a teotl (god) in the world. The most significant story interrelating and integrating red and black in Aztec cosmology relates to Nanahuatzin’s self-sacrificial metamorphosis into the sun (tonatiuh).35 In the General History’s account of this cosmic event, two deities (teteo)— Tecuciztecatl and Nanahuatzin—ritually prepare for “carrying the burden” of (being) the sun.36 Over the course of four nights, these two teteo perform a series of rituals, including bloodletting.37 When the time arrives for the penitents to complete their ritual transformation, only Nanahuatzin, the one who offers his scabs in lieu of incense and ordinary reeds in place of quetzal feathers and whom the teteo dress in paper rather than fine clothing and a feather headdress, has the courage to cast himself into the teotexcalli (teotl-hearth) fire: “All at once he quickly threw and cast himself into the fire; once and for all he went. Thereupon he burned; his body crackled and sizzled.”38 Nanahuatzin’s self-immolation—the fiery consumption of his body—results in the creation of extraordinary symbols and sources of blackness and redness. A foundational cosmic event, Nanahuatzin’s sacrifice—astonishing in its display of humility and courage—results in two significant transformations. First, his burned and charred body, a blackened condition, facilitates the brilliant red hues of the sunrise. Because of Nanahuatzin’s self-sacrifice, the sun rises red in the sky: “the reddening [of the dawn]; in all directions, all around, the dawn and light extended.” Nanahuatzin rises as Tonatiuh, the red sun, a teotl-source of life, heat (itonal), and liveliness. Second, in the process of Nanahuatzin’s apotheosis he singes the eagle and ocelot with their characteristic black markings, and so eagles’ feathers appear to be “scorched-looking and blackened” and ocelots’ coats have black spots.39 In honor of this sacred contest, the Mexica-Aztec arrayed the empire’s most prestigious warrior orders in the branded coats of the courageous eagle and ocelot: “From this [event], it is said, they took—from here was taken—the custom whereby was called and named one who was valiant, a warrior. He was given the name quauhtlocelotl,” combining eagle (cuāuhtli) with ocelot (ocelotl), or powers of the sky and earth.40 A group of teteo witness Nanahuatzin’s self-immolation and, following his sacrifice, they await daybreak at Teotihuacan. Kneeling, the gods look in all four directions for the sun’s first light. Those who looked to the east, Quetzalcoatl, Ehecatl, Totec (or Anahuatlitecu) and the Red (Tlatlahuic) Tezcatlipoca, were rewarded: “And when the sun came to rise, when he burst forth, he appeared to be red; he kept swaying from side to side … Intensely did he shine … his brilliant rays penetrated everywhere.”41 The red sun appears in the east to Quetzalcoatl, who ends his legendary life in a burning red place, 51

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and to Tlatlauhqui Tezcatlipoca (Red Lord of the Smoking Mirror), an ixiptla (localized embodiment) of Tezcatlipoca.42 Quetzalcoatl is one of only four teteo to see the inaugural red rays of dawn, and in his twilight this same teotl, who according to some sources facilitated the creation of humans through autosacrifice, abandons Tula for “the place of the red color, the place of the burning / in tlapalla in tlatlaya.”43 Both Tlatlauhqui Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl, witnesses to the first light of creation, bind themselves to creative and destructive forces through the vibrant and vital reds of blood, fire, and sunlight. In addition to describing the significance of red and black in sacred acts of creation and destruction, Sahagún observes the roles redness and blackness play in the responsibilities of the god-keepers (teohua) who minded temples throughout the empire. God-keepers collected ritual elements, including tlahuitl (red ochre) and/or tlilli (black) pigments, in preparation for calendric festivals. The teohua at Tecanman gathers “the red ochre, the black stain, and the foam sandals, the sleeveless jacket, and the bells which [the impersonator of ] Xiuhtecuhtli, the old god, required when he died.”44 Here, redness, red ochre, and blackness converge around sacred rituals, in this instance ones having to do with Xiuhtecuhtli Huehueteotl (Precious/Turquoise Lord, Old Old God), a teotl associated with fire: He was thought a god, considering that he burned one, he consumed one, he singed one, he scorched the fields. And for many purposes was he useful; for with him one was warmed, things were cooked in an olla, things were cooked, things were toasted, salt [water] was evaporated, syrup was thickened, charcoal was made … one was burned ….45

Appropriately, Xiuhtecuhtli Huehueteotl wore a divine array of black, red, and blue. His face was blackened (tlilticamotenuiltec), and he wore green stones (chalchiuhtetele), cotinga and quetzal feathers, rattles, and shells. Additionally, Sahagún’s informants recall that “he had the fire-serpent disguise / xiuhcooanacoche.”46 The god-keeper at Teconman bore the responsibility for assembling the ritual elements needed by Xiuhtecuhtli Huehueteotl’s ixiptla (localized embodiment), presumably the teotl’s “array / inechichihual,” including tlahuitl (red ochre) and tlilli (black).47 Along with the most basic word for black, tlilli, meaning soot, black ink or dye, and blackness (tlillōtl), Aztecs associated black with tēzcapōctli (mirror smoke), popōca and pōctli (smoke and smoking), chapopohtli (tar, asphalt), and teotzinitzcan (the Trogon bird).48 In addition to these descriptive associations, they recognized a particular black coloring, tezcatetlilli (mirror stone earth), which Sahagún’s collaborators compare to iron pyrite and describe as “shin[ing], shin[ing] constantly.”49 Certain black materials such as obsidian, jet, pitch, soot, rubber, and bitumen helped to instantiate an aura of sacrality. The reflectivity of these materials is striking in contrast to the opacity (and even light-absorbency) of ash and coals. It is telling that among them, resin, bitumen, and iron pyrite are among the pigments in the Aztec color-seller’s baskets—reminding us again of Taussig’s contention that colors are their referents, in a “deeply organic sense.” The red, black, iridescent, and reflective elements collected by the teohua contributed to the ritual manufacture of ixiptlahuan (localized embodiments) and thereby the apotheosis of teteo.50 Blackening the face and striping the faces of priests or ixiptlahuan with black mirror stones were common aspects of ritual adornment. Black, like blue-green, was associated 52

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with materials that had reflective potential, the ability to shine and thus to emanate divinity. During the celebration of Izcalli, the eighteenth and final ceremony of the xihuitl (year) solar calendar, honored “our father, fire” and involved the construction of two ixiptlahuan of fire teteo. The scribes identify them as Xiuhtecuhtli (Year Lord) and Milintoc (Shining, Sparkling, Flaring). They describe Xiuhtecuhtli’s mask as “made of green stone (chalchihuitl) diagonally striped with turquoise (xihuitl). It was awesome; it glistened, it glittered; it emanated brilliance exceedingly.”51 By comparison, Milintoc’s mask was “made of seashell. Its lips painted black, it appears black; they, the black stones, were called teotetl [god-stone; jet], and the face was striped diagonally with black mirror stones (tezcapoctli).”52 Alfredo López Austín argues for an inherent linguistic relationship between darkness and divinity, noting that in some compound words, teotl itself also denotes blackness.53 Teotetl (god-stone; jet) illustrates this precept graphically; Sahagún’s collaborators understood the word’s components—teotl (god) and tetl (stone)—together as reflecting the object’s absolute blackness: “perfect in its blackness … it is precious, rare, like the special attributes of a god.”54 As with all colors, Nahuatl expresses black and blackness in both descriptive and metaphoric fashions. Teotetl ’s absolute blackness reflects the ritual importance of black body paint, pigments, unguents, and minerals. Cumulatively, the chalchihuitl (green stones), teotetl (jet) and tezcapoctli (black mirror stones) adorning images of Xiuhtecuhtli and Milintoc created luminescent ixiptlahuan that sparkled, glistened, and glittered like firelight.55 The brilliant light cast by these stones reinforces two sacred associations related to Aztec color perceptions (or conceptions): first, the interrelation of blue, green, black, and red in ritual settings, and second, the connection of this color group with fire-related teteo and their ixiptlahuan. As with the story of Nanahuatzin’s metamorphosis into the sun, the human/teotl body stands at the center of these displays of color; the play of (sun)light on the body of Xiuhtechutli’s and Milintoc’s ixiptlahuan reflected the animacy of the Aztec universe. Quite literally, the ixiptlahuan of these teteo embodied and radiated the colors of the Aztec cosmovision. The use of black and red as a second skin was as highly visible as the flayed covering of Tlatlauhqui Tezcatlipoca and the adornments of the ancient god Huehueteotl, endorsing Taussig’s contention that color is fundamentally linked to the human body. Redness was linked to the source of light and life; blackness literally embodied the sacred.56 Throughout Mesoamerica priests, ixiptlahuan, and other ritual participants blackened their bodies as preparation for performing their ceremonial duties. As Guilhem Olivier explains, By covering their bodies with soot or black paint, the penitents prepared for the divine confrontation but also performed an act of faith that was supposed to please the gods. The verb tliltilia [to push oneself up, to become famous] probably translates the link that existed among blackening, penance, and the benefits or the prestige that could be derived from these practices… Coming before the meeting with the gods, blackening reduced the distance between people and their creators.57

For Olivier, the blackened skin of priests, ixiptlahuan, and ritual actors “could even represent a total identification with the deity.”58 The darkening skin ointment acted as a supernatural bodily armor to protect and fortify the ritual participant against the dangers inherent in such activities as “entering dark caves” or “sacrificing” (Fig. 3.3). 53

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3.3 Sacrificing priests covered in black unguent, and Tlaloc ixiptla in black and blue-green (above), from Codex Borbonicus, fol. 31 (detail). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale, Paris

Aztec priests applied a sooty unguent; “indeed they put it on like a costume when they anointed themselves,” according to the Dominican, Diego Durán.59 This was one of the reasons teohua collected resinous black substances from the pine or ocote, as indicated in the passage above. On ceremonial occasions priests applied a more potent black concoction, one that added the ashes of poisonous animals, such as scorpions, spiders, vipers, and centipedes, as well as ground tobacco leaves (picietl ) and the seed of the morning glory (ololiuhqui), both considered hallucinogens.60 Known as teotlacualli or “food of god” (comida divina), this potent mixture was edible and offered to the gods to eat, just as deity effigies were dripped with and fed liquid rubber. The black salve not only had a therapeutic value as “sacred medicine,” but also appears to have possessed divinatory capabilities, with ground hallucinogens added to the pigment in order to enhance ecstatic vision.61 54

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Blackened skin was also a prerogative of an elevated status in the civil hierarchy. In the Codex Mendoza, compiled twenty years after the conquest, the mythohistoric priestleader of the Mexica, Tenoch, military commanders, and priest-warriors (tequihua) wore black body paint, as did official executioners.62 The rubbing of blackened soot on the human body may have been preparatory to assimilating, and communicating with, properties of the sacred.63 Both lay and priestly bodies blackened their skin during rites of passage, often associated with practices of penance and fasting. During the most precarious moments in the life of the community, the ceremonies held at the time of a king’s ascension and death, the royal body was smeared with black dye or “divine ointment,” and the same substance rubbed onto the effigies of deities, thus serving to reinforce the process of the ruler’s consecration.64 In part, the adoption of black skin may also reflect the black coloration of some of the major Aztec male deities, from Tezcatlipoca (Smoking Mirror) to the ancient earth lord Tlaloc (see Fig. 3.3). Tezcatlipoca, for example, was both kingmaker and sorcerer and was characterized by blackness.65 His representations included wooden anthropomorphic sculptures in which the body was “smeared with black” or painted with bitumen, mimicking his most important image of obsidian fashioned of a black shiny stone, similar to jet.66 As a volcanic glass, obsidian had the brilliant reflective qualities of a divinatory mirror, appropriate for a mantic-god whose own insights broke the constraints of normal vision. A blackened body continued to define the highest members of the colonial ruling class as channeling the supernatural, as seen in 16 blackened figures in the Tira de Tepechpan, from Cortés to Bishop Juan de Zumárraga and several indigenous governors.67 Moreover, a number of devotions to the Cristos Negros, or black-skinned images of the crucified Christ in the Americas that had no European precedent, may also be explained by the sacrality and sovereignty traditionally accorded blackness in the indigenous worldview.68 Although not a comprehensive explanation, at least seven of the cults to miraculous Black Christs were engendered in the countryside and claim strong indigenous roots traceable to the sixteenth century. As central as the crucifix was to Christian iconography, when reproduced with a blackened body in the New World it subscribed to a traditional and more positive visual code associated with supreme male deities, ancestry, healing, and extraordinary seeing. The early chronicles of the Christ of Chalma (in the State of Mexico), describe the first sixteenth-century crucifix as blackened (denegrido), a condition explained by its long exposure to candlesoot and dust, an official justification frequently given for darkened Catholic images.69 Even after a fire of indeterminate date and the subsequent substitution of a lighter copy, however, it remained a “black Christ” in the popular imaginary.70 The Christ of Tila in Chiapas is a Maya example of the refashioning of a crucifix to whiter tonalities, revealing the discomfort of the Church with these early black cult images. In 1694, Bishop Francisco Nuñez de Vega recorded the “prodigious” event in which the Tila crucifix renovated itself from dark to light, its “smoky and blackened body suddenly becoming white, as it is seen today.”71 What is significant to our discussion is that, seven years earlier, this same bishop had destroyed a multitude of “sooty idols” in the region, linking the dark Christ of Tila to local precontact images.72 Perhaps the renewed extirpation campaigns of the late seventeenth century, such as 55

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those of Bishop Nuñez de Vega, combined with new sensitivities to racial distinctions, encouraged the lightening of both these examples. It is neither possible, nor necessary, to pinpoint precisely the specific deities replaced by blackened crucifixes; it is clear, however, that the positive values associated with blackness helped convert a newly imported devotional effigy into a more familiar, and distinctly more powerful sacred object for indigenous devotees. Although darkness conjured the uncanny for both Euro-Christian and Nahua cultures, including fears of death, the nocturnal and the underworld, the more holistic Mesoamerican cosmos did not readily split into an oppositional dyad of light/dark, life/death distinctions.

Sacred Essences: Blue-Green and Red That the malleability of blackness could encompass death and regeneration, disease and fertility, is underscored by its semantic breadth. In most Mesoamerican languages black is categorized with the colors green and blue under a “dark-cool” rubric.73 As we have seen, far from being the absence of color, the sight of black (and notion of blackness) is not only a marker connecting the object or wearer with the sacred, but it is also enriched by a web of meanings associated with blue/green, including preciousness and life itself. Of all the colors, the intersection of blue and green was the most richly laden with symbolic meaning in both the Maya and Mexican spheres. The recipe for a blue-green called “Maya blue” produces a lake from a mixture of leaves from the tropical añil plant (tlacehuilli or Indigofera suffruticosa), boiled and combined with white clays.74 The resultant color combined celestial blues with the greens of vegetation, manifest chromatically in some of the most treasured substances in Mesoamerican cultures, turquoise (teoxiuitl), jadeite (chachiuitl), and costly quetzal feathers. The same recipe for Maya blue continued to be utilized by indigenous artists in some sixteenth-century monastic murals analyzed by Constantino Reyes-Valerio, such as the frescoes in the open chapel at the Augustinian Actopan, Hidalgo, and the sotocoro (area below the choir loft) paintings in the Franciscan monastery of Tecamachalco, Puebla.75 Executed on traditional amate paper, the biblical scenes in the medallions at Tecamachalco display a vibrant blue-green hue, as evident in the flood waters of Noah’s Ark (see Plate 10.) The color blue-green participated in two interrelated and powerful “symbolic clusters,” in Dehouve’s words, one related to the life-force of tōnalli (sun-heat; day sign; prerogative) and the other to vegetation, water, and human sacrifice.76 Its intimate relationship to sacrifice and to the color red linked two precious liquids: water and blood. This chromatic dualism of blue and red appears at a crucial point in Aztec migration history. At the time of the providential founding of their capital, Tenochtitlan, the preimperial Mexica responded to the prognostications of their patron deity, Huitzilopochtli. The promised sign of their destination, a prickly pear cactus surmounted by an eagle, finally appeared on a swampy island in Lake Texcoco; the cactus was adjacent to a spring whose waters suddenly changed from clear to bi-colored streams of water, one red and one blue. According to Durán, one stream was “red almost like blood, … and the second stream was so blue and thick that it was a shocking thing [to behold].”77 56

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That the very center of the Aztec empire was a place where red and blue waters flowed as one, foretold the militant means by which they expanded territorially, also expressed by blue and red. The difrasismo atl-tlachinolli, literally water-fire, means sacred warfare.78 The pairing of red and blue had an older, pre-Aztec distribution that also crossed media, as depicted in codices, sculpture, and murals79 (see Plate 11). Wake privileges blue and red as the essence of the Mesoamerican sacred and “the chromatic metaphor for the source of life,” with evidence for their continued use together in colonial manuscripts and murals of central Mexico.80 Although separately the colors red and turquoise blue often retain traditional values, we believe that their meanings are no longer as metaphorically or consistently interlocked in the colonial period.81 A number of scholars have proposed that the red and blue of the Virgin’s robe and tunic reflect this ongoing sacred conjunction;82 however, this color scheme has a longstanding history in Marian iconography. A stronger case is made by Clara Bargellini for the unusual blue-green hue of the mantle in the sixteenth-century painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a tone described in 1757 by the famed artist Miguel Cabrera as “neither blue nor green, but participating in both.”83 After a scrupulous physical examination of the Guadalupe image, Cabrera accounts for the use of four different painting techniques yet concludes that the image was miraculous and adapted by the Virgin Mary to the “style and language of the Indians.”84 Thus, by implication, Cabrera attributes the unique blue-green tonality of the mantle to an indigenous color vocabulary. The frequency with which the indigenous muralists interjected blue-green into their black and white compositions on mendicant walls continued to invest the color with sacred meaning. A good example is the blue-green corn stalk (replacing the traditional reed) held by Christ as the Ecce Homo at the monastery of Epazoyucan, Hidalgo.85 Additionally, a vivid turquoise color makes a startling appearance within the monochromatic palette of the barrel vaults of the Malinalco cloisters (Fig. 3.2). The vault paintings complement the paradise-garden scene painted on the cloister walls below with highly stylized vegetative motifs and winged creatures. Amid this dense foliage blue-green selectively highlights the leaves and the heads of bee-like insects whose bodies take on the trilobed shape of the glyphs for greenstone and, by extension, preciousness. Common to the Aztec garden heavens is the concept that the souls of the dead were said to suck the different, savory flowers in the manner of bees, birds or butterflies. First, the souls were said to be converted into “precious green stones,” rare materials such as jade or turquoise that we have noted were metaphorically linked to life-giving powers; after four years the souls were transformed to flying creatures and returned to earth.86 Within the bicultural implications of the Malinalco paradise garden, the blue-green color moves the glyph-image of the precious bee from a cipher into palpable reality, or rather the symbolic and material realms interpenetrate.

Embodying the Culture of Color In the Aztec world—and, later, that of New Spain—colors (re)presented sacred relationships interwoven among the natural world, human society, mythohistoric associations, physical 57

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sensations, and material connotations. That is to say, colors and colorful things functioned within vast conceptual matrices so that a flower was at once a part of the natural world, a source for pigment, a metaphor for poetic and priestly speech, and a glyphic prompt in a synesthetic experience. We have argued that red, black, and blue-green operated in several registers simultaneously and demonstrate the significance of color in precontact and colonial Central Mexican sacred contexts, including in the narration of mythohistory, the attire of sacred entities, healing practices, and the adornment of sacred spaces. Given the powerful presence of color and the seemingly inseparable relationship between color (as the referent) and colors’ multiple and compounding references, the painted Coyolxauhqui Stone, discussed at the outset, raises an important question: what was the relationship of color to the concept of teotl (god) in the Aztec world? Simply stated, colors gave form to the Aztec world. Recall the story of Nanahuatzin’s transformation from a pustule-covered body, to a charred black corpse, into the red light of the life-giving sun. His body is “in tlilli, in tlapalli” writ large, a cosmic ideogram that scribes reinscribed each time they painted glyphs in red and black overlay. The body and the glyphs merged like an intentional palimpsest layered in sacred meaning. Similarly, the five colors of maize gave shape, substance, and subsistence to life in Mesoamerica. In its precontact glory, the Coyolxauhqui Stone, an ixiptla of a defeated and decapitated teotl (goddess), appeared in the five sacred colors of the Aztec world: white, black, yellow, chili-red, and blue-green. These five colors gave shape to the goddess and her bodily adornment, and they facilitated onlookers’ recognition of the monument as Coyolxauhqui, a recognition that must have recalled her story, the story of Huitzilopochtli’s birth, and the founding of the Aztec empire. In this sense, the colorful form of the ixiptla embodied a teotl and re-presented the mythohistory of Tenochtitlan and the Aztecs. More emphatically, the goddess Coyolxauhqui (in)forms the Aztec cosmovision: the sacred colors differentiate the significant elements of her body and her corpse tells the story of the culture’s founding. Indeed, it seems that one would be hard pressed to find a more literal representation of Taussig’s observation that “color is fundamentally involved in the making of culture from the human body.” Some ties among language, material culture, and cosmovision persisted through the Encounter into sacred expressions in the colonial period, when it seems colors continued to be seen in reference to God (consider the Christ at Chalma) as much as the natural world (recall Motolonía’s edible flowers) and human body (in descriptions of priests painted black). Materials valued for their luminous surfaces, and the colors that mimicked these materials, also persisted, as in the use of quetzal feathers in feather paintings. Amerindians placed a premium on brilliant objects, such as polished stones and iridescent feathers, qualities conveyed by blue-green and black.87 In addition to its luminescence, other transformational qualities of divinity were evoked by blackness, such as the opacity of soot and smoke or the absoluteness and “perfect blackness” of teotetl (jet). Long into the colonial period sacred works were being created that incorporated reflective materials, such as translucent shell, mirrors, gold, even tropical feathers.88 Similarly, shimmering colors encoded Christian values associated with the abstract qualities of the transcendent, and at the same time responded to a definition of divinity that was more emphatically embedded, both perceptually and conceptually, in the material properties of the color pigments.89 58

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Notes 1. Michael Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 8. 2. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex. General History of the Things of New Spain, trans. Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, 13 parts (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950–82), Book 11: 245. All General History citations refer to this translation and will appear as the book and page numbers (for example, Book 11: 245). 3. Lourdes Cué et al., “El Monolito de Coyolxauqui: investigaciones recientes,” Arqueología Mexicana (March–April 2010): 42–47; and H.B. Nicholson, “Polychrome on Aztec Sculpture,” in Painted Architecture and Polychrome Monumental Sculpture in Mesoamerica, ed. Elizabeth H. Boone (Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1985), 162–63. 4. One notable arrangement of these colors, as complimentary pairings of black-red and blue-red, appears analogous to the Nahuatl linguistic parallelism known as a difrasismo and explored below. This analogy was first suggested in Danièle Dehouve, “Nombrar los colores en Náhuatl (siglos XVI–XX),” in El Color en el arte mexicano, ed. Georges Roque (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México e Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2003), 68. 5. Marshall Sahlins, “Colors and Cultures,” Semiotica 16, 1 (1976): 3, 8, and 12. 6. Eleanor Wake, Framing the Sacred: The Indian Churches of Early Colonial Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 176 and 255–56. 7. Dehouve, “Nombrar,” 84–85; and Stephen Houston et al., Veiled Brightness: A History of Ancient Maya Color (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 25. 8. Sahagún, General History, Book 11: 245. 9. Ibid., Book 7: 18. 10. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, trans. A.P. Maudsley (New York: Farrer, Straus & Giroux, 1956), 193; Elizabeth Hill Boone, “The Color of Mesoamerican Architecture and Sculpture,” in Painted Architecture and Polychrome Monumental Sculpture in Mesoamerica, ed. Elizabeth Hill Boone (Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1985), 179–80; Dehouve, “Nombrar,” 52; and Carmen Aguilera, “Reconstrucción de la policromía de Coyolxauhqui,” in De la historia: homenaje a Jorge Gurría Lacroix (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 1985), 46. 11. Sahagún, General History, Book 10: 77. 12. On cochineal, see Abelardo Carrillo y Gariel, Técnica de la pintura de Nueva España (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1946), 14–17; and Elena Phipps, Cochineal Red: The Art History of a Color (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010). Phipps notes that cochineal was imported from subtropical Mexico and also found in South America. 13. Díaz del Castillo noted that “Much cochineal is sold” (Discovery and Conquest, 216.). Also see Carrillo y Gariel, Técnica, 9–11; Phipps, Cochineal Red, 26–27. 14. The actual chromatic terms, however, vary from between 11 and 14. John Gage, “‘Color colorado’: estudios culturales comparados en la América prehispánica,” in El Color en el arte mexicano, ed. Georges Roque (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México e Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2003), 105–6; and Dehouve, “Nombrar,” 89. 15. Although this chapter focuses on pigments, Sahagún and his informants discuss colors and pigments in other portions of the General History. Colors come to the forefront in their descriptions of the rainbow, agricultural products, and the merchants who sold pigments, necklaces, precious stones,

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and other valuable (and colorful) objects. See Sahagún, General History, Book 2: 64; Book 7: 18; and Book 10: 77 and 87. 16. Colonial lexicographer Alonso de Molina glosses tlapalli as “ink, dye, something dyed.” Frances Karttunen notes that the compound word tlapalli builds upon the stem palli (black clay used in dying cloth), which derives from the verb pā (“to dye something”) plus the noun suffix -li, by adding the nonspecific nonhuman prefix tla- (something). Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana (1571) 5th repr. (Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, 2004), 131v; and Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 186 and 250. 17. On the adjectival suffixes used to form color words in older Nahuatl, see Dehouve, “Nombrar,” 52–60. 18. Ibid., 52. 19. “Lib. XI. cap. xi of Sahagún’s Historia general de lascosas de Nueva España, which enumerates the colors used by the tlacuilo (a scribe and artist), as well as by the dyer and designer of fabrics, the potter, and others who used colors, gives the impression that the colorist was well versed in the knowledge of materials, their preparation, and their application.” Arthur J.O. Anderson, “Pre-Hispanic Aztec Colorists,” El Palacio 55, 1 (1948): 20. 20. “Muchos colores hacen los Indios de flores y cuando los pintores queren mudar el pincel de una color en otra, limpian el pincel con la lengua por ser los colores hechas de zumo de flores.” Toribio Motolinía, Memoriales e historia de los Indios de la Nueva España, vol. 240 (Madrid: Editorial Atlas, 1970), 303. 21. Gary Tomlinson, “Unlearning the Aztec Cantares (Preliminaries to a Postcolonial History),” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 277. 22. John Bierhorst, Cantares Mexicanus. Songs of the Aztecs (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 353, 67, and 77. Bierhorst dates the recording of the cantares to circa 1550–80, although they are thought to be preconquest in essence. On the complexities of translating these 91 “Mexica songs,” see Tomlinson, “Unlearning the Aztec Cantares.” Most scholars translate (in) xochitl (in) cuicatl as poetry, but Lockhart suggests the broader designation of “elaborated song” See James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 394. On “flowers and song” as encapsulating the “purpose and meaning of life,” see also Jaime Lara, Christian Texts for Aztecs (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 141–43 and 65. 23. Lara, Christian Texts, 245. 24. Nicholson, “Polychrome on Aztec Sculpture,” 145–46 and 51–54. Nicholson cites 1913 archeological reports on the Aztec architectural remains and sculpture excavated from central Mexico City/ Tenochtitlan and painted in the five primary colors. See also Dehouve, “Nombrar,” 68–74, who associates this palette with the colors of maize leaves and kernels; also Leonardo López Luján et al., “Línea y color en Tenochtitlan: Escultura policromada y pintura mural en el recinto sagrado de la capital Mexica,” Estudios de cultura Nahuatl 36 (2005): 17. 25. Migeul Leon-Portilla, Aztec Thought and Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 75. Leon-Portilla credits Angel Mariá Garibay with first suggesting this metaphoric pairing. 26. In the Mapa Tlotzin; Elizabeth Hill Boone, Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztec and Mixtec (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 25. 27. Ibid., 21, 24, and 252 n. 15. 28. Cited in Leon-Portilla, Aztec Thought and Culture, 172–73, from Sahagún’s Codices Matritenses. 29. On active native participation in early colonial visual culture, see Jeanette Favrot Peterson, The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Austin: University of

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Texas Press, 1993); Constantino Reyes-Valerio, Arte Indocristiano (Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2000); Samuel Y. Edgerton, Theaters of Conversion: Religious Architecture and Indian Artisans in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001); Lara, Christian Texts; Wake, Framing. 30. Wake, Framing, 176, 207, 55, and throughout. 31. Lara notes the black type with rubrication in widely available Christian publications. The use of rubrica with black lettering is also visible in the books held by the Church Fathers and saints painted on the stairwell of the Augustinian monastery of Actopan. Lara, Christian Texts, 9. See also Wake, Framing, 177. 32. From eztli, “blood,” and huahuana, “to scratch, scrape something, to incise lines on something.” Karttunen, Analytical Dictionary, 52, 80, and 270. 33. Karttunen describes this as a “related verb with the prefix TLA-,” the nonspecific nonhuman object prefix meaning “something.” Ibid., 270. 34. Ibid., 269–70. According to Karttunen, tlāhuitzcalli (the rosy light of dawn) also appears to be related to this word group. 35. Michel Graulich argues that this myth functions as the paradigm for ritual expiation; see Michel Graulich, “Aztec Human Sacrifice as Expiation,” History of Religions 39, 4 (2000): 352–71. 36. Sahagún, General History, Book 7: 4.Tecuciztecatl is sometimes spelled Tecciztecatl (He of the Conch Shell), and Nanahuatzin (Revered Pustule) was considered a diseased deity, making his sacrificial act all the more noteworthy. 37. Sahagún’s collaborators remind readers that “this Tecuciztecatl: that with which he did penance was all costly / in yehuatl, tecuciztecatl, in ipantlamacehuaya: muchitlazotli.” Ibid. 38. “zannimanommotlaztiuetz, omomaiautiuetz in tleco, zan ye cenia: niman ye ictlatla, cuecuepoca, tzotzoioca in inacayo.” Ibid., Book 7: 6. 39. “in tlachichilihui, nohuiyampatlayahualyo in tlahuizcalli, in tlatlahuillotl.” Ibid.; see also Book 1: 83–84. 40. “inin, quilmachoncan man, oncanmocuic in tlatolli: inicitolo, tenehualo, in aquintiacauh, oquichtli: quauhtlocelotltocayotilo.” Ibid. 41. “Auh in ichuac, oquizaco, in omomanacotonatiuh: iuhquintlapallimonenecuilotimani … cencatlanestia … auh in itonalmiyonouiiampacacalac.” Ibid., Book 7: 7. 42. Guilhem Olivier, Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God: Tezcatlipoca, “Lord of the Smoking Mirror,” ed. Davíd Carrasco and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, trans. Michel Besson, in the series Mesoamerican Worlds: From the Olmecs to the Danzantes (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003), 41, 52, and 182. He associates Tlatlauhqui Tezcatlipoca with Xipe Totec’s bloody-red flayed skin. 43. Sahagún, General History, Book 10: 175–76. 44. Ibid., Book 2: 209. 45. “Teotlipanmachoia: yehica, catetlatia, tepaloa, techichinoa, tlachinoa: ihuanmiectlamantli, inictlacnelia: caicnezcolo, ictlapahuaxo, ictlacuxitilo, ictlaxco, iciztatlatilo, icnecutlatilo, ictecullatilo … ictetlecuilolo …” Ibid., Book 1: 29. 46. Ibid., Book 1: 30. 47. According to Bassett’s analysis of teotl, the inechichihual (array, adornment) of a teotl constitutes a part of the teotl’s āxcāitl (possessions, property) and neixcāhuilli (exclusive things, occupation, business, pursuits), which contribute to its qualities as mahuiztic (something marvelous, awesome, worthy of

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esteem) and tlazohcā (valuable, beloved). Molly Bassett, “The Fate of Earthly Things: Mexica-Aztec Deities and Their Representation” (dissertation, University of California, 2009), 89–146. 48. Molina, Vocabulario, pt 2: 147v–48; Sahagún, General History, Book 11: 242–43. 49. Sahagún, General History, Book 11: 238. 50. Ixiptla occurs in two forms in older Nahuatl texts and lexicons: the concrete īxīptatl (localized embodiment, representative, delegate) and the abstract īxīptlayōtl (representation, image, likeness); however, both terms contain the same root concept of re-presentation by virtue of a shared skin. In order to simplify Nahuatl orthography, we use ixiptla (singular; localized embodiment) and ixiptlahuan (plural; localized embodiments). See Bassett, “The Fate of Earthly Things,” 165–74. 51. Sahagún, General History, Book 2: 159. 52. Ibid., Book 2: 161. 53. Alfredo López Austin, The Myths of the Opossum: Pathways of Mesoamerican Mythology, trans. Bernard Ortiz de Montellano and Thelma Ortiz de Montellano (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), 145 and 368; see also Olivier, Mockeries, 184–91. To the best of Bassett’s knowledge, no etymological evidence links the semantic denotation “black” with teotl; however, teotetl (jet) and the examples cited above and by López Austin demonstrate that teotl carried a pragmatic or contextual connotation associated with blackness. 54. Sahagún, General History, Book 11: 228; and Molina, Vocabulario, pt 2: 112r. 55. Elsewhere, Xiuhtecuhtli and Huehue teotl are associated with one another and with black; see Sahagún, General History, Book 2: 209. 56. Along with sweeping, incensing, and other duties, priests also practised sacrificial rituals. It may be blood from the priests’ ritual auto-sacrifice that introduced the color red to their blackened bodies; red is shown smeared above their ears and across their temples in the Codex Mendoza. See Frances Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt, eds, The Codex Mendoza, 4 vols (Berkeley and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), vol. 2, 149; and vol. 3, fols 57r, 62r–68r. 57. Olivier associates tliltilia (to push oneself up, to become famous), which appears in Siméon alone, with “tliltiani [sic], ‘to stand up, to become black.’” Molina defines tliltia as “pararse (to stop; to stand up), hacersenegro (to make oneself black),” and Siméon as “ponersemoreno (to make oneself dark), atezarse (to bronze oneself ).” Molina, Vocabulario, 148r; Olivier, Mockeries, 188; and Rémi Siméon, Diccionario de la legua nahuatl o mexicana, trans. Josefina Olivia de Coll, 1st Spanish edn (Mexico: Siglo Vientiuno Editores, 1977), 208. 58. Drawing on López Austin’s association of blackness with teotl, Olivier defines teotl as “divine and black.” Olivier, Mockeries, 191. 59. Fray Diego Durán, Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar, trans. Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 91 and 215; see also Sahagún, General History, Book 2: 87 and 219. 60. Fray Diego de Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e Islas de la Tierra Firme [1581], ed. Angel M. Garibay, 2 vols (Mexico: Editorila Porrúa, 1967), vol. 1, 51; and Durán, Gods and Rites, 114. 61. Ritual participants daubed themselves with such a black unquent before they entered steambaths, places of birthing and healing. Durán, Gods and Rites, 115–17; and Historia, vol. 1, 47–48 and 52. 62. Berdan and Anawalt, The Codex Mendoza, vol. 3, 2r, 66r, 64r, 67r, and 68r. On its use by seasoned warriors, also see Sahagún, General History, Book 2: 100. 63. Olivier, Mockeries, 188; and Durán, Historia, vol. 2, 443. The use of soot to blacken sacred bodies alludes to the mythic ash of Nanahuatzin’s cremated body, the material remains of his pre-transformation self.

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In their use by priests, the ashes act as a shed/second skin, much like the flayed skins of Xipe Totec’s ixiptla. 64. As described during the inaugural rites for a new Aztec ruler, Motecuhzoma II, in Durán, Historia, vol. 2, 415; Juan de Torquemada, Monarquía Indiana, 5 vols (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México e Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 1975–82), vol. 4, 78; and Olivier, Mockeries, 186. 65. Olivier, Mockeries, 14. 66. Durán, Historia, vol. 1, 47. 67. The sixteenth-century Tira, or scroll-like pictorial manuscript, was executed by four native artists and records events from circa 1298 to 1596. See Xavier Noguez, ed., Tira de Tepechpan: Códice colonial procedente del valle de México, 2 vols (Mexico: Biblioteca Enciclopédica del Estado de México,1978), vol. 1, 172–73; Boone, Stories in Red and Black, 214 and 47; and Lori Boornazian Diel, La Tira de Tepechpan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008). 68. Jeanette Favrot Peterson, “Perceiving Blackness, Envisioning Power: Chalma and Black Christs in Early Colonial Mexico,” in Seeing across Cultures: Visuality in the Early Modern Period, eds Dana Leibsohn and Jeanette F. Peterson, 49–71 (New York and London: Ashgate, 2012). 69. Francisco de Florencia, Descripción Historico Y Moral Del Yermo De San Miguel De Las Cuevas En El Reyno De La Nueva España (Cádiz: Imprenta de la Compañía de Jesús-Cristóbal de Requena, 1689). 70. Peterson, “Perceiving Blackness.” 71. “… sucuerpoahumado y denegridoimprovisadamente se manifestó y hallóblancocomo al presente se ve,” as quoted from Las Constituciones Diocesanas of 1702 by Carlos Navarrete Cáceres, “El Cristo negro de Tila, Chiapas,” Arqueología Mexicana 8 (2000): 65. 72. Ibid., 64–65. Navarrete suggests the deities associated with commerce, EkChuac (Maya) and Yacatecuhtli (Mexica-Aztec), both of whom were depicted as black in the codices. 73. Robert MacLaury’s conclusions are distilled from more than thirty dialects and language subfamilies in Mesoamerica. Robert E. MacLaury, Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica: Constructing Categories as Vantages (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), Table 1, 397–407; and xviii, 25, 97, 246, 329–33, 87, 480–81. 74. This blue-green mixture is known as “Maya blue,” and has been recently given the neologism “grue.” In the Maya area, the clay is paligorskita (formerly called atapulguita); a second clay additive, sepiolita, and others, are in the “Maya blue” pigments used on monuments in Aztec Tenochtitlan. Interestingly, during excavations under the Cathedral Sacristy in the 1970s, symbols of chalchihuitl or jade, symbols of preciousness, were located on the Templo del Sol (Str. A) painted with Maya blue; see Nicholson, “Polychrome on Aztec Sculpture,” 154–55. See also Constantino Reyes-Valerio, De Bonampak al Templo Mayor: El azul maya en Mesoamérica (Mexico: Siglor Veintiuno Editorial y Agroasemex, 1993), 123–27; Houston et al., Veiled Brightness, 40–42 and 80–81; and López Luján et al., “Línea y color,” 22–27. 75. Reyes-Valerio, Bonampak, 88 and 107. 76. Dehouve, “Nombrar,” 64–66 and 70. 77. “el aguaque el dia antes salíaclara y linda, aqueldíasalíabermeja, casicomosangre, la cual (agua) se dividía en dos arroyos, y el segundo arroyo, en el mesmolugarque se dividía, salía tan azul y espesa, que era cosa de espanto.” Durán, Historia, vol. 2, 48. 78. López Luján et al., “Línea y color,” 29. 79. Wake, Framing, 109–11. 80. Ibid., 111, 237, and 55.

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81. Perhaps most convincing are Wake’s examples of blue and red Christian churches in sixteenth-century maps that she argues are refashioned sacred mountains, although the churches are also represented in a wide tonal range that does not always include the opposing color. Ibid., 110–11 and 27–29. 82. Ibid., 209. 83. “el manto de nuestra Imagen en un color que ni es azul ni es verde, pero participa de ambos.” Miguel Cabrera, Maravilla Americana Y Conjunto De Raras Maravillas [1756] (Mexico: Editorial Jus., 1977), 22; Clara Bargellini, “Interrogantes sobre los colores del arte virreinal,” in El Color en el arte mexicano, ed. Georges Roque (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México e Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2003), 214–16; and “The Colors of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Painting in New Spain” (paper presented at the I Tatti and Kunsthisthorisches Institut, Florence, forthcoming). Cabrera was one of seven artists who, in 1751, inspected the Guadalupe image to determine its condition and verify its authenticity. 84. Cabrera, Maravilla Americana, 11–13 and 29. 85. Lara, Christian Texts, 213–17; fig. 8.23. 86. Sahagún, General History, Book 3: 47–48. Peterson, Paradise Garden Murals, 132–36; and Jeanette Favrot Peterson, “The Wilderness-Garden Paradigm in Sixteenth-Century New Spain: Paradise between Metaphor and Lived Reality,” in The Interlacing of Words and Things in Gardens and Landscapes: Beyond Nature and Culture, ed. Steve Dunn, 117–36 (Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks, forthcoming). 87. Nicholas J. Saunders, “Stealers of Light, Traders in Brilliance: Amerindian Metaphysics in the Mirror of the Conquest,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 33, 1 (1998); and Diana Magaloni Kerpel, “Real and Illusory Feathers: Pigments, Painting Techniques and the Use of Colors in Ancient Mesoamerica,” Nuevo Mundo (2006), at http://nuevomundo.revues.org/1462. See, for the Maya, the section on Mesoamerican aesthetics that valued the reflective, luminous surfaces of things in Houston et al., Veiled Brightness, 50–58. 88. Bargellini, “Interrogantes sobre los colores del arte virreinal,” 222–23. 89. Alessandra Russo, “Plumes of Sacrifice: Transformations in Sixteenth-Century Mexican Feather Art,” RES 42, Autumn (2002).

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4 The Expense of Ink and Wastes of Shame: Poetic Generation, Black Ink, and Material Waste in Shakespeare’s Sonnets Mitchell M. Harris

In the scopic field, everything is articulated between two terms that act in an antinomic way—on the side of things, there is the gaze, that is to say, things look at me, and yet I see them. Jacques Lacan1

It may be a bit jarring to readers of a volume on the materiality of visual culture to find in its midst a chapter of literary analysis on Shakespeare’s sonnets. But to literary scholars, this simply might appear to be the next step in an inevitable series of steps leading directly into the endless abyss that is the investigation of material objects in the literature of early modern England.2 As materialist readings of early modern culture have continually (and considerably) expanded in recent years—from Marxian readings of socio-economics to less politically charged readings of material objects like stage props (skulls, thumbs, swords, books, clothing, and the like)—the history of the book has found itself in vogue. After all, books are material objects. Here, then, I am speaking of a history of the book that operates distinctly from the history of the book as it was once understood within the realm of bibliographic and textual studies. The history of the book of which I speak has looked to the printing press as an “agent of change,” to borrow Elizabeth Eisenstein’s words, and has established early modern books as commodities proper—objects of distinct value and meaning in their dumb material state, wholly worthy to be scrutinized and evaluated apart from the content they bear.3 Thus, the very objects that were created to capture the words and noble ideas of writers of a bygone historical era are now offered up to the scholarly altar as material objects devoid of content, yet still expressing cultural value and meaning. The book that first appeared in London in 1609 as Shake-speares Sonnets. Neuer before Imprinted is certainly not beyond the reach of also being seen as a dumb material object. In fact, such an examination of its strictly material features would undoubtedly prove useful. But as I address this text as a material object—and a visual object at that—I want 65

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to address it as an object that merits greater consideration of its material embodiment because the author himself seems to be self-conscious of that very embodiment. In other words, in addressing Shake-speares Sonnets. Neuer before Imprinted as a material object, it may be helpful to rehearse briefly how Shakespeare seemed to be coming to envision the book that was capturing his sonnets as a material (and visual) object, and thus envisioning the book as an entity that was subject to many of the same problems to which other material objects were subject. This is to say, then, that as Shakespeare was composing his sonnets, the material mediums by which he wrote and published gave him enough pause to make him think about how they stood in relation to the immaterial intellectual content they bore, and one of those material mediums, ink (and its standard color in the early modern print shop, black), plays a significant role in that story. The possibility of such a story becomes evident in Sonnet 65, when Shakespeare returns to the primary theme which gave rise to the sequence in the first place—the need to secure immortality in the face of one’s inevitable physical decay: “what strong hand can hold [time’s] swift foot back?” he asks, “Or who his spoil or beauty can forbid?” (11–12).4 Instead of addressing these questions through the physiological nuances of human sexuality as he does earlier in the procreation sonnets, the poet-persona who writes these poems—whether he be Shakespeare or some fictional construct of his imagining—revitalizes the Horatian thematic of poetry-as-monument begun in Sonnet 18 through the concise metaphor in Sonnet 65’s couplet. Here, nothing can hold back time, unless, the sonneteer believes, “this miracle have might: / That in black ink my love may still shine bright” (13–14; my emphasis). As the poem’s conclusion indicates, selfreflexive meditations on the poetic process do not censor the erotic energy that compels the poet to write. Rather, such self-reflexivity enhances the poetic process, enabling the sonneteer to extend his erotic energies through newfound metaphoric transferences. “Black ink,” like the bodily fluids necessary for generation and propagation in the earlier sonnets, fights against time’s inevitable decay by giving birth to a material reality that outlives the sonnets’ immaterial generation in thought. It should come as no surprise, then, that the sonneteer continues to build upon the metaphors of poetic generation (because they are metaphors of eroticism) elsewhere. In Sonnet 86, for example, the poet’s brain, compelled by the exacting poetry of the rival poet, miraculously transforms from a tomb into a womb, helping his “ripe thoughts” grow (3).5 And in Sonnets 85–87, the poet’s one-time jealousy concerning the misuse and abuse of the youth’s genitals, which made the young man “common” in the earlier poems, transforms into a newfound jealousy over the quills and pens that now offer the youth encomia that exceed the sonneteer’s own poetic (and, hence, erotic) capacities: I think good thoughts, whilst other write good words, And like unlettered clerk still cry amen, To every hymn that able spirit affords, In polished form of well-refinèd pen. (85.5–8)

One should note, however, that this sort of metaphoric transference works both ways in the sonnets—that is, if the physical tools of the poet find themselves operating as the bodily members that they come to represent, then these tools are also subject to the 66

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same anxieties that govern the poet’s treatment of their representative bodily members elsewhere. Such anxieties are perhaps nowhere more realized than in Sonnet 108, when the poet asks: “What’s in the brain that ink may character, / Which hath not figured to thee my true spirit?” (1–2). As he acknowledges in the first quatrain, the answer to the question is “Nothing” (4), and because there is nothing there to body forth the reality of his feelings, emotions, and thoughts, he “must each day say o’er the very same” (6). Thus, whereas the poet boldly attempts to claim the monumentality of his sonnets in Sonnet 65, he retreats from such a position in Sonnet 108, where nothing can be written but rather repeated orally in order to find “the first conceit of love” and protect it from “time and outward form,” which both “would show it dead” (13, 14). This very sentiment, of course, is seen earlier in Sonnet 85, in the passage quoted above, where the poet trembles below the pen of his rival. How, then, do we explain this neurotic oscillation, to borrow an apt phrase from Eric Mallin,6 between one extreme and the other—a poet asserting his capacity to build a monument to his beloved and a poet impotent in that quest? Because of the manifold complexity of Shakespeare’s sonnets, there no doubt could be many answers to this question, but in the course of this discussion I would like to focus on one in particular: the uncanny coincidence that in both Sonnet 65 and Sonnet 108—two of the sequence’s most powerful and memorable poems—ink, or, more specifically, “black ink,” plays a central role in how the poet attempts to body forth, to borrow Theseus’s words from the “shaping fantasies” speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his immaterial contours of thought through the material commodity of ink. Ultimately, of course, the poet never finds comfortable refuge in the material mediums that can offer the monumentality he so desperately wants to secure. In the sonnets, after all, pages (or “leaves”) are yellowed and torn, books collect dust, and ink blots and stains. I thus am interested in investigating the material reality of ink in Shakespeare’s time in order to unravel a broader reading of the sonnets which suggests that the relationship between material processes (bodily, sexual, economic, etc.) and poetic processes (thinking, writing, editing) are not always divisible and are often bound together by implicit homologies that the poet knowingly—or perhaps even unknowingly—constructs. One such implicit homology, I will maintain, is that of the “spirit” that “ink may character” in Sonnet 108 and the wasted “spirit” that the poet disparages in his examination of heterosexual relations with the dark lady in Sonnet 129 (“Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame”). Shakespeare’s “black ink” never stops asking us to consider its metaphoric semblances (melancholy produced by black bile, the dark lady reflected in the darkness of the poet’s ink, poetic anxieties regarding the potential reduction of poetry to another form of commodity, etc.), and its metaphoric semblances never stop asking us to consider its material reality—that is, ink as both a monetary “expense,” insofar as the sonneteer is misguided in seeking a love incapable of a material fruition of its own, and a fixed stain on the hand of the poet, “the dyer’s hand” (111.7), who puts it to use. In this manner, the sonnets invite us to reflect upon the generative process of creating poetry, the material means of producing that poetry, and the blackness of the ink that gives that poetry its material reality, while also calling attention to the somatic boundaries that are erased through metaphorical transferences. 67

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The Materiality of Shakespeare’s “Black Ink” Because this is a collection devoted to investigating the materiality of color, let me first turn to the materiality of Shakespeare’s “black ink.” In our day and age, apart from the discursive lexicon encompassing race and ethnicity, black and white are seemingly colorless colors. In early modern England, however, after the birth of Gutenberg’s moveable type, one of the most important colors to be produced was black.7 Indeed, in his seminal account of Shakespeare and the early modern press, Colin H. Bloy explains “that those writers and printers who have made a special study of ink always paid the greatest attention to the black pigment.”8 The black pigment most commonly used for typography and lithography during the early modern period was lampblack, and the process whereby one would acquire this pigment was time-consuming and physically demanding. As Bloy notes, in order to procure lampblack, one would begin by taking pitch resin and placing it within an iron vessel. The vessel then was covered with sheepskins, which were usually hung over some sort of makeshift frame surrounding the vessel. Once this was done, the ink-maker would ignite the pitch, and wait for it to burn out. Once the resin was extinguished after its self-consumption, the ink-maker then beat the sheepskins, forcing the black residue which had stuck to them in the process of incineration to fall to the ground. This residue—the lampblack—was then swept up.9 The repeated interest in the production of quality black ink during the early modern period, especially one suitable for the press, reveals how elusive and painstaking its production was (even after the lampblack had been procured). While recipes for black ink used in printing houses do not begin to emerge until the late seventeenth century, it is believed that the black inks of Elizabethan England resembled them. In a recent essay, Adrian Johns suggests that the invention of Gutenberg’s press resulted in the demand for oil-based printing inks.10 Thus, he contends, the “oil-based ink required for printing originated, in all likelihood, in the experimentation of artists with oil paints.”11 As a result, such ink was both expensive and time-consuming to produce. To get a sense of how long it took to produce ink, one need only read Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683–84), the first comprehensive account of printing-house practices to be published in England. Moxon expresses a profound disappointment with the ink produced by English printing houses, suggesting that the “Hollanders” ink is to be praised above that of the English: “As First, They make theirs all of good old Linseed-Oyl alone, and perhaps a little Rosin in it sometimes, when as our Inck-makers to save charges mingle many times Trane-Oyl among theirs, and a great deal of Rosin.”12 Moxon goes on to describe the Dutch process of ink-making, which includes (to identify only a few parts of the rather elaborate process) using the finest aged linseed oils, burning off resins at an appropriate level of heat, ensuring that the ink mixture is properly stirred while boiling, and properly storing the ink for at least one year to ensure better drying capabilities.13 Moxon’s complaint against the English basically rests upon their parsimony. Compared to the Dutch, the English, he believes, are willing to cut expenditures by using excessive rosin or new linseed oil, both of which turn the black ink yellow.14 Today, of course, that such short-cuts were taken by some printers is visually apparent from the brown halos (the result of the yellowing black 68

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ink) we see bleeding around letters pressed in poorly assembled books of the period. That the ink would bleed also is a result of shortcuts: the excessive presence of rosin or new linseed oil (instead of aged linseed oil) prevented the ink from drying in a timely manner, thus permitting it to excessively penetrate the paper. To my knowledge, there is no known record to indicate the costs of printing ink in Shakespeare’s day. This seems to be the result of two problems during the period. First, numerous components were used to make black ink. It thus is difficult to specify how much good ink cost to make during the period, and give a precise account as to why some printers wished to cut costs in this specific area of the print process. We know, for example, that linseed oil was more expensive to purchase than rosin, but market fluctuations and agricultural conditions varied (often quite wildly) throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Second, print houses jealously guarded their own ink recipes. They seemed to do this because ink-making was done in-house in England until at least the mid-seventeenth century, perhaps even as late as the mid-eighteenth century.15 And even when print houses began to contract out for their ink—something that seemingly did not happen in England until the late seventeenth century—they still remained curiously secretive and guarded. For example, Johns points out that the new University Press at Cambridge “did buy equipment and raw materials to make its own ink, but for the most part had supplies shipped in from London or further afield.” In around 1700, he continues, “Louis XIV’s Imprimérie Royale tried to negotiate for the formula, only to be told that the Press’s ink was produced to a secret recipe by a firm in Antwerp.”16 For our purposes, however, printing ink may not be as important to examine as would Shakespeare’s personal acquisition and use of ink. That the purchase of ink (and paper) was a personal expense to be shouldered by Shakespeare—both as a playwright and a poet—can be inferred from its absence from Philip Henslowe’s meticulous diary, which never once documents ink as a company expense. So where or how did Shakespeare procure his ink? In answering this question, one can only speculate. Perhaps he had a close connection to a printing house that would sell him some, but it is more likely that he produced his own. There are seemingly endless recipes for ink in early modern England that were most often published in books relating to housewifery or the magical arts. Johann Jacob Wecker’s (1528–1586) Eighteen Books of the Secrets of Art & Nature, which was translated into English in 1660, gives one recipe for making ink, which Wecker titled “The best way to make Ink.” The process is rather elaborate. It includes frying “Galls” (that is, the excrescence of insects left on tree bark) in oil, adding white wine, “Gum Arabick,” and “Vitriol.” This mixture then was to be set in the sun for several days and stirred “continually.” This process was to be repeated as much as possible, because “the ink will be better than it was, and so it will be the oftner you repeat this.”17 Yet Wecker never mentions how many times it should be repeated. Presumably it could go on ad infinitum. Or perhaps Shakespeare learned his ink recipes during his grammar school days. The anonymous A New Booke, Containing All Sorts of Hand Vsvually Written at This Day in Christendome (1611) begins with the poem “Rvles Made By E.B. for Children to write by,” which seems to be a way for students to memorize how to make ink in preparation for their classroom exercises: 69

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To make common Inke of wine take a quart, Two ounces of Gumme let that be a part, Fiue ounces of Gals, of Copres take three, Long standing doth make it the better to be. If wine ye do want, raine water is best, And then as much stuffe as aboue at the least. If Inke be too thicke, put vinegar in: For water doth make the colourmore dim. To make Inke in hast. In hast, for a shift when ye haue great need, Take wooll, or wollen to stand you in steed. Which burnt in the fire, the powder beat small, With vinegar or water make Inke withall. To keepe Inke long. If Inke ye desire to keepe long in store, Put bay salt therein, and it will not hore. To make speciall blacke Inke. If that common Inke be not to your mind. Some lampblacke thereto with gumme water grind: Each painter can tell how it should be done, The cleaner out of your pen it will runne: The same to be put in horne or in lead, No cotton at all: when long it hath staid, The bottome will thicke, put more common Inke, And it will be good, well stirred, as I thinke.18

Both recipes may explain, in part, the synecdochical presence of gall as ink in Shakespeare’s plays. In Cymbeline, for example, Posthumus urges Imogen to write to him while he retreats to Rome for sanctuary. When he receives her letters, he suggests, “with mine eyes I’ll drink the words you send / Though ink be made of gall” (1.1.101–2).19 And in Twelfth Night, Sir Toby impels Sir Andrew to “Taunt [Malvolio] with the licence of ink” (3.2.37), bidding, “Let there be gall enough in thy ink; though thou write with a goose-pen” (3.2.40–41). Such passages reveal that Shakespeare possessed at least a basic knowledge of ink-making, but that he sees ink as a noxious substance (punning on gall as both an ingredient of ink and as bile or a sour liquid) perhaps hints at a more secretive knowledge of its various uses in “science” manuals. Indeed, while ink was believed to be noxious in certain contexts, paradoxically, the science manuals of the period also pointed out its curative effects. Bloy explains that “[t]hroughout the centuries, printing ink has in some way or other entered into the pharmacopeia of folk medicine.” For example, it was thought to be “excellent for the treatment of cuts, bruises and burns, and that the olive oil which ran down the screw of the press into the pan was useful for the treatment of haemorrhoids.” Stale ink, Bloy continues, “was used until recently for daubing on tumours, swellings of all kinds, ulcers and wounds.”20 To further this case for the curative effects of ink, it is worth turning our attention to Tanya Pollard’s essay on early modern potions and writing on the body, in which she demonstrates that medical spells of the period often “involve treating words, or even letters and syllables, as physical entities that interact directly with the body, primarily through external application or internal digestion.” As such, she maintains, “they demonstrate the curiously liminal nature of words: although they derive power 70

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from their status as abstract symbols, this power becomes associated with their material form, embodied in physical substances such as ink, paper, and the vaporous particles of breath.”21 Pollard, however, never makes explicit the connection between ink’s believed purgative and curative effects, and the possibility that the external application or internal digestion of written medical spells was plausibly intended to deliver the pharmaceutical ink to the patient. Nonetheless, what is important to take away from Pollard’s discussion of written spells is what Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr refer to as an “ecological perspective” which highlights the “mutual penetrability” of the body and its environment in early modern England, and by that time, ink had undoubtedly become an important part of that environment.22 For if, as the previous examples from his plays show us, Shakespeare sees the drinking of ink to be noxious, Sonnet 111 seems to point to a curative form of drinking ink, because one of its constituents (vinegar or “eisel”) seems to possess medicinal benefits. As Johns comments, “ink was a powerful substance associated with chemical medicines, Paracelsian solvents, and the like.”23 Thus, in Sonnet 111, when the poet’s “nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand” (6–7), he begs the youth to pity him and wish his health renewed, “Whilst like a willing patient I will drink / Potions of eisel ’gainst my strong infection” (9–10). The proximity of the stained “dyer’s hand,” much like the poet’s ink-stained hand, to the drinking of “[p]otions of eisel” seems to hint at Shakespeare’s secretive knowledge of the therapeutic possibilities of one of his tools of craft.24 Of course, it is not known exactly what led people in the early modern period to believe that ink was medicinal, but from the recipes that we do have, one could surmise that it was either the presence of its oils or its ammonias, depending upon what ailment needed healing. In early modern England, then, ink was not merely confined to the page. It found its way onto and into the body. Equally intriguing, however, is the converse prospect: how the body found its way into early modern ink. Bloy, for one, notes that printers’ ink balls had to be soaked in lye overnight in order to remain supple, and the most common form of lye used was human urine. Indeed, urine was even used to clean typeface. As Bloy suggests, [s]uch lye was pretty harmless stuff, but in the earlier days of printing the use of urine was widespread. The ammonia produced by urine after a time would have a strong caustic effect. Such practices, along with other equally noxious substances, combined to make an early printing house a most unhealthy and stinking place in which to work.25

The pungent odor of urine, in fact, led one contemporary to suggest that the soaking of printers’ balls was one of “the nastiest processes imaginable, which converted the press room into a stinking cloaca.”26 What is lesser known, however, is that some early modern ink recipes called for the express use of urine as a key ingredient in the ink-making process—an important piece of information that escapes both Bloy and Johns. In his recipe for making an “Ultramarine blew without Lapis Lazuli,” for example, Wecker suggests that one “Take Verdigrease, Litharg, Quicksilver, of each what is sufficient: grind them and mix them well with a Boys Urine.” By doing so, he continues, “you shall have a most beautifull colour like to an Emrald, either to write or Paint with.”27 71

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But urine was not the only bodily fluid put to use in the constitution of ink. Blood, in the stead of vermilion (a word that Shakespeare uses in Sonnet 98 to describe red), also was a constitutive element of some red ink recipes. John White provides a recipe called “How to make Mutton blood-red” in his book, A Rich Cabinet with Variety of Inventions in several Arts and Sciences: Take some of the clearest blood of a Sheep, and put it in a bladder, and with a needle prick holes in the bottom of it, then hang it up to dry in the Sun; this saith a Painter (that told it me for a speciall experiment) will make transparent and excellent blood-red colour, which you may also dissolve in your Allum water, according as you have need thereof.28

Thomas Kyd also acknowledges the use of blood in ink-making when, in The Spanish Tragedy, he has Bel-Imperia write her last letter to Hieronimo in her own blood. “For want of incke receiue this bloudie writ,” she writes, spurring Hieronimo to commit his concluding acts of vengeance.29 Regarding the relationship between red ink and blood in this period, Bianca F.C. Calabresi has noted that in “presenting red ink as blood, the early modern text sought in its own way to create the impression of depth upon the surface of the text, to generate the imagined insides of subjects through the marking of their somatic boundaries.”30 But, as we well know, the 1609 quarto Shake-speares Sonnets included no red ink. In fact, of the sonnet sequences printed between 1591 and 1609, Shake-speares Sonnets is unique in that it seemingly went out of its way to cut costs. It printed its sonnets across its pages, thus interrupting the singular material status of many of its poems, and it used only black ink.31 But this is precisely what I am interested in examining: how the 1609 quarto goes out of its way to exhibit its cost-cutting measures given the sonnets’ concern with materiality and “waste.” I am also interested in examining how Shakespeare envisions his sonnets, with only their black ink, as a way, in the words of Calabresi, to “create the impression of depth” and “generate the imagined insides of subjects.” Unlike Calabresi, however, I believe that Shakespeare’s black ink does not demarcate somatic boundaries, but rather calls them into question by means of the “mutual penetrability” of the text and its environment—and this “mutual penetrability,” in turn, has something to say about materiality and waste in the sonnets.

Wasting Ink or Writing Sonnets? Sonnet 129 (“Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame”), like Sonnet 1, is a remarkable sonnet because it captures many of the themes that continuously reappear throughout the sonnets: lust, shame, reason (and the lack thereof in the face of lust), the idea of possessions (economic and physical), and the disparagement of waste (economic and physical as well). And like Sonnet 1, Sonnet 129 ostensibly exhibits a masturbatory pun. Whereas the poet chides the young man for burying his “content” in his “own bud” (1.11), in Sonnet 129, the poet chides himself for wasting his “spirit.” Both men, then, never make appropriate use of the bodily fluids they possess—specifically, their semen. There is a key difference, however, between these poems. In Sonnet 129, the poet 72

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disparages not masturbation but his own heterosexual relations with the dark lady.32 He finds that his own “waste”-ful sexual forays—whatever they may be—are no more appropriate than the youth’s wasteful masturbation. Though divided by the expressions of human sexuality they disparage, the two poems reassert their connectedness through Sonnet 129’s explicit use of the homology that connects economic frustrations to masturbation in Sonnet 1.33 That the young man “wastes” his seed is evident from his feeding on his “self-substantial fuel” (1.6). And because of this, he makes “a famine where abundance lies,” thus becoming the oxymoronic “tender churl” who “mak’st waste in niggarding” (1.7, 11). Sonnet 4—often read as the sonnet that clarifies the elusive allusion to masturbation in Sonnet 1—makes the poet’s fascination with economic (and, hence, material) waste all the more evident: Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy? Nature’s bequest gives nothing but doth lend, And being frank she lends to those are free. Then beauteous niggard why dost thou abuse The bounteous lárgess given thee to give? Profitless usurer, why dost thou use So great a sum of sums yet canst not live? For having traffic with thyself alone, Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive. Then how when nature calls thee to be gone, What ácceptable audit canst thou leave? The unused beauty must be tombed with thee, Which usèd lives th’ executor to be.

The sonneteer attacks the youth’s “[u]nthrifty loveliness” in sheer economic terms (4.1). By not marrying, he appears, once again, to be a “niggard” (4.5). But, unlike in Sonnet 1, the young man is now seen as a veritable “usurer” who cannot leave an “ácceptable audit” (4.7, 12), because he has “traffic with [himself ] alone” (4.9). By not engaging in a heterosexual relationship that is intended for procreation, then, the youth’s “unused beauty must be tombed with” him (4.11), ultimately revealing how it is possible for a “tender churl” to “mak’st waste in niggarding.” Sonnet 129 also uses economic metaphors to reprove another wasteful form of sexuality, the poet’s own misused heterosexual activities: “Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame” (1). Here, “expense” is polysemous. On one level, it reminds readers of the economic profligacy of the youth’s sexuality in the procreation sonnets—that is, “expense” as an unnecessary disbursement (a noun). At another level, however, “expense” is verbal; it is the active sending out of a thing, whether it be material or immaterial. Sonnet 129, a dark lady sonnet, thus distinguishes itself from its young man predecessors in two ways: first, through its polysemous “expense,” and, second, by its movement away from the initial economic metaphor with which it begins. While the youth is unthrifty and wasteful, the poet’s impersonal and distanced consideration of his own sexual mores moves from a consideration of pecuniary wastefulness to self-loathing and ultimately to the observation of his own spiritual damnation. The “spirit” of line one also proves to hold multiple meanings: it is the poet’s own semen (a material emission), but it is also his own expression of thought (an immaterial emission). 73

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In this manner, the poet unwittingly effaces the somatic boundary that separates the material from the immaterial, and this effacement or erasure echoes the sonneteer’s earlier locutions on the writing process. It is only in the poet’s “black ink” that “my love may still shine bright” (65.14). Hence, at the very moment “ink” appears in the sonnets, it attempts to conceal its materiality in order to properly body forth the immaterial love it theoretically encapsulates. When ink returns later in the sequence, however, it accidentally discloses its failure to properly conceal its irrevocable presence in the poetic process. As I have suggested, in light of Sonnet 85, Sonnet 108 could be read as an admission that no material medium is capable of capturing the poet’s feelings— thus producing a neurotic oscillation of sorts. Here, in a sort of Hegelian self-negating reversal, I would like to follow that oscillation to its end. If we are to read Sonnet 108 in light of what comes after it, specifically Sonnet 110, then the tables are suddenly turned. The poet confesses: Alas ’tis true, I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view, Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, Made old offences of affections new. (110.1–4)

He thereby reveals that the sonnets he has aspired to create as monuments have been reduced to mere commodities, having been sold cheaply to the motley crowd. If this is so, then Sonnet 108 exposes the paradoxical absent-presence/presentabsence of material mediums in the poetic process. While there is “Nothing” in “the brain that ink may character, / Which hath not figured to thee my true spirit” (108.5, 1–2), there is still something. It is “the very same” thing that the poet “must each day say o’er” (108.6), So that eternal love in love’s fresh case Weighs not the dust and injury of age, Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place, But makes antiquity for aye his page, Finding the first conceit of love there bred, Where time and outward form would show it dead. (108.9–14)

Sonnet 108’s sestet reveals that the poet is inscribing his thoughts onto the page, the “fresh case” of his love—a point reified in the pun “for aye his page” in line 12. Indeed, Helen Vendler points out a host of puns in Sonnet 108 that suggest the anxieties of writing aroused by the sweet boy who wants novelty from his poet … The aural pun on wrinkles and ink (like wrinkles and writ in 93 and the conceptual puns on wrinkle and pen and graven in 100); the pun on writ in spirit and merit; and the fact that bred includes read (preterite).34

In his edition of the sonnets, Stephen Booth identifies yet another pun that intimates the poet’s writerly anxieties: “Since ‘nothing’ and ‘noting’ seem to have been pronounced alike … Shakespeare’s contemporaries may have heard a pun here where Nothing follows upon character, figured, speak, register, and express—five synonyms or near-synonyms for 74

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‘to note.’”35 In other words, the very word that, in light of Sonnet 85, seems to suggest that thoughts cannot be confined to a material medium (that is, “nothing”) also can be the very word that, in light of Sonnet 110, announces that the act of writing is taking place at the very moment it is purportedly not taking place (in other words, “nothing” as “noting”). Thereby, Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that writing in order to achieve monumentality paradoxically negates the prospect of monumentality altogether. Writing only takes place “each day,” because, unlike a monument, love needs a “fresh case,” ink needs to escape being wrinkled, and the “page” must avoid the “dust and injury of age.” And because writing must take place everyday, it ultimately grows common, but as Shakespeare reminds his readers elsewhere, “sweets grown common lose their dear delight” (102.12). The “common”-ness of writing then returns the poet-persona to the homologous sexual and economic anxieties that plague the young man sonnets. But how do these anxieties arise in the young man sonnets in the first place? Once again, it appears that a sort of uncontrollable metaphoric transference is to blame. It is as if the poet of the sonnets, in attempting to find novelty, cannot control the semantic slippage to which such a quest opens itself. This semantic slippage occurs by way of the narrative the poet constructs: the youth must procreate in order to become immortal (Sonnets 1–17); the poet rethinks this position and asserts the exegimonumentum theme of his verse (Sonnets 18–19), thus expanding the metaphors and tropes he can use to appeal to the youth; then, the sonneteer becomes attracted to the youth because he finds that his lavish adulation of the youth’s beauty is entirely convincing (Sonnet 20); in hoping to live out his sexual desires through the “use” of the youth’s love (20.14), the sonneteer begins to efface the boundaries between himself and his object of adulation (Sonnet 20 and following); because subject-object relations are suddenly blurred, the poet is unwittingly narcissistic—loving himself and his verse is an act of loving the youth (Sonnets 22, 24, 47, etc.); thus, the act of writing poetry is an act of sodomy—it is “Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame” (129.1)— abetting the “common” nature of the misguided youth (Sonnet 69). But because Sonnet 129’s polysemous first line is also an economical trope, I would argue that it not only chastises the sinfulness of wrongful sexuality but also the sinfulness of all forms of wasteful materialism, spending time idolizing (indeed, fetishizing) the love object, who has become an object-subject/subject-object, through the thinking and writing of poetry. Writing itself, however, seems more potently wrongful as it exhibits a material waste that is metaphorically tied to the material wastes of the masturbating youth and the miscreant lover of the dark lady.36 This suggestion of sonnet-writing as a material waste—in particular, a waste of ink—may in fact be a conventional trope that Shakespeare borrowed from Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, where Sidney writes, “Thus write I while I doubt to write, and wreake / My harmes on Ink’s poore losse.”37 But how does Shakespeare’s particular homology of the “waste of shame” and the waste of ink work itself out? Let me propose one solution. If Kyd was capable of envisioning blood becoming ink, Shakespeare proved to be capable of envisioning ink becoming blood. In 2 Henry IV, Westmorland asks the Archbishop of York: 75

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Wherefore do you so ill translate yourself Out of the speech of peace that bears such grace Into the harsh and boist’rous tongue of war, Turning your books to graves, your ink to blood, Your pens to lances, and your tongue divine To a loud trumpet and a point of war? (4.1.47–52)

Is it too much to believe, then, that Shakespeare’s “black ink” of the sonnets is his own wasteful stain (dye, infection, inficere), perhaps his own urine, his own blood, or, in following the Galenic model that saw semen as the concocted and cooled form of blood, his own seed—his own “waste of shame”? After all, Shakespeare seems to understand the body’s potent ability to express (and waste) its concocted fluids, when he has Lady Macbeth proclaim rather outrageously, “Come to my woman’s breasts, / And take my milk for gall” (1.5.45–6). It was John Milton, however, who would go on to liken semen to excrement in his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, thus erasing the somatic and semantic lines that separated semen from urine and blood. “[T]he vessell of voluptuous enjoyment must be made good to him that has tak’n it upon trust without any caution,” he writes, “when as the minde from whence must flow the acts of peace and love, a far more precious mixture then the quintessence of an excrement.”38 By erasing so many of its somatic (and semantic) boundaries (youth/poet, blood/ink, environment/page), Shakespeare’s sonnets, I would argue, leave its poet-persona with the quintessence of his own narcissistic excrement (especially when we remember that gall is indeed an excrescence) staring back up at him in the form of “black ink.”

Conclusion To conclude, I would like to turn briefly to the epigraph that began this discussion, because I believe that it speaks directly to the homologies that engage ink and its vicissitudes within the sonnets. During his discussion of “the Gaze” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Jacques Lacan uses the anecdote of the sardine can to demonstrate the fundamental instability of subject-object relations. While out in a fishing vessel in his early twenties, Lacan recalls, he is approached by a character called Petit-Jean, who “pointed out to me something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a small can, a sardine can.” Lacan notes that the can “glittered in the sun. And Petit-Jean said to me—You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!” Later, Lacan realizes that if what Petit-Jean said to me, namely, that the can did not see me, had any meaning, it was because in a sense, it was looking at me, all the same. It was looking at me at the level of the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is situated—and I am not speaking metaphorically.39

Lacan’s anecdote thereby reveals that he now realizes the speciousness of the subjectobject duality Petit-Jean unwittingly forced upon him. The object (sardine can) quickly becomes the subject (Lacan as the sardine can looking back at himself—the subjectbecome-object). This, then, is what Lacan means when he proclaims that “things look 76

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at me, and yet I see them.” The sardine can looks at him from a subject position, and yet he, an object, still sees it. Is this not precisely what the (im)materiality of black ink in Shakespeare’s sonnets does to the poor sonneteer? Ink is the material investment that both monumentalizes the young man and takes the readers of the sonnets into the immaterial realm of the cognitive during the reading process. Yet, once there, the black ink—and black is “beauty’s successive heir” (127.3)—shows itself to be bleeding back into the environment from whence it came—uncontained by the page, uncontrolled by its author, material once again, monumentalizing everything while being incapable of monumentalizing anything. Can we not suggest, then, that as the ink of his freshly cut pen captured the verse that made the sonnets, Shakespeare stared down at his paper, and a reflection in the wet black ink stared back at him? Indeed, the sonnets looked at Shakespeare, and yet he saw them.

Notes 1. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 109. 2. Douglas Bruster summarizes our current theoretical current by claiming that “Matter has clearly won the day over form in the study of Shakespeare and early modern literature” (31). Elsewhere, Jonathan Gil Harris has commented that the desire to better understand “material culture” has resulted in the appeal to “get ‘material’ in a new way—by embracing physical objects as the stuff of history” (47). See Douglas Bruster, “The Materiality of Shakespearean Form,” in Shakespeare and Historical Formalism, ed. Stephen Cohen, 31–48 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); and Jonathan Gil Harris, “Atomic Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Studies 30 (2002): 47–51. For further assessments of the “new materialism,” see also Jonathan Gil Harris, “The New New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects,” European Journal of English Studies 4, 3 (2000): 111–23; and “Shakespeare’s Hair: Staging the Object of Material Culture,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001): 479–91; also Douglas Bruster, “The New Materialism in Early Modern Studies,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn, 191–205 (New York: Palgrave, 2002). Jean E. Howard, for one, has resisted the dominating influence of the new materialism by urging scholars to remember its roots in Marxist theory. See her “Material Shakespeare/ Materialist Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare Matters: History, Teaching, Performance, ed. Lloyd Davis, 29–45 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003). 3. See Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), and The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). The literature that encompasses readings of the material book in early modern England is simply too large to rehearse in a single endnote. 4. All citations of Shakespeare’s sonnets are from Stephen Booth, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), and are cited parenthetically according to sonnet and line numbers. 5. On the early modern poetic trope of masculine parturition vis-à-vis the womblike brain, see Katherine Eisaman Maus, “A Womb of His Own: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female Body,” in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 89–108; and her earlier version, “A Womb of His Own: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female Body,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 266–88. See also Raymond Stephanson, “The Symbolic Structure

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of Eighteenth-Century Male Creativity: Pregnant Men, Brain-Wombs, and Female Muses (with some Comments on Pope’s Dunciad),” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 27 (1998): 103–30. 6. Eric Mallin, Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 135. Peter C. Herman also adopts this phrase in his examination of economic metaphors in the procreation sonnets: see Peter C. Herman, “What’s the Use? Or, the Problematic of Economy in Shakespeare’s Procreation Sonnets,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New York: Garland, 1999), 278. 7. My point, here, is not that the sonnets demonstrate a lack of racial language that hinges upon color, but rather that black and white were also colors outside of this specific discursive realm. On the sonnets and race, see Margreta de Grazia’s important “The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer, 368–89 (New York: Garland, 1999). For a broader discussion of “the colors of rhetoric” in Shakespeare’s sonnets, see Elizabeth D. Harvey, “Flesh Colors and Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt, 314–28 (London: Blackwell, 2007). 8. Colin H. Bloy, A History of Printing Ink, Balls and Rollers, 1440–1850 (London: Wynkyn de Worde Society, 1967), 42. 9. Ibid., 42. 10. Adrian Johns, “Ink,” in Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory, eds Ursula Klein and E.C. Spary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 107. 11. Ibid., 108. 12. Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing [1683–84], eds Herbert Davis and Harry Carter, 2nd edn (New York: Dover, 1962), 83. 13. Ibid., 84–85. 14. Ibid., 83. 15. See Johns, “Ink,” 110. 16. Ibid., 109. 17. Johann Jacob Wecker, Eighteen Books of the Secrets of Art & Nature, Being The Summe and Substance of Naturall Philosophy, Methodically Digested. First designed by John Wecker Dr in Physick, and now much Augmented and Inlarged by Dr. R. Read. A like work never before in the English Tongue (London: Simon Miller, 1660), sigs Tt1v–Tt2r. 18. A New Booke, Containing All Sorts of Hand Vsvually Written at This Day in Christendome, as the English and French Secretary, the Roman, Italian, French, Spanish, high and low Dutch, Court and Chancerie hands: with Examples of each of them in their proper tongue and Letter. Also an Example of the true and iust proportion of the Romane Capitals. Collected by the best approued writers in these languages (London: Richard Field, 1611), sig. A2r. 19. All references to Shakespeare’s plays are from The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edn, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2008). The plays are cited parenthetically in the text according to act, scene, and line number. 20. Bloy, A History, 8. 21. Tanya Pollard, “Spelling the Body,” in Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, eds Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 171. 22. Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, “Introduction: Inhabiting the Body, Inhabiting the World,” in Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 3.

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23. Johns, “Ink,” 105. See also William Eamon, Science and Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 24. In his edition of The Sonnets, John Kerrigan, citing Geoffrey Hill, observes that the Latin for “infect” is inficere, which means “to stain or dye.” See Kerrigan, ed., The Sonnets and “A Lover’s Complaint” (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 326. For a more elaborate discussion of the relationship between infection, staining, and dyeing in the sonnets, see Philip Edwards, “The Dyer’s Infected Hand: The Sonnets and the Text of Hamlet,” in Hamlet: New Critical Essays, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (New York: Routledge, 2002), 101–11. 25. Bloy, A History, 51. 26. See Johns, “Ink,” 118. 27. Wecker, Eighteen Books, sig. Rr4v. 28. John White, A Rich Cabinet with Variety of Inventions in several Arts and Sciences. By J.W. (London: Will Whitwood, 1677), 147. 29. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, in The Works of Thomas Kyd, ed. Frederick S. Boas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1901), 3.2.26. 30. Bianca F.C. Calabresi, “‘Red Incke’: Reading the Bleeding on the Early Modern Page,” in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 238. 31. On the material presentation of the 1609 quarto, including the quarto’s willingness to break its sonnets across pages, see Coleman Hutchinson, “Breaking the Book Known as Q,” PMLA 121 (2006): 33–66. On how using red ink would increase the costs of printing a text, see Bloy, A History, 30–41. 32. Valerie Traub maintains that “Sonnet 129 establishes the illicit and terrifying figure of woman-assodomite” (436), because the sonnet’s first line establishes that “any penetrative activity, including phallic withdrawal and emission and oral or anal intercourse” reifies the “defiling sense of profligate consumption” exhibited in the “male homoeroticism that infuses the first 126 sonnets” (437, 436). See Traub, “Sex without Issue: Sodomy, Reproduction, and Signification in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer, 431–52 (New York: Garland, 1999). 33. On the sonnets and economic metaphors, including the trope of usury, see John B. Mischo, “‘That Use is Not Forbidden Usury’: Shakespeare’s Procreation Sonnets and the Problem of Usury,” in Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, eds David G. Allen and Robert A. White, 262–79 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995); Herman, “What’s the Use?”; David Hawkes, “Sodomy, Usury, and the Narrative of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Renaissance Studies 14 (2000): 344–61; Neil Dolan, “Shylock in Love: Economic Metaphors in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Raritan 22, 2 (2002): 26–51; and Natasha Korda, “Dame Usury: Gender, Credity, and (Ac)counting in the Sonnets and The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 60 (2009): 129–53. 34. Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1997), 459. 35. Booth, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 348. 36. Indeed, this may say something important about the emergent market economy of Shakespeare’s England. As Elizabeth Pittenger points out, before the rise of a mercantile economy, writing, specifically scribere, the copying of manuscripts in medieval monasteries, was a form of manual labor and thus a form of penitence, or, as she writes, “a way of working off a sinful debt.” See her “Explicit Ink,” in Premodern Sexualities, eds Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996), 230. 37. Astrophil and Stella, 34.12–13, in Philip Sidney, The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962).

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38. John Milton, The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), vol. 2, 248. 39. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 95.

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5 “Luscious Colors and Glossy Paint”: The Taste for China and the Consumption of Color in Eighteenth-Century England Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding

During the last decades of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century, the intensification of the Anglo-Chinese trade led to the increasing presence of a vast new array of exotic products on the English market. Porcelain, lacquered wares, hand painted silks and wallpapers, painting on glass, gouaches, and watercolors formed the bright essentials of China’s authentic and derivative material culture. These artifacts, often catered specifically for Western desires, familiarized the public with a colorful vision of Cathay. The nobility, gentry, and wealthy middle class were eager to display the splendor, novelty, and strangeness of Chinese export wares in their homes. Chinese objects were especially appreciated for their “colors so artfully varied.”1 The admiration stemmed in particular from the textures, materials, and colors used. Seizing the economic opportunity for profit triggered by the new fashion for Chinese decoration, English artists and designers imitated in turn these goods and produced eye-catching artifacts in the chinoiserie style. Thus a market of luxurious commodities and semi-luxuries grew in the field of material exoticism, with a new range of objects sold at various costs. In this chapter I propose to follow the history of the Chinese taste in England through the lens of color and analyze sinophilia as an expression of chromophilia, whilst I suggest that sinophobia was linked to a burst of chromophobia. The taste for China, manifest in the consumption of Chinese artifacts and the popularity of chinoiserie, intersected with socio-cultural phenomena, ranging from aesthetics and science to political and social issues, such as nationalism, taste, and the definition of politeness. Scholarship has demonstrated that the arrival of exotic commodities helped define the ideas of taste and luxury and played a role in the “consumer revolution.”2 I choose here to examine how color was deeply linked to the perception of Chinese exoticism to shed some light on the cultural and anthropological impact of the reception of the Chinese taste on English society. 81

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I first investigate how the desirability of the most representative Chinese wares, such as lacquer, silk, wallpaper, and porcelain, was linked to the public’s enjoyment of gay colors and glossy materials. I then embark on a sociology and a physiology of the Chinese taste by focusing on technical practices associated with color-making and the fabrication of chinoiserie objects in order to reveal the scientific and socio-cultural agendas embedded in the acquisition of skills and techniques. Finally I will examine the condemnation of the Chinese taste expressed in terms of chromophobia. I suggest that the cosmetic nature of paint was used as an argument against the illegibility of chinoiserie in civic humanist discourses which aimed at making gaudiness the province of the foreign, the impure, and the deceitful.

“China’s Gayest Art”: Sinophilia, Chromophilia, and the Aesthetic of Radiance Chinese wares were particularly coveted for their beauty, considered in terms of shades and luminosity. Numerous contemporary commentaries insisted on the colorful exotic commodities to be found at chinamen’s and toymen’s shops, such as Peter Motteux’s The Two Fans in Leadenhall Street in London, “[w]here the tall jar erects its stately pride, / With antic shapes in China’s azure dy’d; / There careless lies a rich brocade unroll’d, / Here shines a cabinet with burnished gold.”3 The taste for lacquered wares was prevalent among the highest social classes at the end of the seventeenth century, where it was common practice to display a lacquered “cabinet,” in the form of a whole room composed of walls covered with lacquered panels complemented with the display of porcelain. Mary of Orange possessed such a room in the Water Gallery “pannell’d all with Jappan.”4 More often, collections of lacquered wares furnished English interiors. Many an aristocratic household prided itself on having a gilded and japanned cabinet (in our modern sense) on a stand (see Plate 12). A lot of lacquered cabinets were topped with crestings that presented small brackets for the display of oriental porcelain. Articles of furniture in glossy black and gold lacquer but also in polychrome lacquer were deeply admired and desired. Indeed two different types of lacquer wares reached England, known as Japan and Bantam wares. Japanese lacquer was made of a black ground completed by a gold lacquer design. The Japanese had developed the technique of maki-e, or “sprinkled pictures,” which involved the delicate and meticulous work of dusting fine gold powder over an outline previously painted in wet lacquer. In 1630, Japan excluded all Western merchants except for the small authorized presence of merchants of the Dutch East India Company. The lack of supply in the face of the high global demand for Japanese lacquered wares led the Chinese to develop and imitate the Japanese technique of lacquering. China supplied the demands of the West and of its domestic market for black and gold lacquer wares, responding to imperial and European commissions. The second type of lacquer ware was truly Chinese, and was known as “Bantam ware,” later known also as “Coromandel ware.” Bantam was a Dutch port on the west coast of Java from which this type of lacquer was shipped. In the eighteenth century, the trade of this polychrome Chinese lacquer was organized along the southeast Coromandel coast 82

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of India, and thus bore the name of Coromandel ware. This type of lacquer, produced in the province of Honan, was given the name of kuan cai, or “engraved polychrome.”5 The technique consisted of carving and incising designs in lacquer. Carved lacquer was then filled in with polychrome colored lacquers of oil paints. India, Japan, and China were commonly confused at the time and were all seen as countries from the East Indies. The Japanese origin of lacquer was responsible for the creation of the verb “to japan” which referred to the technique of varnishing on wood as practiced by the new trade of “japanners” in England. The geographical confusion between India, Japan, and China is manifest in the terms used to describe East Asian lacquered wares imported to England. Bantam work was also named “Japan cut-work” or “India work,” so it generally remains very difficult to identify the origin of lacquered wares in contemporary testimonies. Moreover, the Chinese copy of Japanese lacquer and its subsequent export to England made it even more difficult to distinguish production places. The palette of Bantam lacquer allowed for a great variety of colors. As underlined in Ephraim Chambers’ definition of Bantam work in his 1778 Cyclopaedia, English customers were keen to acquire these colorful luxuries: “Bantam work, a kind of Indian painting, and carving on wood, resembling Japan-work, only more gay, and decorated with a great variety of gaudy colors.”6 Etymologically, gaudiness comes from the Latin gaudere, meaning “to rejoice.” According to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, the verb “to gaude” then in use meant “to exult; to rejoice at anything.”7 Despite the negative contemporary connotations attached to the term “gaudy,” in Johnson’s dictionary, the entry for “gaudy” reads “showy; splendid; pompous; ostentatiously fine.”8 The gaudy colors referred to by Ephraim Chambers clearly highlight the idea of joy, gaiety, and happiness associated with the indulgence in bright colors. Chinese Coromandel lacquer was often cut up to form chests and cabinets, to decorate a commode or a cabinet, or to furnish wall panels. These enlivened homes with color and luminosity and, conversely, made their hosts radiant with the pleasure of being surrounded by such artwork. In the eighteenth century, rooms paneled with lacquer became more sporadic. A growing number of ladies’ dressingroom or bedroom walls were covered with Chinese export wallpaper. The imports of Chinese wallpaper started in the last decades of the seventeenth century and intensified throughout the eighteenth century. (See Chapter 15 and the accompanying color plates.) Wallpaper was imported in England through the private trade of supercargoes. 9 Chinese export wallpaper was of two distinct types, the fauna and flora or the scenic, the latter depicting daily life scenes, such as the cultivation of tea and rice, and the production of silk and porcelain. Most wallpapers were of a creamy or yellow ground, which allowed for these scenes to stand out in vivid colors, but the ground could also be blue or green. The exclusive nature of Chinese export wallpaper, together with the relatively short supply available, fostered the development of chinoiserie wallpaper, known as “Mock India paper,” to satisfy the demand of the middle class. Paper manufacturer Richard Masefield, whose shop was on the Strand in London, advertised the quality of his Mock India Paper which “surpasses everything of the kind yet attempted and for Variety, Beauty and Duration, equal to the real India paper.” Indeed, the durability of colors played a decisive role in determining the quality of wallpaper and fabrics. A good color was a long-lasting one, for no customer wanted to see the bright and gaily motifs displayed on his wallpaper vanish from the walls of the room. 83

5.1 Artist unknown, trade card for “[Richard] Masefield’s … Manufactory in the Strand, London,” uncolored etching, c. 1760. D, 2. 3231. © The Trustees of the British Museum, London

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Wallpaper and silk were probably hand painted in the same workshops in Canton since the technique required to stain wallpaper was very similar to the preparation of hand painted silk. In 1664, John Evelyn discovered Chinese goods brought by a Jesuit on his way back from China, among which featured Chinese silk garments and paper: “glorious vests, wrought and embroidered on cloth of gold, but with such lively colors, that for splendour and vividness we have nothing in Europe that approaches it; … a sort of paper … exquisitely polished, of an amber yellow, exceeding glorious to look on.”10 The terms “splendid,” “vivid,” “glorious,” “lively,” “polished” contribute to drawing a portrait of China as a wealthy empire, materialized metonymically by the brilliance and color of its artifacts. Although raw silk formed the bulk of exports, hand painted and embroidered piecegoods were part of the private trade of East India Company supercargoes who bought specific types of silk, like gauze, satin or taffeta. Such fabrics were used to make bedhangings, bedspreads, dresses, and wall-hangings.11 In a letter written in 1750, Elizabeth Montagu extolled the high quality of the silk used for the furnishing of her dressingroom in her London apartment of Hill Street and admired the beauty of colors: “My dressing room in London is like the Temple of some Indian god … The very curtains are Chinese pictures on gauze, and the chairs the Indian fan sticks with cushions of japan satin painted: as to the beauty of coloring, it is carried as high as possible.”12 Similarly, John Macky had nothing but praise for the hand painted silk furnishings of Lady Castlemain’s quarters at Wanstead: “[the] anti-chamber [was] furnish’d with China silk, stained in colors, incomparably fine; the bed-chamber, dressing room, and closet all also of China silk.”13 Like wallpaper, hand painted silk was of a creamy or pale yellow ground and was characterized by a wide and vivid tonal range. Floral decoration could be finished with a metallic outline of gold and silver. Such a pattern can be seen on Mrs Garrick’s hand painted silk dress kept at the Victoria and Albert Museum (see Plate 13). The collection of porcelain was a salient feature of the Chinese taste. “Chinaware,” as it was called at the time, filled cabinets and rooms for showy display, placed against the walls or set on the mantelpiece. Porcelain consisted mainly of two color schemes, blue-and-white and polychrome. The long-standing enjoyment of the blue-and-white type can be seen in the coining of the term “Nankin” which referred to the design in underglaze cobalt blue. The name “Nankin” was imbued with exoticism, linked as it was to the geography of China. Interestingly enough, “Nankin” did not only refer to blue but also to yellow. As Sarah Lowengard has demonstrated, “Nankin,” also spelt “Nankeen,” was the name of a color applied on textiles that varied from yellow to light brown.14 But in Chinese export porcelain wares, “Nankin” referred specifically to the blue-and-white scheme on these popular productions. The English relentlessly tried to fathom the mystery of porcelain making, but it was not until 1745 onwards that English manufacturers such as Chelsea, Bow, and Worcester started to rival Chinese porcelain, in a constant search to emulate the beautiful color of Nankin: “The adding the true old china blue to our European manufactures in imitation of Porcelain, may give a value which they have not at present.”15 Enameled porcelain was highly appreciated in the 1720s for its bright colors: “they [the Chinese] paint the flowers of plants, and some part of the birds &c; in very bright 85

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colors, after the vessel has been baked.”16 The English East India Company ships brought backs cargoes of porcelain belonging to the famille verte and famille rose styles, the Kakiemon and Imari styles, or simply of the traditional blue-and-white type. Many an armorial service was commissioned in enamel painted decoration (see Plate 14). Enameled porcelain pieces only appeared in China around 1720 and can be seen as the result of the Jesuits’ introduction of the technique of painting enamel on copper at the Emperor’s court. The flourishing of the famille rose style was the result of the wide use of pink enamel, derived from gold. Thanks to the Jesuits’ artistic transfer of stylistic techniques and skills, Chinese potters multiplied the array of decorative patterns and enriched the palette of colors. Thus the Chinese Imari decorative and color schemes, which imitated the precious Japanese porcelain then unavailable since Japan’s commercial closure, combined the use of underglaze cobalt blue with overglaze iron red enamel and gilding.17 Praised for their color and their lustrous texture, Chinese wares were used to adorn the body and the interior. Chinese attributes of brilliance were thus donned by the English home and self: the English household became an orientalized mirror of the self. The insistence on bright colors, gloss, and brilliance is indicative of the sensorial approach put forward in the aesthetic reception of East Asian wares. The visual and tactile pleasure conveyed by those goods testified to the sensual appeal of material exoticism. The preface in The Ladies’ Amusement; of the whole Art of Japanning made easy (1762) underlines the rococo features of the style: “with Indian and Chinese subjects great Liberties may be taken, because Luxuriance of Fancy recommends their Productions more than Propriety … yet from their gay Coloring and airy Disposition seldom fail to please.”18 The Chinese taste reflected the joie de vivre of collectors and amateurs and could be read as a worldly statement of their participation in the polite society of the time.

From China to Chinoiserie: The Scientific Quest for Brightness However, the fascination for “China’s gayest art”19 did not simply stem from a reveling in the playfulness of an exotic emanation of the rococo. I would argue that it cannot only be ascribed to the love of luster but must also be understood as the testimony of English scientific curiosity. The mystery surrounding the manufacturing of porcelain, the secret about the durability and vividness of colors, and about the composition of varnish, fueled the desire to emulate Chinese art and industry. Aesthetics fused with science and technology. If the enthusiasm for glittering ornaments reflected the rococo delight in sensuality and materiality, the encounter with China’s material production also gave rise to a technological interest in the discovery of new materials and manufacturing processes. The constant focus on technological improvements and inventions can be seen as evidence of the English Enlightenment’s attachment to the idea of progress and as a sign of the Industrial Revolution to come. The lure of China’s colored and glossy wares lay in the scientific admiration of the quasi-magical techné required to fabricate these goods as much as in the sensual pleasure of the aesthetic experience. 86

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In a passage from Erasmus Darwin’s epic poem “The Botanical Garden” (1789), the technical prowess and scientific knowledge of China’s porcelain industry are celebrated. Indeed, technological expertise is aesthetized in an ode to radiance. The stanza abounds in terms associated with color, emphasizing light and luminosity, iridescence, brilliance, and brightness. The passage describes the superiority of Chinese potters, as shown in their ability to produce such a colorful art: First CHINA’S sons, with early art elate, Form’d the gay tea-pot, and the pictured plate; Saw with illumin’d brow and dazzled eyes In the red stove vitrescent colors rise; Speck’d her tall beakers with enamel’d stars, Her monster-josses, and gigantic jars; Smear’d her huge dragons with metallic hues, With golden purples, and cobaltic blues; Bade on wide hills her porcelain castles glare, And glazed Pagodas tremble in the air.20

The “golden purples” are a clear reference to enameled porcelain, in particular the famille rose, whilst “cobaltic blues” point to the underglaze decoration of Nankin wares. The passage emphasizes the gestures, skill, and art required of Chinese porcelain makers to mould, fire, and paint porcelain. The verb “smear” is not to be understood here in its negative connotation but belongs to the specific vocabulary referring to the technique of glazing enamel. The luminosity of the colors thus created coalesces with the glowing flame of porcelain kilns. The description of porcelain making through the poetic evocation of colors invoked is accompanied by a very technical scientific footnote which explains the processes of color-making for “metallic colors,” namely purple and soft pink enamels. Pink, red, and purple enamels, we learn, are the precipitates of gold by tin to produce a red color or by alkaline salts to produce a “bluish purple.”21 The popularity of Chinese decorative artifacts triggered emulation and a sense of competition from English craftsmen who aspired to copy the much-sought-after Chinese wares. From the 1770s, there was a decline in the purchase of Chinese porcelain as the Europeans now mastered the art of ceramics. In England, Josiah Wedgwood was hailed as the English master of pottery. In his factory named Etruria, opened in 1769, he introduced new tastes in line with the renewal of classicism. Jasperware, which blended blue oxides with white paste and the use of black basalts, marked the turning point in the history of taste in ceramics and announced the decline of the Chinese stylistic influence. In his poem, Erasmus Darwin describes the industrial accomplishment of England now boasting fine porcelain and bright enamels, thanks to Wedgwood: GNOMES! as you now dissect with hammers fine The granite-rock … And pleased on WEDGWOOD ray your partial smile, A new Etruria decks Britannia’s isle. … Charm’d by your touch, the kneaded clay refines, The biscuit hardens, the enamel shines …22

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5.2 Artist unknown, trade card for “J. Cockerill … Chair Manufacturer,” uncolored etching, c. 1797. D, 2. 626. © The Trustees of the British Museum, London

The English, originally China’s disciples, finally became their own masters, manufacturers, and colorists. Soon, Chelsea and Worcester porcelain rivaled the excellence of Chinese porcelain as they produced faithful and fine copies of colored and blue-and-white wares. Similarly, the importation of lacquered furniture and japanned wares led to the development of japanning techniques in England and to numerous publications on the art of japanning, the most famous being John Stalker and George Parker’s A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing published in Oxford in 1688. The activity became extremely popular at the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century, especially among women who were encouraged to learn japanning as a pastime. Mrs Delany noted in 1729 that “everybody [was] mad about Japan work” and “[hoped] to be a dab at it.”23 She was more than likely inspired by japanned furniture in the layout of her paper mosaics, characterized by the choice of black ground for the assemblage and collage of her colorful cut-paper flowers. However, if A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing was intended to assist amateur decorators, notably women, it was also directed at professional cabinetmakers. The practice of japanning was thus doubly gendered: in the domestic sphere it became synonymous with female accomplishments whilst in the commercial, public sphere, professional japanners and cabinetmakers such as George Parker, Pierre Langlois, Giles Grendy or John Belchier provided expensive articles of lacquered furniture to wealthy patrons who could in turn dabble in the same activity. In the last decade of the century, a “painted and japan’d chair manufacturer” named J. Cockerill had two shops in London where he sold “elegant Japan’d CardTables and Bed-Cornishes [sic], the greatest Variety of Drawing-Room Japan’d Chairs 88

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in Colors, or Black and Gold in the most Superb Style,” undoubtedly intended to match his customers’ desire to furnish their Chinese rooms or to spice up their home with a taste of the exotic. A close look at the instructions on the use of colors given in manuals on japanning and gilding helps us to understand the crucial role played by the desire for exotic glitter in the economy of the household. When staining or varnishing wood, the amateur had to become a chemist who needed to be familiar with the proportions of ingredients, dosage, and the reactions of chemical precipitates. He also stepped into the role of an alchemist, transforming raw materials into textures which, when applied to an object, would create a work of art. Intellectual faculties, practical knowledge, and aesthetic sense were equally necessary in preparing and applying colors. The wood stainer could even turn vile substances into pure colors, a magical act not far from the transformative qualities of alchemy, which could supposedly turn urine into gold. Brasil wood had to be mixed “in stale urine or water impregnated with pearl-ashes”24 to produce a bright red color. A paler red would be obtained by “dissolv[ing] an ounce of dragon’s blood in a pint of spirit of wine; and brush[ing] over the wood with the tincture, till the stain appears to be as strong as is desired.”25 Colors could be purchased at druggists’ (or “Drugsters”26) premises but also at the newly created color-shops. There existed for japanning a wide selection of colors and varnishes to choose from in order to obtain “a neat, glossy piece of work”:27 ivory black, lampblack, verdigris, umber, a reddish brown similar to brown red, indigo, or yellow ochre (often spelt “oker”), were all fashionable shades. Japanning manuals competed to offer the best recipes to make “an excellent varnish, fit to be used for varnishing light colors, as white, yellow, green, sky, red, also … silver’d or gilded.”28 For Japan ware, black was usually preferred, which required the use of “lamp black” or “lamblack” to cast a “Jett-shining Gloss” on the wood.29 A black ground was most often chosen for japanning, but grounds could also, though more rarely, be white, imitating the delicate color scheme of polychrome porcelain. Red lacquer was also greatly appreciated. The technique of japanning consisted of applying coats of heavily pigmented colored varnish that was initially blended with oil resin formulation (also known as spirit varnish), such as turpentine or essential oil, or with dissolved resin, such as seedlac, sandarac, copals, gum elemi, mastic, Venetian turpentine, gamboges, or the red gum known as dragon’s blood. Each layer had to be polished and allowed to dry before applying the next coat of varnish. Successive coats had to contain less and less pigment. The last coats required the application of a final white or clear varnish. In their Treatise, John Stalker and George Parker intended to teach the amateur “to lay Blacks, and other colors, which are much in vogue with us and the Indians.”30 Stalker and Parker were cautious to distinguish Japan work from Bantam work: “The Japan-Artist works most of all in Gold, and other metals, the Bantam for the generality in Colors, with a small sprinkling of Gold here and there.”31 Although they expressed their preference for the former, they did not reject the latter, on account of the gaiety it provided for interior decoration: “This must be alleged for the Bantam-Work, that tis very pretty … and those who are inclined to admire colors, may find safe and exact rules set down by way of information.”32 89

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The imitation of and faithfulness to original oriental lacquer is evinced in the minute definition and description of Bantam work and in the advice given to the practitioner to observe a real piece of Bantam work so as to produce a faithful copy: “I should counsel that person, who designs to imitate Bantam work, to endeavour to procure a sight of some Skreen, or other piece; for one single survey of that will better inform him, than ten pages can instruct or demonstrate.”33 If color was welcome, inconsiderate gaudiness, understood here as the unpleasant association of jarring colors, was strictly forbidden. Bantam work was not to be mixed with Japan work. For the authors, the confusion of the two was the sign of the ignorance of wouldbe japanners who hid their incompetence behind an unruly abuse of color and were thus accused of being daubers rather than faithful and accomplished craftsmen: “the ignorant undertaker not being able to make his work look well and lively, inserts several colors as a file to set it off, when (unfortunate man) instead of art, fancy and skill, he exposes a piece gay, quaint, gawdy [sic], finical, and mean, the genuine product of ignorance and presumption.”34 Several sets of prints were incorporated in manuals on japanning where amateurs could copy the patterns or simply cut them out, paint them and paste them on the surface of the japanned object. Advice was given on how to add color to these cutout patterns, using gold and paint. It is to be noted that flora and fauna designs were very much appreciated for their botanical qualities and bright colors. The second pattern in the Treatise serves as a model for painting an exotic bird with a lustrous plumage, such as the bird of Paradise. The authors instruct the reader on how to make the japanned pattern shine with various shades of black, silver, gold and brown: This is a representation of Birds, which if you work with gold and colors, I advise that the body of the first Bird … be done in gold, the wings with bright copper, and, when secured, let its brest [sic] be redded a little with vermilion …. Then take your black shell, and beautifie the eye, and the touches about it with black; as also the feathering of the body and back. Let the wing be set off or feathered with silver … the tail, legs, and bill with gold ….35

Birds of Paradise were closely linked to the East Indies and were renowned for the bright colors of their plumage. With their heads of yellowish silver and their main brown or black plumage contrasting with flank plumes of yellow and white, the shades of their feathers fitted perfectly with the shining hues of japanned decoration. To add extra brilliance to compositions, it was recommended to lay speckles of gold on the designs, such as flowers, characters, rocks, and garments, in order for the scene to be “decked with gay and beautiful apparel.”36 However, measure, temperance, and decency were de rigueur in the application of color to resist any temptation to fall into the wild fancies of absurd chinoiserie composition. The empirical approach was advocated, with particular attention paid to observation and imitation of the original: [I]f you would exactly imitate and copie out the Japan, avoid filling and thronging your black with draught and figure, for they, as you may remark, if ever you happen to view any true Indian work, never croud [sic] up their ground with many figures, Houses, or Trees, but allow a great space to little work: And indeed tis much better, and more delightful; for then the Black adds lustre to the Gold, and That by way of recompence gives beautie to the Black.37

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Japanning amateurs would be rewarded with more gloss and more brightness for their artistic discernment.

Tasteful Textures and the Projection of the Self The richness and delicacy of Chinese artifacts offered a discourse on texture, a “texturology,” which corresponded to a sensualist approach to the experience of art, but which was also metaphorically indicative of the social and cultural transformations of those who aspired to be connoisseurs. Through their polished or smooth surfaces, real Chinese products or chinoiserie objects reflected the aspiration of polite society and thus were a means of self-fashioning. John Stalker and George Parker insisted on the analogy between the polite status of the aficionados of the exotic Far East and the glossy aspect of the lacquered ware from China and Japan. The shining and reflective qualities of japanned surfaces became the mirror, both physically and metaphorically, of household owners, male and female, turned into mythological Nymphs and Narcissuses of the domestic sphere: Japan … [is] delightful and ornamental beyond expression. What can be more surprizing than to have our Chambers overlaid with Varnish more glossy and reflecting than polisht Marble? No amorous Nymph need entertain a Dialogue with her Glass, or Narcissus retire to a Fountain, to survey his charming countenance, when the whole house is an entire speculum. To this we subjoin the Golden Draught, with which Japan is so exquisitely adorned, than which nothing can be more beautiful, more rich, or Majestick.38

Whitening, painting, and varnishing worked as metaphors for social politeness and cultural refinement. In the realm of female accomplishments, painting was one of the master arts. Japanning manuals urged for a sound arrangement of designs so as “to order, beautifie [sic] and correct”39 and prescribed the correct method for applying colors, enhancing the technique of shading and gradation, so as to reach chromatic harmony, “not to daub but to look for harmony.”40 Indeed, polishing colors, gilding and japanning required method, discipline, selection, and taste and thus stood as a metaphor for self-polishing. The specular and the spectacular merged in the worship of glitter and brightness. Hovering between light and matter, color bore an ambivalent status, as evinced in the aesthetic of radiance that characterized the reception of the Chinese taste. It was a scientific notion, yet the making of it was intertwined with the material quality of its concrete manifestation in the form of pigments, oils, varnishes, oxides. Japanning, glazing enamel on porcelain, applying dyes, pigments, and paint on silk and wallpaper were artistic practices very much akin to the art of cosmetics that consisted of beautifying the body by applying ointments, “rouge” on one’s cheeks, patches and moles on one’s face. Most japanning manuals were actually part of larger how-to manuals that prescribed recipes for beautifying the body and creating cosmetics. Stalker and Parker stressed the idea that japanning was an act of beautifying when they underlined the metaphorical interrelationship between the way the body and household were decked with glitter, comparing the “small sprinkling of Gold here and there” on japanned furniture to 91

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“the Patches in a Ladies countenance.”41 Moreover, a good color had to be long-lasting and solid, not fading with time. For Stalker and Parker, the protective quality of varnish preserved the body of precious cabinets and commodes, rendering them impervious to wear and tear: Painting only is able to keep us in our Youth and perfection; that Magick Art, … not only renews old age, but happily prevents grey hairs and wrinkles … Well, then, as Painting has made an honourable provision for our Bodies, so Japanning has taught us a method, no way inferior to it, for the Splendor and preservation of our Furniture and Houses. These Buildings, like our Bodies, continually tending to ruin and dissolution, are still in want of fresh supplies and reparations … the Art of Japanning has made them almost impregnable against both: no damp air, no mouldring worm, or corroding time, can possibly deface it.42

The use of the term “deface” and the vocabulary relating to the body (“ruin,” “grey hairs,” “wrinkles”) reveal the cosmetic nature of japanning. As makeup preserved the face from showing the ravages of time, so good varnish kept japanned furniture forever youthful, unmarred by cracks which, like wrinkles, betrayed the passage of time and ultimately disfigured it.

“Gaudy Chinese Crudity”: Chromophobia and the Expression of Sinophobia The visual and tactile modes of apprehending color that lay at the core of the enjoyment of the Chinese style were widely welcome throughout the eighteenth century, but they also received severe rebuke. Chinese ornamentation, discussed in the debate on nature and artifice, crystallized the problem of the status of paint, which, in eighteenthcentury parlance, also referred to cosmetics, “colours laid on the face.”43 The sensuality of chinoiserie was condemned by the partisans of the classical taste. They leveled sharp criticism at the splurge in bright colors and fantasy seen as the utmost disregard for the rules of perspective and the expression of contempt for the principles of artistic harmony. Gaudiness, in its negative understanding, was associated with the luring attraction of chinoiserie. According to the wallpaper maker John Baptist Jackson, colorful Chinese export wallpapers had to be dismissed on account of the absurdity of pictorial representation. He opposed the tasteful, harmonious design and color pattern of his production to the lurid colors of Chinese export wallpaper that, he claimed, revolted against the notion of taste: Whatever is of Art or Nature may be introduced into this Design of sitting up and furnishing Rooms, with all the Truth of Drawing, Light and Shadow, and great Perfection of Colouring … It need not to be mentioned to any Person of the least Taste, how much this Way of finishing Paper exceeds every other hitherto known; ’tis true, however, that the gay glaring colors in broad patches of red, green, yellow, blue, etc. which are to pass for flowers and other objects which delight the eye that has no true judgment belonging to it, are not to be found in this as in the common paper but Colors softening into one another, with Harmony and Repose, and true Imitations of Nature in Drawing and Design … Nor are there lions leaping from bough to bough like cats, houses in the air, clouds and sky upon the ground, a thorough confusion of all the elements, nor men and women, with every other animal, turn’d monsters, like the figures in the Chinese paper, ever to be seen in this work.44

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In rejecting the appealing aspect of Chinese export or “mock India” wallpaper, Jackson was of course advocating his own wares. But beside the obvious advertising stance, Jackson was also pleading for a return to classical canons, urging for a respect of the conventions of pictorial art, lying in the harmonious use of drawing and color. According to the champions of the classical taste, the sensuality of chinoiserie textures and colors lured and deceived the eye. The foreign seductiveness of a fantasized Eastern exoticism took the public further away from the representation of truth in art: Persons who should prefer gaudy and unmeaning Papers, (so generally met with) would prefer a fan to a picture of Raphael, Carrace, Guido or Dominichino, and those who chuse the Chinese manner ought to admire, in pursuit of that same taste, the crooked, disproportioned and ugly, in preference to the strait, regular and beautiful. ’Tis by this very means of ill judgment in furnishing apartments, that the true taste of the person is unthinkingly betray’d; those little and seemingly distant things offer the clue which leads to the discovering the whole mind, and undoes, perhaps, all that character of being a true judge of the polite arts which they are so fond of establishing.45

To many observers, Chinese paintings did away with pictorial mimesis to give vent to fantasy and nonsense. In 1766, Malachy Postlethwayt ascribed the popularity of Chinese export painting to colors, diversity, and fantasy: “the pictures are valued for the liveliness and briskness of the colors and variety of figures. Odd fancies commonly hit the general taste, and the Chinese do not seem to have any fancy for pieces of gravity.”46 The absence of perspective in Chinese painting offered a striking contrast with the use of colors, the gradation of hues, and the rules of perspective that, since the Renaissance, had codified European painting. Consequently, the pictorial system of the Chinese Other was rejected, seen as a lack of harmony and unity in representation. Perspective creates a reassuring relationship between the viewer and the represented scene. By constructing harmonious proportions within the painting according to the outside gaze of the spectator, the use of perspective enables the latter to measure the world.47 Against “the splendid Impertinence, the unmeaning Glitter, the tasteless Profusion, and monstrous Enormities”48 of the Chinese taste evoking the grotesque and the unnatural, the masters of the Renaissance represented safe, valuable references. The colorful Chinese taste, seen as the epitome of gaudiness, was disavowed for its connotations of extravagance and unbridled sensuality. In The Architectural Remembrancer published in 1751, Robert Morris deplored what he called the “impropriety of ornament,”49 namely the use of jarring colors in the imitation of Chinese decoration: [T]he (improperly called) Chinese Taste … consists in meer whim and chimera, without rule or order, it requires no fertility of genius to put in execution; the principals are a good choice of chains and bells, and different colors of paint … a few laths, nailed across each other, and made black, red, blue, yellow, or any other color, or mix’d with any sort of chequer work, or impropriety of ornament, completes the whole.50

Chinoiserie was rejected on the moral grounds of the “civic humanist theory of painting”51 where amateurs were expected not to surrender to sensuous art but to aspire to the nobler function of art, namely the representation of truth and beauty. Chinoiserie was seen as a form of subjectivist hedonism,52 clearly opposed to a patrician conception of art that considered painting as the vehicle for raising the soul. The playful and 93

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sensuous rococo features of the Chinese style conveyed libertine overtones that clashed with the respectability and virtuous aspiration of high art. Lord Shaftesbury urged connoisseurs to turn a deaf ear to the deceitful siren calls of colorful Chinese exoticism: Grotesque and monstrous figures often please … But is this pleasure right? And shall I follow it, if it presents? Not strive with it, or endeavour to prevent its growth or prevalency in my temper? … Effeminacy pleases me. The Indian figures, the Japan-work, the enamel strikes my eye. The luscious colors and glossy paint gain upon my fancy … But what ensues?—Do I not for ever forfeit my good relish? 53

The rejection of chinoiserie fueled the continuing debate on the perverse nature of color, started in Antiquity and fought between the Poussinists and the Rubenists in the seventeenth century. Jacqueline Lichtenstein has argued that in the ethical vocabulary applied to aesthetics and used in the fight about the supremacy of drawing over color, a comparison was established between color and temptation embodied in the figure of the female courtesan: “Like the charms of feminine seduction, the captivating graces of coloris are the object of the same moral reprobation. When ornament becomes makeup on a canvas, painting becomes a woman—a woman of the most dangerous sort, illegitimate like the pleasure whose symbol she is.”54 Chinoiserie was considered superficial and entertaining and became synonymous with low culture. The style was accused of standing for a celebration of deviance, creating an unorthodox stylistic temptation for the audience and, as such, a threat to good taste. Thus chinoiserie appeared as an early form of kitsch, belonging to the culture of the exotic and the foreign, which did not stimulate intellectually, but called for the power of the imagination.55 The distrust of exotic splendor reflected the age’s engagement in a close scrutiny of aesthetic standards and its aspiration to create universal visual standards, postulating an imitation of nature in keeping with a Neoplatonic idealization of the concept of beauty. When setting the criteria of beauty, Lord Shaftesbury declared in his Characteristicks: “The senseless part of mankind admire gaudiness: the better sort and those who are good judges admire simplicity.”56 Mostly seen as grounded in the realm of the feminine and the pretty, the Chinese taste was dismissed as evidence of bad taste and of a lack of aesthetic discernment. On top of being seen as indulging in rococo glitter, the Chinese taste was identified with a worship of the foreign, a behavior that contradicted patriotism and had to be rescued by a return to classicism. Eastern goods and their influence on home decoration symbolized the invasion of the Chinese Other. As such, desire and repulsion represented two facets of the reaction to foreign artistic influence, in the form of either celebration or irrational fear. Acting as a bewildering surface, sensual chinoiserie challenged the Neoplatonic doctrine of art and threatened to topple the moral and political edifice of the English Republic of letters. This exploration began with an investigation of the relationship between the reception of Chinese wares and the celebration of color; it also highlighted the way that the culture of Eastern and Eastern-looking commodities revealed new links, or “reflections,” between brightness and domestic as well as national identity. Returning to the burst of chromophobia associated with material sinophobia, it is important to make a final remark on how the Chinese taste was, after all, a colorful and mental English 94

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construct, resulting from England’s orientalization of China. Indeed, the use of vivid colors and the absence of proportion in painting that were so much criticized in England belonged to the pictorial practice of court painting in China and, as we have seen, was the legacy of a European presence, that of the Jesuits. The Chinese refused to export the nobler genre of elite painting reserved for the literati, which was much more nuanced and sober. The English detractors of Chinese art had therefore no knowledge of the subtle variations of black and white used to convey poetical depth in Chinese painting. They eliminated the learned aspect of Chinese visual culture. Francois Jullien’s study on the principle of “blandness” or “flavorlessness” (dan in Chinese) found in Chinese art, literature, music, and painting, has convincingly shown how Chinese landscape painting lay in the delicate contrast of lines and in an unobtrusive palette of subtle black and white to convey, through a restricted use of color, a powerful symbolism.57 In stark contrast to this principle, the vividly colorful Chinese export wares gave the English an image that corresponded to their preconceived judgment on Chinese art based on color, liveliness, and gaiety.

Notes 1. Lord George Macartney, An Embassy to China, Being the Journal Kept by Lord Macartney During his Embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-lun, 1793–1794 [1797], ed. J.L. Cranmer-Byng (London: Longmans, 1962), 124. 2. See Neil McKendrick et al., The Birth of a Consumer Society. The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa, 1983); Maxine Berg, “Asian Luxuries and the Making of the European Consumer Revolution,” in Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods, ed. Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 228–44. 3. Mary Montagu, “Friday—The Toilette, Lydia,” Town Eclogues (London, 1715). 4. Celia Fiennes, The Journey of Celia Fiennes, ed. Christopher Morris (London: Cresset, 1947), 60. 5. For this information, I draw heavily on Craig Clunas, ed., Chinese Export Art and Design (Westerham: V&A Publications, 1987), 80–96. See also Margaret Jourdain and Soame Jenyns, Chinese Export Art in the Eighteenth Century [1950], (London: Spring, 1967), 16–24; Oliver Impey, Chinoiserie: The Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art and Decoration (New York: Scribner, 1977), 111–27; Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie. The Vision of Cathay (London: Murray, 1961), 70–76. 6. Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Science (London, 1778), vol. 1, 397. 7. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of English Language (London, 1755), vol. 1, s.v. “gaude.” 8. Ibid., s.v. “gaudy.” 9. For more information, see Frederike Wappenschmidt, Chinesische Tapeten für Europa vom Rollbild zur Bildtapete (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1989); Eric Arthur Entwisle, “Chinese Painted Wallpapers,” The Connoisseur 93 ( June 1934): 367–74; Gill Saunders, Wallpaper in Interior Decoration (London: V&A Publications, 2002). 10. John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. William Bray (London: Dent/Everyman’s Library, 1973), 387. 11. See Clunas, Chinese Export Art and Design, 22–28; and Jourdain and Jenyns, Chinese Export Art, 61–65.

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12. Cited in Emily J. Climenson, Elizabeth Montagu: The Queen of the Blue-Stockings, Her Correspondence from 1720 to 1761, 2 vols (London, 1906). Letter from Elizabeth Montagu to Sarah Scott, 3 January 1750, vol. 1, 271. 13. John Macky, A Journey through England in Familiar Letters from a Gentleman Here to his Friend Abroad (London: Pemberton, 1722), 21. 14. Sarah Lowengard, “Colors and Color Making in the Eighteenth Century,” in Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650–1850, eds Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 105–06. 15. William Phorson, The School of Wisdom and Arts (London, 1783), 322. 16. Ibid., 310. 17. See Jourdain and Jenyns, Chinese Export Art, 53–56. See also Michel Beurdeley, Les Peintres jésuites en Chine au 18ème siècle (Arcueil: Anthese, 1997). For a detailed account of decorative and color patterns, especially regarding the Imari, blue-and-white and famille rose and verte decorations, see Louis Mezin, Cargaisons de Chine (Lorient: Musée de la Compagnie des Indes, 2002). 18. Anon., The Ladies’ Amusement; of the whole Art of Japanning made easy (London: Robert Sayer, 1762), 3–4. 19. Thomas Gray, “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes” (London, 1747). 20. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Part I (London: Jones & Company, 1825), 34. 21. Ibid., 96. 22. Ibid., 34. 23. Mrs Delany to Anne Granville, 9 September 1729, in Mary Delany, Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, with Interesting Reminiscences of King George III and Queen Charlotte, ed. Lady Llanover (London: Richard Bentley, 1861–62), vol. 1, 213. 24. Ibid., 60. 25. Ibid., 60. 26. John Stalker and George Parker, Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688), 3. 27. Ibid., 9. 28. Anon., The Laboratory, or School of Arts (London, 1738), 166. 29. Anon., A Family Jewell, or the Woman’s Councellor (London, 1704), 18. 30. Stalker and Parker, Treatise, Preface and 15. 31. Ibid., 36. 32. Ibid., 7. 33. Ibid., 37. 34. Ibid., 6–7. 35. Ibid., 43–44. 36. Ibid., 33. 37. Ibid., 40. 38. Ibid., Preface.

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39. Ibid., 40. 40. Ibid., 49. 41. Ibid., 36. 42. Ibid., Preface. 43. Johnson, Dictionary, vol. 2, s.v. “paint.” 44. John Baptist Jackson, An Essay on the Invention of Engraving and Printing (London, 1754), 9. 45. Ibid. 46. Quoted in Alan V. Sugden and John L. Edmonsen, A History of English Wallpaper 1509–1914 (London: Batsford, 1925), 101. The exact reference to Malachy Postlethwayt’s work is not provided by the authors. 47. Daniel Arasse, Histoires de peintures (Paris: Denoël, 2004), 59–71. 48. John Gilbert Cooper, Letters Concerning Taste (London: Dodsley, 1755), Letter IX, 61–62. 49. Robert Morris, The Architectural Remembrancer (London, 1751), Postscript. 50. Ibid. 51. John Barrell, “Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Englishness of English Art,” in Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 159. 52. Gérard Genette, L’Oeuvre de l’art: La relation esthétique (Paris: Seuil, 1997). 53. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, Soliloquy: or, advice to an Author (London, 1710), 229. 54. Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age [1989] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 190. 55. For a definition of kitsch, see Thomas Kulka, Kitsch and Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 56. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (London, 1711), 161. 57. François Jullien, L’Eloge de la fadeur (Paris: Editions Philippe Picquier, 1991), 18. For an English translation see In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics (New York: Zone, 2004).

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Part II Producing and Exchanging Pigments and Dyes

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

6 Seeking Red: The Production and Trade of Cochineal Dye in Oaxaca, Mexico, 1750–1821 Jeremy Baskes

Long-distance trade was an integral aspect of Mexican civilizations for centuries before the arrival of Europeans. Tropical feathers, obsidian tools, jade, and cocoa beans were just a few of the items exchanged between distant regions. The Spanish conquest of Mexico expanded markets. Goods produced in Europe were introduced into the New World and American goods were shipped to European consumers. While the conquest altered the basket of marketed goods, economic exchange and participation in markets were nothing new to the Mexican people. Indisputably, the American export most coveted in Europe was silver. Throughout the colonial period, silver was the single most important Mexican export by value, exceeding in most years the value of all other exports combined. Unfortunately, silver bullion’s dominance of the export trade has tended to eclipse the study of other colonial products exported to Europe. While silver was important, other commodities were also exported in large quantities, especially indigenous dyestuffs such as blue indigo and red cochineal. This chapter concentrates on the production and trade of cochineal dye, or simply grana as it was known in colonial Mexico. For much of the colonial period, cochineal was, after silver, Mexico’s second most valuable export, a commodity so highly demanded in Europe that, claimed one seventeenth-century Spanish merchant, it virtually guaranteed its seller a handsome profit.1 Crimson-colored cochineal dye comes from the dried bodies of Dactylopius coccus, an insect indigenous to southern Mexico. Parasitic to the nopal variety of cactus, cochineal, as the insect is commonly known, thrives when protected from its many natural predators. In the “wild,” cochineal insects neither reach the size nor the potency of domesticated insects.2 The practice of producing dye from insects was not unique to America; even prior to the conquest Europeans had been producing red dye from an insect called kermes for more than a thousand years.3 Mexican cochineal, however, 101

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revolutionized the dye business, for it was far more potent and brilliant than red dyes previously known in Europe (see Plate 15). Cochineal was distinguished from all other colonial exports for its production was almost entirely carried out by Indians on small peasant plots. Labor demands in the production of grana were high. While not arduous, it was necessary to pay constant attention to the cochineal to protect it from its many predators which included chickens, turkeys, lizards, and a number of insects.4 Because grana production was labor-intensive and there were no economies of scale, large-scale production based on wage labor proved uncompetitive.5 While plantations did exist, they were few and their total output was small.6 The first step in the production of cochineal was the preparation of a nopalera, a nopal cactus patch. Peasants created a nopalera by digging small holes and then inserting a cactus leaf about half-way into each hole, leaving the rest of the leaf exposed. Placed in the earth in this way, the cactus began to grow and after eighteen months to three years was sufficiently mature to serve as host to the parasitic cochineal insect. A nopalera could be placed on virtually any plot of land, although well-irrigated land produced the best cacti.7 When a nopalera reached sufficient maturity, it was time to “seed” the cacti with cochineal insects. Producers attached “nidos,” nests, filled with female insects to the joints of each plant. While nests could be constructed of many different materials, palm leaves and corn husks were readily available, inexpensive, and, thus, typically used. After the insects hatched, they emerged from the nests and spread themselves out across the cacti leaves, inserting their proboscises through the membranes of the cacti in order to feed on the plants’ juices. The cochineal remained in this immobile state for three to four months, growing in size. During this period, it was necessary to guard the grana carefully, for birds and insects preyed upon the cochineal. This process was very laborintensive, involving literally moving from leaf to leaf to remove undesirable predators. Keeping the area in and around the nopalera well weeded also reduced the presence of pests. In addition, it was necessary to keep the cacti well pruned to prevent them from bearing fruit and flowers, both of which retarded the development of the cochineal. Finally, cochineal needed protection from extremes in weather. Excessive sunlight, wind, rain, or cold were sufficient to destroy the insects. As a result, nopaleras were sometimes protected from the elements with mud walls or primitive roofs. This stage of the cultivation process, then, demanded specialized skills and intensive labor.8 When the insects reached full size, producers carefully brushed them, still alive, from the leaf of the nopal using either a specially designed stick or an animal tail (see Plate 16). The final step was to kill and dry the insects, which was accomplished by a number of different processes, including immersion in boiling water, exposure to sun, heating on a skillet, and suffocation.9 Once dried, the insect resembled a seed, which is probably why the Spaniards called it grana, meaning grain. The red dye was contained inside the dried corpse which was marketed whole.10 Grana cochinilla was utilized in Mexico long before the arrival of Europeans. In his chronicle of the Mexican conquest, Bernal Diaz del Castillo reported that cochineal was abundant in the marketplace of Tenochtitlán.11 According to Lee, cochineal was 102

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among the articles paid in tribute by conquered tribes to their Aztec rulers. In addition, the preconquest people of the Oaxacan region of the Mixteca dyed fabric, stone, and wood with cochineal dye while Aztec women used it to color their bodies.12 The greatest stimulus to its production, however, occurred only after the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Production expanded early in the colonial period as Spanish merchants purchased grana for sale in the markets of Europe. By the late 1540s many Tlaxcalan Indians were producing it for export, and some commoners had evidently grown wealthy, much to the dismay of their social superiors.13 By the end of the sixteenth century, Mexican cochineal was already widely traded in Europe, so much so that in 1589 the Amsterdam commodities exchange began recording its price.14 Annual exports from Mexico before 1700 ranged from 5,000 to 14,000 arrobas of 25 pounds weight each, equal to 125,000 to 350,000 pounds.15 It was in the eighteenth century, however, that the cochineal industry reached maturity. By mid-century, annual production of grana surpassed in some years one million pounds weight. Output peaked in 1774 when more than 1.5 million pounds were produced. While the Indians of Tlaxcala might have dominated the early colonial production of cochineal, by the eighteenth century domesticated cochineal, grana fina, was produced exclusively in the southern province of Oaxaca with some minor spillover into towns bordering Oaxaca in the province of Puebla, portions of which pertain to the modern state of Guerrero. Inhabitants of several other regions of Spanish America, including Chiapas, Campeche, and parts of Peru, harvested small quantities of grana silvestre, wild cochineal, but neither the quality nor the quantity rivaled the grana fina of Oaxaca.16 A significant percentage of Oaxacan families were involved in some aspect of the cochineal industry, primarily as producers. In 1793, the Oaxacan Intendant Corregidor, Antonio de Mora y Peysal, estimated that the cochineal industry employed 25,000 to 30,000 people in the province, around 8 percent of the population, but probably more than one third of the households.17 Because of its intensive demand for labor, the production of cochineal was virtually monopolized by indigenous peasants. A few Spanish haciendas in the central valleys of Oaxaca attempted to produce the dyestuff, but they were never capable of effectively competing with the peasant economy. While not prominent in the production of cochineal, Spaniards dominated the commercial end of the industry, trading the dyestuff from Oaxaca to Spain and beyond. The colonial province of Oaxaca was subdivided into 22 distinct political jurisdictions in most of which was produced at least some grana cochinilla. Average production per thousand people was 106 arrobas (2,650 pounds) province-wide but many regions deviated substantially from this average.18 The production of cochineal in all districts of Oaxaca reflected the dyestuff ’s importance in the local peasant economies as a highly valued commodity capable of producing money income. It was a critical supplement to more traditional crops. Income generated by the production and sale of cochineal was used by producers to meet the many necessary expenses they incurred, whether for tribute, religious services, communal events, or the purchase of items at a local store. As Don Joaquin Alvarez, the parish priest of Santa Maria Ozolotepec, Miahuatlan, explained: cochineal “is the only commodity with which [the tributaries] maintain themselves and pay their debts.”19 103

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Indigenous control over the production of this highly marketable commodity had important consequences for Oaxaca’s population and economy. In many regions of colonial Mexico, Spaniards erected large estates and came to control a considerable percentage of the landed resources.20 In these regions, Indian village lands diminished despite aggressive resistance against the expansion and encroachment of non-Indian landholders.21 In Oaxaca, in contrast, peasant landholding dominated and haciendas were of extremely minor significance.22 The retention of land that Oaxacan peasants enjoyed was a result of cochineal’s importance. Ownership of Oaxacan land offered Spanish entrepreneurs few economic possibilities and certainly none that could rival the marketing of cochineal. As a result, Oaxaca’s colonial elite concentrated on commerce and the landed resources remained in the peasants’ control, a trait that still somewhat characterizes modern Oaxaca. Peasant control over the production of the province’s key commodity also had a demographic impact. According to the census ordered by Viceroy Revillagigedo in the 1790s, Oaxaca’s population remained overwhelmingly indigenous: 88.3 percent of the province’s total population of 411,336 was categorized as Indian. Even more striking was the tremendous degree of segregation. Of the mere 6.3 percent of Oaxaca’s total population listed as Spanish, 43 percent, 10,970, resided in the provincial capital of Antequera (known today simply as Oaxaca). The vast majority of Spaniards, 84 percent, lived in one of five centers—Antequera, Teposcolula, Juxtlahuaca, Xicayan, or Tehuantepec. Most of Oaxaca’s other districts were virtually uninhabited by Spaniards. Villa Alta, the largest district with a population of 58,280, was home to only 38 Spaniards. Spaniards barely reached 1.5 percent of the total population residing in the cochineal-rich regions of Miahuatlan, Nexapa, and the Chontales.23 In no other province of Mexico was the Indian/Spanish ratio as skewed as it was in Oaxaca. These demographic patterns were reinforced by the cochineal economy. All aspects of the production of cochineal remained in the hands of peasant producers. Indigenous peasants possessed the lands, planted the nopal cacti, introduced the bugs, collected the harvest, killed and dried the cochineal, and otherwise prepared it for market. The role of outsiders was indirect; Spaniards provided financing prior to the production process and were the primary consumers of the finished product. Their role, however, gave them little incentive to reside outside of the provincial towns. Grana cochinilla had many advantages as a supplement to traditional agriculture. First, nopaleras, the cactus groves in which the cochineal was produced and harvested, flourished almost anywhere, including on marginal lands or small plots. As a result, peasants did not need to sacrifice valuable crop land for the production of cacti. Second, while the production of cochineal was labor-intensive, it was not physically demanding. Consequently, older family members or children could perform the bulk of the work. Third, since production was possible in the courtyard of a home, women could attend to the cochineal, as well as other domestic tasks, while men were away in the fields. Cochineal production thus efficiently utilized the available household labor pool.24 Finally, cochineal remained a cottage industry with most production occurring on small plots operated by individual households, often located, no doubt, a stone’s throw away from the peasant’s abode. In contrast to sources of income tapped by Indians in other 104

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parts of colonial Mexico, such as wage labor in haciendas, obrajes, or mines, production of cochineal did not require that individuals migrate. This was much more than just a convenience. The ability to remain at home allowed peasants to more easily balance the demands of cochineal production with the requirements of staple crop production. Production of dye was less disruptive to familial and communal life and explains, to at least some degree, the greater survival of peasant communities in Oaxaca than in most other Mexican regions.25 A salient feature of cochineal production was the heavy reliance of producers on external financing. The production of the dyestuff required the significant outlay of funds, particularly in the purchase of cochineal “seed,” the pregnant females introduced into the nopalera at the start of the production cycle. In addition, months separated the introduction of the “seed” and the eventual harvesting of a marketable product. As a result, many producers sought to gain financing for their cochineal production and did so by contracting in advance to sell their output in exchange for immediate cash payments. Producers received money from Spaniards, most often the Spanish district magistrates known as alcaldes mayors, promising to deliver to them at a later date some fixed amount of cochineal. Such transactions were called repartimientos.26 Throughout Oaxaca cochineal dye was produced with repartimiento financing. The terms of the typical cochineal repartimiento loan required that borrowers pay their debts in kind, typically six to eight months after receipt of the cash advance (the repartimiento). The day-to-day operation of the repartimiento required that the alcalde mayor or one of his tenientes (lieutenants) travel to the many Indian villages of the district, distributing loans or collecting cochineal debts. The alcalde mayor of Miahuatlan reported in 1752 that he always distributed pesos to the Indians of his district in September and October, contracting for them to pay him back at harvest time at the rate of one pound of grana cochineal for each 12 reales (1.5 pesos) that he advanced to them. Indeed, the cochineal repartimiento almost always entailed a 1.5 peso advance per pound to be paid in the future, a standardization that helped reduce the conflict and ambiguity that often plagued such cross-cultural transactions.27 A number of other officials and provincial priests signaled October and November as the most important months for extension of cochineal loans. As each noted, however, the repartimientos began as early as July and continued until as late as January.28 Repartimientos were not issued every year, according to the alcalde mayor of Nexapa, but only in the first three years of an official’s tenure. After that, it was generally considered too risky to make additional loans.29 At harvest time, often the late spring, the alcalde mayor or his teniente recaudador, his debt collector, returned to the cochineal-producing villages to collect the dyestuff owed to them. Debt collection, however, was difficult because debtors frequently proved unable or unwilling to repay their repartimientos promptly.30 Often debtors were unable to meet their debt obligations, due, for example, to the loss of the cochineal harvest, not uncommon given the dyestuff ’s vulnerability to inclement weather. Inability to pay was probably the most common reason for delay or default, but other peasants simply evaded their debts or resisted repayment, dragging their feet as long as possible. Alcaldes mayores unable to collect their repartimiento debts had several options available to them. First, they could simply permit the indebted peasant additional time 105

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to pay. In 1752 a number of provincial priests and alcaldes mayores suggested that this was often necessary. The alcalde mayor of Nexapa, for example, noted that few Indians entirely paid their debts in one year as stipulated, but that most needed two to three years, sometimes five. The official from Chichicapa-Zimatlán wrote that while total payment was due in one year, “one gives thanks to God when the money is collected in two years.” Alcaldes mayores and priests consulted generally agreed that when a debtor proved unable to repay, the alcalde mayor had to refinance the individual, hoping that the entire debt would be repaid in the following harvest.31 The second option available to the alcalde mayor was to apply pressure to the debtor and his family, or to imprison him. In fact, the alcaldes mayores often did resort to violent means to collect debts owed to them, especially when they perceived that the debtor was resisting repayment of a debt that he could in fact meet, or when the official feared that the debtor might attempt to flee the village without paying. Even if the debt still proved uncollectible, punishment of a recalcitrant debtor undoubtedly sent a powerful message to others to pay up promptly. This, at least, was the argument of the alcalde mayor of Zimatlán, Yldefonso Maria Sanchez Solache, who in 1784 stated that imprisoning debtors for short periods had “very favorable effects; being this a very powerful stimulus for the purpose of dedicating [the Indians] to their work.”32 Sometimes, an indigenous village official was incarcerated, serving as a hostage to force the community to repay an outstanding debt. The final alternative open to the Spanish official was to confiscate the personal belongings of the debtor and attempt to recover the value of the initial repartimiento with goods of equal worth. Needless to say, the average indigenous family in rural Oaxaca did not own many items valued by the alcalde mayor. Not infrequently, all of the above collection methods failed. In such instances, the alcalde mayor had no choice but to simply write off the debts, entering “incobrable,” uncollectible, in his repartimiento ledger. The officials from Oaxacan districts all recognized that some level of total default was inevitable, and that repartimiento loans, while providing potential for very high profitability, also placed principal at very substantial risk of loss.33 That default was common is unquestionable; most of the judicial cases dealing with the repartimiento involved cases in which the alcalde mayor responded, often violently, to indebted peasants who failed to meet their obligations promptly. The production of cochineal was directly dependent on the availability of credit, and credit depended largely on the availability of repartimientos. Without credit, many peasants could not produce a cash crop such as cochineal. Only when merchants had the ability to enforce the repayment of debts, however, did they feel sufficiently secure to loan funds to the peasant producers of cochineal. It was because the alcaldes mayores were vested with judicial authority to pressure debtors to repay loans that they were willing to extend credit to poor peasants. This factor explains why the repartimiento became the primary means by which cochineal was financed. Indians had little alternative but to seek credit from the alcalde mayor because of their poverty and the colonialists’ perceptions of them as dishonorable and prone to deceit. Eighteenth-century Oaxacan peasants needed credit just like poor people do in modern economies, and, like their modern counterparts, colonial Oaxacans had limited sources 106

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for such finances. Cash repartimientos not only provided financing for production of cash crops like cochineal but could also be partially used to meet other expenses such as tribute or religious fees. Peasants could also turn to the repartimiento for a loan when bad weather threatened their subsistence. The repartimiento system of credit, then, became an important outside source of funds for Oaxacan peasants, a critical supplement to the traditional rural economy. It became one weapon in their overall strategy of economic survival.34 Encountering an alcalde mayor who was eager to profit and willing to lend, the peasants borrowed willingly. Historians have often portrayed the repartimiento as a highly abusive and coercive system of production and consumption.35 Peasants did not need to be coerced to accept repartimiento credit, however, because the alternative was no credit at all.36 For most of the eighteenth century, repartimiento financing was readily available and production of cochineal was abundant. Repartimientos were illegal before 1751 since the Laws of the Indies expressly prohibited Spanish officials from conducting trade with the Indians under their charge. These restrictions, however, were routinely ignored and the Crown did little to enforce them.37 Indeed, the Crown benefited from the system since officials paid large sums to purchase their colonial offices, desirous of the juridical authority that allowed them to safely extend repartimiento loans.38 The royal position towards the repartimiento, however, changed over the second half of the eighteenth century. Legalized in 1751, the repartimiento was severely attacked by religious clerics and Bourbon reformers in the 1770s and 1780s, and was finally banned in 1786 by Article 12 of the Real Ordenanza de Intendentes.39 When repartimientos were permitted, the production of cochineal was substantial. In contrast, the late colonial abolition of the system of repartimientos coincided with a major decline in grana production. In 1758 El Registro de Grana, a Oaxacan office established to guard against fraud in the cochineal business, began recording annually the levels of grana cochinilla produced in the province.40 By law, all merchants were required to submit their cochineal to this office where it was weighed and checked for purity.41 The Registry’s figures for gross annual output survive and provide a good, though probably incomplete, record of total annual production of cochineal.42 The annual output of cochineal registered as well as the average price per pound (reales per pound)43 in Oaxaca for 1758 to 1821 is displayed in Graph 6.1.44 Until the mid-1780s, cochineal production boomed, due both to the 1751 legalization of the repartimiento and to the healthy demand for the dyestuff in Europe. The 1751 legislation legalized an already common practice but led to greater investment in the industry, since now the Spanish officials could trade more openly and legally with the Indians of their districts. Graph 6.1 also demonstrates the industry’s late colonial depression, related, in part, to Article 12 of the Real Ordenanza de Intendentes of 1786 which explicitly prohibited the provincial officials from providing repartimiento financing to the indigenous inhabitants of their districts. Registered output from 1758 to 1783 reached high levels averaging around 886,000 pounds annually before dropping after 1783 by over half to an average near 402,000 pounds. With the exception of the six years 1768 to 1773, prices hovered between 2 and 2.5 pesos until 1792, after which time they fell briefly only to rise to very high levels for most of the remainder of the colonial period.45 107

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1,800,000

35

1,600,000 30 1,400,000

Pounds

20

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800,000

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Reales per Pound in Reales

25 1,200,000

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10 400,000 5

1821

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1815

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1788

1785

1782

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1773

1770

1767

1761

1764

0

1758

200,000

0

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Graph 6.1 Price and output of cochineal in Oaxaca, 1758–1821. Memoria del gobierno libre y soberano de Oaxaca, 1859, AGEO

The Spanish officials could and did use their judicial authority to try and collect their debts enabling them to make loans that private merchants dared not. While better equipped to collect their debts, alcaldes mayores were, at times, overmatched. The desperate request for help in collecting cochineal debts written in October 1769 by Don José Molina, the alcalde mayor of Villa Alta, to the Viceroy of New Spain, Don Carlos Francisco de Croix, provides insight into the alcaldes’ difficult task of managing his loans. Molina complained that it was common for him and fellow officials to have to wait for two to three years to collect a debt, and that when a producer’s cochineal harvest failed, they were frequently left with no option but to provide a new loan in the hope that the entire amount would be repaid in the following harvest. The shrewd alcalde, wrote Molina, had to be vigilant in his loan distribution and debt collection or face bankruptcy. This, Molina noted, involved choosing carefully who to lend funds to, assuring that the loan recipient truly had a nopalera, a cactus grove, ready for introduction of the semilla, the pregnant cochineal insects, and confirming that the funds were actually employed in the production of the dyestuff. It was not uncommon, wrote Molina, for producers to use the loans for other purposes, only to hide when the debt collector circulated at harvest time. Finally, stated Molina, collecting debts had become especially difficult as of late due to the high market price of three pesos (24 reales) per pound of cochineal. The high price, claimed the alcalde mayor, encouraged many producers to sell their cochineal in Oaxaca or to traveling merchants, rather than to deliver it to him as contracted.46 One receives an almost comical impression of the peasants’ repartimiento debt evasion from the anti-repartimiento testimony presented in 1784 by Antonio Porley, the parish priest of Ayoquesco. Porley condemned the Spanish official of his district, 108

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the Corregimiento of Oaxaca, for employing great violence in the collection of debts. According to the priest, many of the indebted Indians were fearful of being arrested by the teniente and, consequently, fled the village and hid in the mountains whenever there was news of the official’s pending arrival in the village. This had worked, apparently, until the alcalde mayor appeared on Ash Wednesday without any prior warning, rounding up some of the debtors before they could flee. Another new trick of the debt collectors was to arrive unannounced at night when, as Porley noted, many debtors returned to the village believing that the cover of darkness would provide safety. In the past, the teniente would visit the village to collect debts only on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and this provided the debtors relief from their concealment between Thursday and Sunday. Now, however, the alcalde had stationed a permanent collector in the village, and so debtors had no alternative than to remain hidden until the alcalde’s term in office expired. Of course, another alternative would have been to pay the alcalde mayor. Why the peasants of Ayoquesco went to such great extremes not to pay is unclear. Perhaps they lacked the cochineal; yet one cannot help but wonder whether they resisted repayment because they knew that they could get away with it. What is certain, however, is that their evasion was expensive and a nuisance for the official. His frequent visits to the village cost him time and money.47 High levels of default cut deeply into the profits of the alcaldes mayores’ cochineal repartimientos. While quite variable from case to case, evidence suggests that the profitability of the repartimiento was generally good by comparison to many other colonial investments but not exceptionally high.48 This point is illustrated indirectly by the surviving records of Sebastian de Labayru, an alcalde mayor of Miahuatlan who died in office during the mid-1770s. In addition to the repartimiento through which Labayru normally advanced 12 reales against the future delivery of each pound of cochineal,49 he and his lieutenants also purchased cochineal in the local Miahuatlan markets at “precios corrientes,” the going market prices. In most harvests, some producers inevitably harvested more cochineal than they were required to deliver to the alcalde in payment of their contracted debts, and this surplus they sold in local markets, just like any other surplus production. In addition, some wealthier peasants financed their own production of cochineal, selling their entire output in the “free market.” During his years as alcalde mayor, 1772 to 1776, Labayru’s tenientes bought large quantities of this surplus grana, paying prices which ranged from 16 to 28 reales per pound, well above the standard repartimiento price of 12 reales per pound. In total Labayru’s ledger indicates that during these five years he invested outside of the repartimiento roughly 138,837 pesos to purchase 54,092 pounds, an average of 2.57 pesos (20.5 reales) per pound. Repartimiento acquisitions during the same years delivered another 96,610 pounds and cost Labayru 145,303 pesos, an average price of 12 reales per pound. By employing individuals to purchase cochineal in the Miahuatlan markets, Labayru perhaps hoped to make a few reales per pound reselling the dye in Oaxaca.50 Why, though, would Labayru pay as much as 28 reales for a pound of cochineal when he could obtain one for just 12 reales through the repartimiento? The answer is simple. The purchase of cochineal at the market price required no prolonged outlay of funds but was a transaction started and completed quickly. Labayru faced much less risk with 109

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his capital, enjoyed greater liquidity, and was nearly guaranteed a rapid, albeit modest, return if he chose to sell in Oaxaca. In contrast, had he loaned 12 reales for the future delivery of a pound of cochineal, he might have had to wait two, three or more years for repayment and might never have been repaid. The alcalde mayor of Zimatlán, Yldefonso Maria Sanchez Solache, made this very argument in 1784. Buying cochineal at harvest time at the precios corrientes, Solache suggested, was often more profitable than the repartimiento since one avoided the risks of exposing money to lengthy and difficult collections or even total loss.51 No matter how they financed it, many producers were able to market their own cochineal on the “open market,” to traveling merchants, at local tianguis (markets), or by personally bringing their output down to Antequera. It was common for wealthy Oaxacan merchants to supply itinerant peddlers with money to travel to cochinealproducing villages at harvest time to purchase dye directly from producers. At least some of these agents were owners of small stores specializing in the purchase and sale of cochineal dye. Many such shops were found on Calle de la Cochinilla,52 located a block from Antequera’s central plaza. These storekeepers journeyed to the nearby markets of Ejutla and Ocotlán to buy cochineal on the account of the merchants who financed them. As compensation for their services, the storekeepers were paid a fee of 1 peso per arroba of 25 pounds.53 A stream of itinerant merchants also regularly visited the cochineal-producing towns near Teposcolula where indigenous producers often had surplus dye which they marketed themselves. In September 1771, for example, Don Esteban García, a wealthy Teposcolulan merchant and mill owner, advanced Juan Pérez, a mestizo peddler, 400 pesos to buy grana cochineal in the countryside. Pérez agreed to deliver the dyestuff to García in December, at a rate two reales below the market price current in Teposcolula. According to Pérez, he bought the cochineal at the weekly tianguis of Yanhuitlán, Tamazulapán, and the Chocho-speaking towns around Coixtlahuaca at the going rate in these grana producing villages.54 Lucas Pimentel also served as a purchasing agent for Esteban García. In 1771 Pimentel received from García 1,166 pesos 2 reales to use in the purchase of cochineal from indigenous producers. Like Juan Pérez, Pimentel contracted to deliver the dyestuff at two reales below the market price in the plaza of Teposcolula. García was not Pimentel’s only financier. The alcalde mayor of Teposcolula, José Mariano de Cardenas, also employed him to buy surplus cochineal from Indian producers at market prices.55 Twenty-five years later, in 1796, Mariano Ayala received 3,000 pesos from Don Pedro Otero, a merchant of Nochistlán, to purchase grana. Ayala received one real per pound as compensation for his labor.56 Evidently Indians also purchased cochineal in local tianguis. In 1784, for example, the parish priest of Ayoquesco referred to indigenous cochineal producers who sold their output to other Indians in the markets of Ocotlán.57 The Oaxacan cochineal industry entered into decline in the late colonial period, the result of a temporary drop in demand for the dye in Europe after 1784, followed by the abolition of the repartimiento in 1786, and finally the onset of decades of war after 1793. Already facing difficulties, the decline of the Oaxacan dye industry accelerated rapidly after Mexico gained its independence in 1821. Throughout the colonial period, 110

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1,200,000

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Graph 6.2 Output and value of cochineal post-independence, 1822–58. Carlos Maria de Bustamante, Memoria Estadistica de Oaxaca … (Veracruz: Imprenta Constitucional, 1821), 24 (for the year 1820)

Oaxaca retained a virtual monopoly on the production of grana fina, which served to keep the price of this commodity relatively (and, perhaps, artificially) high. The Spanish Crown prohibited the production of grana fina outside of Oaxaca, and this prohibition remained in effect until 1819 when the Crown extended permission to produce cochineal to Yucatán and Guatemala.58 Thereafter, cochineal flourished in Guatemala, so much so that it nearly completed the economic devastation already begun in Oaxaca. Competition from Guatemala drove the price of cochineal rapidly downwards, although it is not clear whether this occurred because of overproduction or because Guatemala enjoyed comparative advantages.59 In any event, the price of cochineal in Oaxaca descended rapidly after independence, falling throughout the 1820s, dipping below 10 reales in 1837, never again to enter into double digits. Despite successful efforts in the late 1840s to increase production to levels comparable even to those sustained in the boom years of the 1770s, the value of the output was a small fraction of what it had been in those earlier glory days. Both the total annual output and the total value of that output per year are displayed in Graph 6.2. Production began a general trend upwards in the mid-1820s, a trend which was sustained until the mid-1850s. But despite this significant growth in output, the overall value of production in Oaxaca fell continually. The price of cochineal was simply falling more steeply than output was growing. Independence, then, struck a decisive blow to the Oaxacan cochineal industry. Never again would Oaxaca enjoy its earlier opulence. For decades Oaxaca’s leaders mourned the decline of this “precious fruit” and lamented their failure to find another commodity capable of producing comparable wealth.60 The post-independence collapse of the 111

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cochineal trade contributed to a steep decline in Oaxaca’s economy, one which would continue into the twentieth century. Throughout the colonial era, Oaxaca was one of Mexico’s most prosperous provinces due to the demand for red cochineal dye. With the end of the colonial period, Oaxaca became one of Mexico’s poorest states.

Notes 1. Cited in Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 169. 2. The most thorough discussions of the cochineal insect are R.A. Donkin, “Spanish Red: An Ethnogeographical Study of Cochineal and the Opuntia Cactus,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 67, 1 (1977): 1–84; and Memoria sobre la naturaleza, cultivo y beneficio de la grana dedicada al rey nuestro señor, Archivo General de la Nación de México (AGN), Correspondencia de Virreyes, vol. 90, primera serie, 1794, fols 126–230. This latter work was prepared for Viceroy Revillagigedo by the respected scientist José Antonio Alzate y Ramirez. See also Barbro Dahlgren de Jordán, La Grana cochinilla (Mexico: J. Porrúa, 1963). 3. Donkin, “Spanish Red,” 9–10. 4. See ibid., 14–15; Dahlgren de Jordán, La Grana cochinilla, 53–55, 80–81. 5. John H. Coatsworth, “Obstacles to Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Mexico,” The American Historical Review 83, 1, Supplement (1978): 87, argues that peasant producers enjoyed a comparative advantage in the production of items demanding “close supervision,” cochineal being one such commodity. 6. For references to large-scale production of cochineal, see Donkin, “Spanish Red,” 13; Brian R. Hamnett, Politics and Trade in Southern Mexico, 1750–1821 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 57–61. As Hamnett noted, a 4 percent tithe on cochineal produced a total of only 2,832 pesos during the six years 1784–89, a tiny amount. On the cochineal tithe also see Real provisión para que los cosecheros de grana paguen el diezmo a la santa iglesia, Archivo General del Estado de Oaxaca (AGEO), Real Intendencia de Oaxaca, vol 1, Leg. 4, Exp. 43, 1784. 7. The production of nopaleras and cochineal is described well in several works. See, for example, Alzate, Memoria sobre, fols 126–230; Donkin, “Spanish Red”: and Dahlgren de Jordán, La Grana cochinilla. The biweekly newspaper Gazeta de México produced a special description of how grana was produced and harvested and this was published in three parts between 2 June and 30 June 1784. A copy of this newspaper is in the Archivo General de Indias (AGI). 8. Donkin, “Spanish Red.” 9. Ibid. 10. For more than a century, the Spaniards managed to protect the secret of cochineal’s origins. Indeed, natural historians in England and elsewhere sought to discover the nature of the dye. It was only with the improvement of microscope technologies that these scientists discovered that the cochineal grain was actually an insect. The Spaniards’ secret was divulged. See Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red : Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire, 1st edn (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). 11. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, trans. A.P. Maudsley (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1956), 233. 12. Raymond L. Lee, “Cochineal Production and Trade in New Spain to 1600,” The Americas 4, 4 (1948): 452–53. Lee further notes that the payment of cochineal as tribute was adopted by the Spaniards after the conquest.

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13. Charles Gibson, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), 149–50. According to James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 178, commoners from Tlaxcala found cochineal production so profitable that they abandoned the production of traditional crops, earning them the censure of the local Indian Cabildo in 1553. The document cited by Lockhart is reproduced in its entirety in Kenneth Mills et al., Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History (Wilmington DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002), 90–93. 14. N.W. Posthumus, Inquiry into the History of Prices in Holland (Leiden: Brill, 1946), vol. 1, 420–23. 15. Lee, “Cochineal,” 459–60; Carla Rahn Phillips, “The Growth and Composition of Trade in the Iberian Empires, 1450–1750,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires, ed. James Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1990), 34–101; at 80–81 Phillips places the export figures at 6,000 to 8,000 arrobas, considerably lower than Lee’s higher-end figures. 16. On references to cochineal in Chiapas see Brooke Larson and Robert Wasserstrom, “Consumo Forzoso en Cochabamba y Chiapa Durante la Época Colonial,” Historia Mexicana 31, 3 (1982). 17. Archivo General de la Nacion de Mexico (AGN), Historia, vol. 75, Exp. 8, fol. 8v. 18. Jeremy Baskes, Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the Repartimiento and Spanish– Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750–1821 (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 17–19. 19. AGN, Tributos, vol. 14, Exp. 23. 20. Prior to the revisionist literature spearheaded by William B. Taylor in Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1972), historians wrongly assumed that the large estate dominated all of Mexico. The classic starting point for this earlier work is François Chevalier, Land and Society in Colonial Mexico; the Great Hacienda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963). 21. For the central valley of Mexico see Enrique Florescano, Precios del maíz y crisis agrícolas en México (1708–1810); Ensayo sobre el movimiento de los precios y sus consecuencias económicas y sociales (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1969). Robert Patch, Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648–1812 (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), argues that haciendas in Yucatan grew to be critically important by the late colonial era. On the Guadalajara region see Eric Van Young, Hacienda and Market in EighteenthCentury Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 22. The dominance of the Oaxacan countryside by peasants was demonstrated by Taylor, Landlord and Peasant. 23. Population data are reproduced in Marcus Winter et al., Historia de la cuestión agraria mexicana: Estado de Oaxaca, 2 vols (Mexico: Juan Pablos, 1988), 188–90. 24. For references to women and children performing the bulk of the day-to-day labor see Informes de curas y alcaldes mayores sobre repartimientos: Santa Catarina Ixtepeji, AGN, Subdelegados, vol. 34, fol. 6. The report of Josef Victoriano de Baños in Pedimento de oficio del señor fiscal de lo civil sobre la decadencia del cultivo de la grana, AGN, Industria y comercio, vol. 20, fols 165–236, also points to their dominance in the upkeep of the nopaleras. Finally, in his report to the Bishop of Oaxaca, Manuel Eduardo Perez Bonilla, parish priest of Santo Tomas de Ixtlan, complained that children often failed to attend school because they were too busy working the cochineal nopaleras. See AGI, Audiencia de México, Leg. 2588, Cordillera cuarta providencias de visita del obispado de Oaxaca – Informes de dos curas sobre repartimientos de Alcaldes Mayores. 25. Rodolfo Pastor, “El Repartimiento de mercancias y los alcaldes mayores novohispanos: Un sistema de explotacion, de sus origenes a la Ccisis de 1810,” in El Gobierno provincial en la Nueva Espaia 1570–1787, ed. Woodrow Wilson Borah (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1985), 224–26, makes a similar argument about cochineal.

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26. Traditionally, the repartimiento is viewed as a forced system of production and consumption in which peasants were coerced into selling their output in advance at low, non-market prices, not, as I suggest, a means for producers to finance production. 27. On the difficulties and obstacles to cross-cultural trade, see Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, Studies in Comparative World History (Cambridge (UK) and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). For the ways in which the 12-real standard reduced the ambiguities of crosscultural trade, see Baskes, Indians, Merchants, and Markets, 97–109. 28. Informes de curas y alcaldes mayores sobre el repartimiento: Miahuatlan, AGN, Subdelegados, vol. 34, fol. 141, 1752. For same repartimiento schedule see also the informes of other alcaldes mayores in same volume: Nexapa, fol. 119; Chichicapa y Zimatlán, fol. 135; Teotitlan del Camino Real, fol. 154; Tlacolula, fol. 313. These informes, used extensively in this study, were produced by priests and alcaldes mayores from districts throughout Mexico in 1752 at the request of the Viceroy, the First Count Revillagigedo, who was considering the legalization of the repartimiento. The alcaldes mayores clearly had reason to fabricate their reports, yet one is struck by the similarity of issues addressed by all who responded, officials and clergy alike. While important to read such reports critically, one would need to accept a broader conspiracy, for which there is no evidence, to discount them entirely. 29. Informes de curas y alcaldes mayores sobre el repartimiento: Nexapa, AGN, Subdelegados, 34, fol. 119, 1752. 30. For a detailed discussion of repartimiento default see Baskes, Indians, Merchants, and Markets, ch. 6. Arij Ouweneel, Shadows over Anáhuac: An Ecological Interpretation of Crisis and Development in Central Mexico, 1730–1800 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 182, 200–201, also refers to the high degree of delay and default experienced by the district magistrates. 31. Informes de curas y alcaldes mayores sobre el repartimiento, AGN, Subdelegados, vol. 34. For Nexapa see fol. 119 and for Chichicapa-Zimatlán see fol. 135. 32. Testimony de expedient reserved sobre abuses de los alcaldes mayores del obispado de Oaxaca, AGI, Audiencia de México, 1872. 33. Informes de curas y alcaldes mayores sobre el repartimiento, AGN, Subdelegados, vol. 34. 34. Marcello Carmagnani, El Regreso de los dioses: El proceso de reconstitución de la identidad étnica en Oaxaca, siglos XVII y XVIII, Sección de Obras de Historia (Mexico: Fondo del Cultura Económica, 1988), 173, notes the importance of the repartimiento in peasants’ “economic strategies” as a source of income and goods, yet he stops short of arguing that peasants voluntarily sought repartimientos. Peasants rarely revealed how they invested cash obtained in the repartimiento although clearly much went as intended towards financing the production needed to repay the loan. Occasionally, however, documents revealed additional peasant strategies. One woman, Bernarda Gonzalez, requested a repartimiento to tide her over when her harvest failed and she and her children faced starvation. See AGEO, Real Intendencia de Oaxaca II, Leg. 14, Exp. 5, 1811. In other cases, peasants without funds when tribute was due borrowed from the alcalde mayor. Since the official collected tribute, there was probably no actual exchange of money in such cases. See several entries in the ledger of the alcalde mayor of Teposcolula. Libro en que consta las dependencias liquidas, AGN, Real Hacienda, Administración General de Alcabalas, caja 43 (XI). 35. See for examples, Margarita Menegus Bornemann, El Repartimiento forzoso de mercancías en México, Perú y Filipinas, ed. Historia Economica (Mexico: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr José María Luis Mora: Centro de Estudios sobre la Universidad-UNAM, 2000); Rodolfo Pastor and Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Históricos, Campesinos y reformas: La Mixteca, 1700–1856 (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1987); Jürgen Golte, Repartos y rebeliones: Túpac Amaru y las contradicciones de la economía colonial, Estudios Históricos series 6 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1980); Alfredo Moreno Cebrián, El Corregidor de indios y la economía peruana del sSiglo XVIII: Los repartos forzosos de mercancias (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto G. Fernández de Oviedo, 1977), Pastor, “El Repartimiento”; Larson and Wasserstrom, “Consumo forzoso.”

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36. The question of coercion is dealt with extensively in my monograph: Baskes, Indians, Merchants, and Markets, ch. 4. 37. Libro 2, Titulo 16, Ley 54 of the Laws of the Indies specifically prohibited colonial officials from owning property or conducting commerce. The prohibition was extended specifically to the alcaldes mayores by Libro 5, Titulo 2, Ley 47, which stated “Que la prohibición de tratar, y contratar comprehende a los governadores, Corregidores, Alcaldes mayores, y sus tenientes.” See Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las indias, facs. reproduction of original by Julian de Paredes [1681] (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispanica, 1973). 38. On the sale of offices in Oaxaca, see Hamnett, Politics and Trade, 4–6; Baskes, Indians, Merchants, and Markets, 27–33. 39. The vehement attacks leveled against the repartimiento leading to the adoption of Article 12 as well as the equally passionate defenses of the system are well discussed in Hamnett, Politics and Trade. 40. The Crown issued regulations for the Cochineal Registry in 1756. These rules were reissued in 1760, 1773, and 1817 owing to continued abuses. A reproduction of this ordinance, titled Ordenanzas, methodo, o regla que se ha de observar de efecto de cerrar la puerta á la perpetración de fraudes en la grana cochinilla, can be found in the appendix to Dahlgren de Jordán, La Grana cochinilla. An original copy is available for consultation at the Newberry Library in Chicago. These regulations are summarized in AGN, Industria y comercio, vol. 9, fols 135–139, 1782v. 41. Throughout the colonial period and after, sacks of cochineal were often adulterated with other substances by producers and merchants in order to increase their weight and value. 42. Several documents noted that not all cochineal passed through Oaxaca for registration. AGN, Civil, vol. 302, part 1, fol. 75, says that grana from Teotitlan del Camino was shipped directly to Veracruz for export. Mora y Peysal’s data used above estimated that 15,000 arroba were registered in Oaxaca and an additional 8,600 arroba were collected elsewhere, suggesting that only 63.5 percent of total output was recorded by the registry. In AGEO, Tesorería principal, Leg. 8, Exp. 8, 1815, the subdelegate of Teococuilco refers to the production of grana in that town that is not destined for the city of Oaxaca for registration. Finally, in Memoria del gobierno del estado de Oaxaca … 1829 (located in library of AGEO), Governor Jose Maria de Murguia y Gallardi referred to the production figures recorded by the registry but adds that these figures were low since they failed to capture all production in Jamiltepec, Tehuantepec, Teotitlan del Camino, and Teposcolula, much of which never passed through Oaxaca for registry. Despite the potential incompleteness of the data, one can be fairly confident the amount of cochineal not recorded increased and decreased in proportions similar to the grana recorded by the Registro. This is the case since there did not appear to have been major regional shifts in the areas of production over the course of the period under study. The only exception would be in the occasional years when cochineal-destructive weather affected one region but not others. 43. A real was a coin equal to one eighth of a Mexican peso. 44. The most complete set of registry figures (1758–1858) are published in the 1858 Memoria del gobierno del estado de Oaxaca, located at the library of the AGEO, and Boletín de la sociedad Méxicana de geografía y estadística, vol. 7, 1859. See also Hamnett, Politics and Trade, appendix 1; Dahlgren de Jordán, La Grana cochinilla, appendix II. None of these sources include prices or output for the year 1820, a year that for some unknown reason, no data was available. However, I was able to find a reference to production and prices for that year and include them with the otherwise complete series. For 1820, see Carlos María de Bustamante, Memoria Estadistica de Oaxaca y Descripcion del Valle del Mismo Nombre, Estractada de la Que en Grande Trabajó el Senor Don Jose Murguia y Galardi Diputado en Córtes por Aquella Provincia (Veracruz: imprenta constitucional, 1821). 45. I note that the 1786 ban coincided with the depression rather than caused the depression because, as I argue in chapter 8 of my book, the late colonial downturn was more directly caused by a sharp decline in European demand several years before Article 12, coupled with sharply rising transaction costs

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associated with the nearly constant state of warfare beginning in 1794. See Baskes, Indians, Merchants, and Markets, ch. 8. 46. This complaint was echoed by a number of other officials who argued that when market prices were high collection was difficult since many debtors would claim they had lost their harvests, preferring to repay their loans in later years after the prices had declined. See the 1752 testimony of the official of Nexapa in Informes de curas y alcaldes mayores sobre el repartimiento, Nexapa, AGN, Subdelegados, vol. 34, fols 119, 1752. Also see the 1784 report of the alcalde of Zimatlan in AGI, Audiencia de México, 1872, Testimonio de expediente reservado sobre abusos de los alcaldes mayores del obispado de Oaxaca. Last, the Conde de Tepa noted this risk in AGI, Audiencia de México, 1873, Dictamen dado reservadamente al virrey de Nueva España, Don Antonio Bucareli, por el Conde de Tepa sobre el establecimiento de las intendencias, fol. 139. 47. AGI, Audiencia de México, Leg. 2588, Cordillera cuarta providencias de visita del obispado de Oaxaca – Informes de dos curas sobre repartimientos de Alcaldes Mayores. 48. I estimate elsewhere that one official’s annual returns were between 6 and 17.5 percent before deducting administrative costs. See Baskes, Indians, Merchants, and Markets, 118–24. Brading and Ouweneel have estimated the returns of other types of repartimientos at 20 percent and 8 to 13 percent respectively. See D.A. Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 99; and Ouweneel, Shadows over Anáhuac, 181. 49. Of the total cochineal collected through repartimiento advances, Labayru paid 12 reales per pound for all but a small quantity for which he paid 16 reales per pound. 50. Inventario de los bienes que quedaron por muerte del alcalde mayor que fue de Miahuatlan, Don Sebastian de Labayru, AGN, Tierras, vol 1037, Exp. 2, fols 78–81. Some of the numbers had to be reconstructed owing to significant damage to the document. 51. AGI, Audiencia de México, 1872, Testimonio de expediente reservado sobre abusos de los alcaldes mayores del obispado de Oaxaca. 52. Calle de la Cochinilla is now 20 de noviembre, one block west of the Zócalo of Oaxaca. There is a plaque commemorating the street’s earlier importance at the corner of 20 de noviembre and Hidalgo streets. 53. Andrés Portillo, Oaxaca en el centenario de la independencia nacional (Oaxaca de Juarez: H. Santaella, 1910). A copy of this book is available for consultation at the BMLT (Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de Tejada de la Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público). 54. Pérez, no doubt, hoped that the prices in these towns were more than two reales per pound lower than the price in Teposcolula in order to produce some profit for him after he delivered it to García as contracted. In fact, this risky venture backfired, and Pérez was unable to repay his debt. See El teniente de infanteria Esteban García contra Juan Pérez por deuda de pesos, Archivio judicial de Teposcoluda (AJT), Civil, #1101, 1774. 55. Los acreedores de Lucas Pimentel contra Pimentel sobre pesos, AJT. Civil #1095, 1774. 56. Demanda por Don Pedro Otero, comerciante de Nochistlan, contra Mariano Ayala por deuda de pesos, AJT, Civil #1409, 1796. For additional examples of market transactions of cochineal see AJT, Civil, #1237, 1784; AJT, Civil, #1155, 1767; AJT Civil, #1422, 1796; and AGN, Industria y Comercio, vol. 22, Exps 1–4, 1788–92. 57. The priest refers specifically to the practice of certain dishonest Indians who used “monedas falsas” to purchase grana from Indian producers. AGI, Audiencia de México, Leg. 2588, Cordillera cuarta providencias de visita del obispado de Oaxaca – Informes de dos curas sobre repartimientos de alcaldes mayores. 58. Hamnett, Politics and Trade, 144, makes reference to the 1819 Reales Ordenes granting Guatemala and Yucatán permission to cultivate cochineal. There is some ambiguity, however, as Murdo MacLeod, in Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720 (Berkeley: University of California

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Press, 1973) at 170–75, refers to seventeenth-century attempts, and failures, to introduce cochineal into Central America. The Crown was certainly fearful that the secrets of cochineal production would fall into the hands of its foreign rivals. In fact, a Frenchman named Thierry de Ménonville smuggled a nopal with live cochineal out of Oaxaca in 1777 as the French hoped to introduce its cultivation into Santo Domingo. See Hamnett, Politics and Trade, 2. 59. The best discussion of the nineteenth-century Guatemalan cochineal trade appears in David McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 1760–1940 (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 113–29. Unlike Oaxaca, large non-Indian producers made a significant contribution to the overall output in Guatemala. As in Oaxaca, however, financing of cochineal producers was critical and the financiers seem to have been the greatest beneficiaries of the grana trade. Most interestingly, the credit system operated very similarly to the repartimiento. Cash advances were made against future harvests and debtors often failed to repay their loans owing both to harvest losses and deceit. 60. See the various “Memorias del estado de Oaxaca” published in the decades after independence. Several are available for consultation at the Archivo del Estado de Oaxaca.

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7 Red Ochre, Vermilion, and the Transatlantic Cosmetic Encounter Jean-François Lozier

The Europeans who approached North America from the final decade of the fifteenth century onwards could not help but notice that the inhabitants of this New World were scantily clad but abundantly decorated. The Taíno encountered in the Caribbean islands by Columbus and his companions used pottery stamps coated with red, white, and black pigments to paint their bodies with lavish designs.1 The Spanish explorers who in the decades that followed ranged into the North American Southeast came across peoples with “their bodies, legs, and arms painted and ochred, red, black, white, yellow and vermilion in stripes” or, more commonly, “painted with a kind of red ointment.”2 The whalers and cod fishermen who began to visit the shores of Newfoundland too caught glimpses of men, women, and children whose bodies were painted red.3 These, decidedly, were painted peoples. Though the claim that it was due to early encounters with red-painted peoples that all Native Americans became “red-skinned” in Western eyes has been disproved in recent years, there is no doubting that body paint was of considerable socio-cultural importance among the inhabitants of the New World.4 The same might be said, for that matter, of the inhabitants of the Old. Artificially whitened faces and reddened cheeks and lips were a common sight throughout early modern Europe. Leaving aside the related topics of tattooing and scarification, this chapter investigates the roots and ramifications of the meeting of aboriginal and European skin-painting cultures—what might be termed the transatlantic cosmetic encounter—between the early sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries. In Europe this period was marked by the rise of face painting and of new pigments, which were accompanied by a heated polemic regarding the propriety of the painted face. On North American soil, painted faces also became a site of anxiety and innovation, with missionaries making tentative challenges to long-standing indigenous practices and indigenous practices making room for new transatlantic commodities. From locally sourced ochre, the following pages thus lead us to imported vermilion. 119

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Ø Ø Ø In aboriginal North America, the search for good colors was assiduously pursued. To paint themselves, explained one commentator, the original inhabitants prepared colors “with several sorts of Herbs, Minerals, and Earths, that they get in different parts of the Country where they Hunt and Travel.”5 The red pigments that dominated the palette might be extracted from a number of vegetal and mineral sources. In the east, bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis, also known as bloodwort or puccoon root) found widespread medicinal and decorative use. John Smith reported that the Powhatans of Virginia made great use of this root which they called pocones and “which being dryed and beate in powder turneth red.” It reduced swellings and aches, or, mixed with oil, was used to paint faces and garments.6 Ochre was preferred, however, for the brightness of its hues and by its excellent color fastness. Ochre—the term can refer to a variety of red or reddish pigments processed from iron ores, mainly namely hematite and limonite—is associated with human activity in the archaeological record as early as the time of Homo erectus, approximately 300,000 BCE. The persistence of practices and regularity in patterns in the use of ochre in prehistoric and contemporary nonliterate societies are such that one anthropologist describes it as being “like a red thread” woven through human history.7 Red ochre has been found with regularity at the sites of the earliest human occupation throughout the US, much of Canada, and northern Mexico. Paleoindian habitation areas often reveal traces of ochre, while ochred human skeletal remains and associated red-stained artifacts are a common feature of that lithic period’s burials and caches. So abundant was the use of powdered red ochre in the mortuary traditions of some regions that archaeologists speak of a “Red Paint People” on the north Atlantic coast (since renamed the “Moorehead Burial Tradition,” circa 3000 BCE), and a “Red Ochre Culture” around the Great Lakes (circa 1000–500 BCE).8 That ochre was used during this period to adorn the living, and not only the dead, can be inferred with confidence. This prehistoric predilection for red ochre has been attributed by some to the substance’s function as an external and internal healing agent: the iron salts found in ochre are effective antiseptics, have an astringent effect, and tend to arrest hemorrhaging.9 More significantly perhaps, this predilection has been linked to a partiality, inferred from the prehistoric archaeological record and solidly documented by modern ethnography, for the color red. Observing that all languages contain terms for black and white (or “light” and “dark”) and that if a language distinguishes a third color it is necessarily “red,” the anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay proposed four decades ago a model according to which the terms to describe these colors were the first to emerge in human languages everywhere. The other basic color terms, yellow, blue and green, appeared only at later stages, followed by terms for brown, orange, pink, purple or grey.10 Victor Turner and others since have argued that the primacy of black, white, and red as basic colors follows from their cognitive relationship with body emissions—semen, milk, water, feces, blood—and with the associated physical experiences and heightened emotional states.11 Linguistic evidence leaves no doubt of the connection between blood and the color red among the indigenous cultures of North America. In Proto120

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Algic, the reconstructed proto-language which would have been spoken from Atlantic Canada to the Rocky Mountains several thousand years ago and from which subsequent Algonquian languages derived, the word for red derives from a verbal root meaning “bleed” or noun meaning “blood.” The connection persists in many modern languages: in Algonquin, miskwi means blood, and misko means red; in Mohawk, onekwensa means blood, while onekwentara means red.12 Through its relationship with blood, the color red is linked with physical and physiological excitement. It was closely connected with the rituals and symbols of life and death, of reproduction and violence, with festivities and joy. What one writer remarked of the inhabitants of the western Great Lakes in the 1860s—“Red is not only their joy, but also their favorite color”—could have been said just about anywhere on the continent.13 Ø Ø Ø Deposits of ochre—hematite, mainly—are abundant throughout North America. Bodies of water whose banks were known to be rich in ochre were often named accordingly: in the Algonquian-speaking northeast, names such as Aramoni, Olamon, Onaman, Oulaman, Osanaman, etc. dotted the landscape. European explorers and settlers in turn translated these diverse names into “Vermillon” Lake or River (in French, or Anglicized to Vermilion), or “Paint” River or Creek.14 Depending on circumstances and cultural context, the ethnographic record suggests that specific sites of extraction might be kept secret from outsiders or shared with them. In recent years an otherwise friendly and cooperative Yuma informant explained to Paul Campbell that “no one divulges their source for red ochre.” Meanwhile, Naskapi tradition held that all comers, regardless of their band affiliation, could take as much ochre as they needed for their personal use from the deposits near Lake Chibougamau, Quebec, without asking for permission from the band on whose hunting territory the resource was located or providing payment to them. The only constraint was that its sale was strictly forbidden.15 Restrictions on the sale of ochre or the divulgation of its source point to the highly sacred nature of this resource, which like most natural resources was thought to be controlled by supernatural beings. The extraction of ochre, accordingly, was generally accompanied by rituals and offerings aimed at honoring and appeasing these spirits. Several thousand years ago the Paleoindians who exploited the ochre deposits at the Powars II Site in Wyoming left behind successfully used stone projectile points and bifaces as an offering. In more recent times the Gwich’in or Loucheux of the Northwestern Territories, Yukon, and Alaska, were known to leave pieces of sinew when they extracted ochre from the earth. The Piegan Blackfeet of Montana would for their part “pray and sing and go through their religious activities.”16 It is also possible that the processing of ochre had a ritual dimensions. The technical components of this processing depended largely on the nature of the deposit. While ochre-bearing clays extracted from riverbanks required only minimal processing, stone-like chunks of ochre taken from the earth could be easily processed by scraping or crushing. Certain varieties of ochre may have been heat-altered, to facilitate their pulverization or to enhance their hues. Grease, water, sap, or spit was used as a binding 121

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agent before ochre was painted on the body, with more or less ceremony depending on the circumstances. The body-painting pottery stamps of the Taíno had few if any parallels in North America, where paint was applied with hands, fingers, sticks, and rudimentary brushes. Fingers and sticks might then be used to scrape or remove paint to embellish designs with negative spaces.17 As might be expected, the practices and meanings associated with face and body painting varied from one aboriginal culture to another continent. For those peoples who usually went about naked or almost naked, full-body painting had the practical advantages of keeping away mosquitoes and gnats, and in northern climes to serve “in winter as a mask against the cold and the ice.”18 Additional layers of meaning, related to concerns with beauty, spirituality, and self-identification, were common. Among the Beothuks of Newfoundland, the ochring of every member of the band—conducted at a site that still bears the name Red Indian Lake—called for a ceremony, and the application of the first coat in infancy was regarded as a sign of initiation.19 While in some groups it was common for both women and men to paint themselves, the European newcomers discovered with some amusement that in the Eastern Woodlands it was to the men that paint tended to afford the greatest opportunities for self-expression. Women painted themselves sparingly in comparison, though it was customary for them too to paint their faces black to display grief in times of mourning.20 To European eyes, the garish designs adopted by men during celebrations, councils, and on the war path seemed to follow personal fancy. In attempting to describe the face paintings of the Iroquois one Jesuit drew on the vocabulary of facial features most familiar to him and to his European readers: some “appear artistically bearded,” while others “seem to wear spectacles.”21 When questioned about the meaning of such garish designs, warriors admitted to the quizzical foreigners that “not being master of their nature, their enemies could perceive on their face some air of pallor and of fear.” Face paint concealed these signs of weakness, as well as “extremes of youth or age, which might inspire strength and courage in the adversary.” Conversely, warriors found that paint “adds to their Courage and strikes a terror in their Enemies.”22 Though settlers were wont to believe that paint acted as a “disguise” which also concealed the identity of treacherous warriors, one Jesuit’s statement that each warrior had “in this matter his own style of livery, so to speak, which he retains through life,” suggests that the intent was quite the contrary.23 While some warriors may indeed have sought to gain an advantage from the fact that paint covered up their identity, others used paint to proudly proclaim it. Such personal “liveries” may very well have been inspired by visionary experiences. Though the spiritual significance of face and body painting tended to elude the European newcomers to the Eastern Woodlands and in the Southwest during the early modern period, ethnographical information collected in the Plains in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make it clear that color and design preferences were generally inspired by visions and dreams in which supernatural entities imparted powers that protected the wearer from harm. Thus the Hidatsa chief Black Shield might “wet some gunpowder and paint his face” before going into battle, applying “white paint on his lips and eyes just as he has seen these things in his dream.”24 Nineteenth- and 122

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early twentieth-century ethnographic observations that specific face and body painting designs could belong to highly codified registers—among the Mohave, designs bore names like rainbow, coyote teeth, yellowhammer belly, and butterfly, bent over—also hint at what may have lain beneath what early modern observers took to be abstract and fanciful assortments of daubs and stripes.25 Ø Ø Ø Although the European newcomers to North America found indigenous manipulation of skin color repulsive, or at the very least strange and unsettling, the practice was not entirely foreign to them. To those among them who had benefited from a humanistic education, the classical authors offered a natural point of reference. After describing the painted breasts and arms of the Chiriguaná women of what is today Columbia, the sixteenth-century Spanish historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés had asked: “How can we blame them, when we look at other nations of the world who are now prosperous and live in a Christian republic, like the English of whom Julius Caesar writes?”26 The Jesuit Joseph-François Lafitau, who, after living among the Iroquois of what is now Canada between 1712 and 1717, penned Moeures des Sauvages américains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps (1724) in an effort to provide reciprocal illumination of the customs of the inhabitants of the New World with those of the Old, found the adornment of the body with tattoos and paint to be a fecund point of comparison. On the subject of peoples who reddened their entire bodies, Lafitau was expansive. “As a rule,” he writes, “the ancient writers tell us this about the [East] Indians, the Africans, the Picts, the Geloni, the Agathyrses and a number of other peoples,” including the Ethiopians, about whom Pliny “assures us that they colored themselves with vermilion from head to foot.” Deducing that these people were doubtless the same who went about naked, Lafitau goes on to point out that even the Romans painted the statues of their gods during feasts in red, “because this color better simulates that of fire,” and that they did the same to the bodies of their victorious generals during their triumphal processions. Other societies, meanwhile, such as the Persians, had applied paint around the eyes. Noting that the inhabitants of North American had the habit of applying vermilion to their hair, Lafitau pointed out that “all the barbarian peoples of antiquity took pleasure in greasing it well and adorning it with artificial colors.”27 Antiquity was not alone in offering points of comparison, for Europe itself had experienced a revival of face paint during the Age of Discovery. By most accounts, the cosmetic arts had been pushed out of fashion throughout most of the continent during the medieval period. While the Church followed the lead of Saint Augustine who, citing as precedent Saints Cyprian and Ambrose, exhorted against “women who color, or discolor, their features with paint,” the breakdown of trade routes restricted access to the cosmetic staples common in antiquity.28 The Crusades and escalating activity of Italian merchants, who brought various perfumes, unguents, and recipes associated with beautification from the East, triggered a revitalization of cosmetic practices beginning in the thirteenth century.29 To achieve the perfectly pale complexion accented by a 123

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healthy rose pink that was hailed as the ideal of feminine beauty, a French treatise called L’ornement des dames or Ornatus mulierum recommended the use of a flour-based face paint. Meanwhile, the English physician Gilbertus Anglicus advised in his Compendium Medicinae that cyclamen root (sourced in southern Europe) could whiten the face, and chips of brasil wood (sourced in Asia) soaked in rosewater could redden the cheeks.30 Italy, unsurprisingly perhaps, emerged as the center of the face-painting renaissance. Already in the early thirteenth century, the poet and jurist Cino da Pistoja could place in the mouth of an attentive mother the following admonition: “Never leave home without face paint, little girl.”31 If a tad of irony was implied, it nevertheless was an accurate reflection of what was becoming a prevailing fashion. Treatises on beautification which described the best ways of painting one’s face multiplied, such as Antonius of Florence’s De ornatu mulierum and Leon Battista Alberti’s Amiria.32 Though L’ornement des dames and Compendium Medicinae demonstrate a certain interest in face painting in France and England as early as the thirteenth century, it was during the sixteenth that the vogue spread northward from Italy. Caterina de’ Medici was credited with bringing the practice of wearing white and red fards to France when she traveled there to become queen in 1533. In England, the preparation and use of what were called fucus increased dramatically during the second half of the century, as a result of the increased trade with the continent and of the example set by Queen Elizabeth who used them openly and increasingly with age. The Siglo de Oro also saw face paint become fashionable in Spain.33 By the early seventeenth century, the painted woman and the professional beautician had become familiar figures and—as with “Doctor Plaster-Face” in John Marston’s play The Malcontent—stock characters on the stage.34 Fashionable gentlemen were also wont to experiment with face paint.35 The cosmetic convention was for women to whiten the skin of their faces and, as sartorial fashions evolved, shoulders and bosoms with a variety of preparations centered on flour, alum, alabaster, talcum, etc. Because of their bright hues, because they clung well to the skin and because they did not require a heavy application, artists’ pigments found new uses. White lead (lead carbonate or lead oxide), widely referred to as ceruse, generally came to be preferred to other whiteners. Produced on a small scale by exposing thin sheets of lead to vinegar, it was also manufactured on a much larger scale for exportation in Venice and eventually in the Netherlands and England. Likewise, while a variety of substances were used to redden cheeks and lips, it was red lead (lead tetroxide) and above all vermilion (mercuric sulfide, in its strictest sense, though the term was often used loosely to describe other red pigments) that acquired prominence. We shall return to these substances in the final part of this chapter.36 Ø Ø Ø Though women from all rungs of society indulged in white and red face paint to brighten their complexion, it emerged as a sign of aristocratic identity and a hallmark of the court culture which thrived in France and emanated from there throughout Europe. Given the theatrical way in which paint was worn at court, with white applied in a thick layer 124

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across the face so as to erase all signs of aging and disease, and red generously daubed on the lips and cheeks, there could be no question of its being intended to pass off as natural. Rather, paint was a power statement, a demonstration of the aristocratic elite’s ability to force the boundaries of fashion beyond the norms of nature. To be sure, the face-painting excesses in vogue among the entourage of Louis XIV and Louis XV were wildly exotic by comparison to those of the British court. In the mid-eighteenth century Horace Walpole was able to spot an Englishwoman at the Paris opera by the fact that she wore “no rouge.”37 To wear or not to wear face paint was a question about which women across Europe had struggled for centuries. Italian, Spanish, French, and English men of letters, meanwhile, had expended profuse quantities of ink on the matter. Picking up the old patristic arguments which held that the use of cosmetics deformed God’s work and contributed to shifting the emphasis away from the soul to the body, and fusing them with new humanist concerns about the relationship between nature, truth, artifice, and falsehood, these late medieval and early modern authors opposed an almost universally negative response to the cosmetic revival. “Why do women,” puzzled one of Ludovico Ariosto’s characters, “not content themselves with the face that God has given them?”38 In England a puritanical current of reform, coupled with the death of that patron of face paint, Queen Elizabeth, and the perceived cosmetic excesses of the Jacobean period, unleashed a veritable flood of misogynistic polemics and satire, much of which took aim at cosmetic practices. John Donne and Richard Brathwait criticized the woman who took “the pencill out of God’s hand” to hold it in her own “impudent hand.”Thomas Tuke devoted an entire tract to the subject, entitled Treatise against Painting and Tincturing of Men and Women (1616).39 This book’s title notwithstanding, face painting was perceived to be a peculiarly feminine vice. Though men who indulged in face painting might be decried as effeminate fops—the enamored Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, for example, is teased for washing, shaving, and painting his face—it was women who bore the brunt of the criticism.40 Women were vain and deceitful, argued their detractors, and face paint was both the proof and instrument of this nature. Husbands should suspect the faithfulness and chastity of women so concerned with their own attractiveness. The woman who painted herself, wrote Joseph Swetnam, was “like the Spider which weaves a fine web to land the flie;” while Stephen Gosson exclaimed “I never yet saw bayted hooke, But fisher then for game did looke.”41 Such misogynistic flights, which betrayed considerable anxiety with respect to women’s lack of readability, appear to have been particularly virulent in England. Among their avalanche of complaints the English critics pointed to the fact that most cosmetic substances were imported and thus costly, but also foreign and corrupting.42 Nonetheless, the critique of face painting was a theme which crossed national and linguistic boundaries. In Spain as well as in France, that bastion of face painting, men of letters disparaged and mocked the use of cosmetics.43 Beyond the theological and moral arguments, critics everywhere pointed to the paradoxes of these substances which, though meant to enhance beauty, in fact damaged it. The corrosive effects of many ingredients used in face paint were already known in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, when the authors of some of the earliest treatises on beautification warned their 125

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readers against the deleterious effects of the very cosmetic recipes which they supplied. Still, though it was widely known that substances such as white lead and vermilion (a compound of mercury, it will be remembered) were damaging to beauty and health, they continued to find wide use until the second half of the eighteenth century.44 Ø Ø Ø Even if the meanings and practices of face and body painting in the New World mapped only imperfectly onto those of face painting in the Old, colonial commentators naturally recognized parallels between the two. William Strachey thus remarked how the inhabitants of Virginia “annoynt” their bodies with colored dyes, “as doe our great Ladies their oyle of Talchum, or other Paynting white and redd.” On one point of comparison, at least, Strachey found that the analysis favored the locals. The Virginian woman was not as secretive with her cosmetic recipes as her English counterpart: she “preserves yt not yet so secret, and pretious unto her self, as doe our great Ladies … but they friendly communicate the secret, and teach yt one another.”45 More often than not, though, the newcomers tended to view indigenous decorative habits as the result and proof of a collective deficiency in character. Like European women, aboriginal men seemed overly preoccupied with their appearance. “The young people, absorbed in their vanity and desire to please, have recourse to art to embellish themselves,” wrote Lafitau of the Iroquois. “[T]hey put infinite time on it and it occupies them as much as it does European ladies and much more than it does their own [women] who appear persuaded that charity, decorum and their domestic work require more modesty and simplicity.”46 To the missionaries who wished to convert and civilize the “barbarous” inhabitants of the New World, face painting represented more or less of an obstacle to overcome. Roger Williams, the Protestant theologian and founder of the colony of Rhode Island, held opinions in line with those of the English polemicists of his time. It was with some regret indeed that he conceded that it was the “foolish Custome of all barbarous Nations to paint and figure their Faces and Bodies (as it hath been to our shame and griefe, wee may remember it of some of our Fore-Fathers in this [English] Nation).” In his Key into the Language of America (1643), Williams provided phrases by which his readers might attempt to dissuade the Narragansetts from painting themselves: “Cummachiteoûwunash kuskeésuckquash,” meaning “You spoil your face”; and “Mat pitch cowahick Manit keesiteonckqus,” meaning “The God that made you will not know you.” Reflecting on the challenge to Christianity posed by face painting on both sides of the Atlantic, Williams was like many of his contemporaries moved to versify: Truth is a Native, naked Beauty; but Lying Inventions are by Indian Paints, Dissembling hearts their Beautie’s but a Lye, Truth is the proper Beauty of Gods Saints. Fowle are the Indians Haire and painted Faces, More foule such Haire, such Face in Israel. England so calls her self, yet there’s Absoloms foule Haire and Face of Jesabell.

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Paints will not bide Christs washing Flames of fire, Faines Inventions will not bide such stormes: O that we may prevent him, that betimes, Repentance Tears may wash of all such Formes.47

The Jesuit missionaries operating in the Saint Lawrence valley during the same period also attempted to rebuke their Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron neophytes for the “mischievous custom” of face and body painting.48 When he built and decorated a chapel in the mission-village of Lorette, near Quebec, patterned after the Santa Casa of Loreto in Italy, Father Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot was careful that the statue of Saint Mary be painted in flesh tones rather than in the dark tones that characterize the original in Loreto. “We did this for fear lest, if we exposed for the veneration of our Savages an image entirely black,” explained Chaumonot, “we might cause them to resume the custom which we have made them abandon, of blackening and staining their faces.”49 In the decades that followed, however, the Jesuits of New France relaxed their attitudes towards face and body painting. Acknowledging the impossibility of effecting a wholesale transformation of indigenous society, the missionaries came to believe that these customs, like other forms of adornment and dress, language, and music, were innocuous and compatible with the fundamentals of the Catholic faith. By the time of the American Revolution, much had changed at Lorette. A German officer visiting the village’s chapel was astonished to discover carved figures inside who “appear as savages in savage costume … I shall not readily forget good St Peter with his keys and his painted face.”50 The Franciscan missionaries toiling in New Mexico similarly exhibited a great deal of tolerance for painting, even as they fought against idolatry and attempted to reform habits of nakedness. In 1714, the colony’s Governor Juan Ignacio Flores Mogollón conducted an investigation into whether or not the Pueblos should be allowed to continue to paint themselves in a traditional manner. The friars to whom he turned for advice explained that the people of the Pueblos described the painted body as being akin to a “beautiful suit,” and that “body paint is their fancy dress.” Fray Salvador Lopez reminded the governor that the use of paint by their wards was little different from Spanish women’s practice of painting their own faces with white shell powder. Because the Spanish used powder, color, ribbons, and feathers “among themselves to adorn their bodies” and because this was not judged sinful, he reasoned that they could not prohibit the Pueblos from doing the same. “I have seen the painting and the plumes many times,” declared Fray Antonio Miranda of the Pueblos, “and they have told me because among the Spanish it is not a bad thing to put on the hats, feathers and ribbons [that] … they don’t use these things for bad things either.”51 Anxieties about painted neighbors were not merely theological. Governor Flores’s investigation had been prompted by the concern that Spaniards could not tell the friendly Pueblos apart from the other, “heathen” and hostile, inhabitants of the region such as the Apaches. It was feared that the Pueblos, painted and dressed so as to be unrecognizable from the enemy, were free to mischievously steal livestock and murder settlers.52 Similar misgivings about the goodwill and sincerity of indigenous 127

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neighbors were common along the Anglo-American frontier, whose inhabitants often had difficulties distinguishing friends and foes. John Brickell complained after his experience in North Carolina that in times of war these Savages always appear’d in these disguises, whereby they might never after be discovered or known by the Christians that shoud happen to see them after they had made their escape; for it is impossible ever to know an Indian under these Colours, although he had been ever so often at your House, and you were most intimatly acquainted with him before he put on this disguise.53

At the same time, colonists were only too happy to don the aboriginal “disguise” when it suited their purpose. Taking to heart the precept that “When in Rome …,” French and British officials and military men cultivated habits of self-presentation that allowed them to interact most fruitfully with their aboriginal interlocutors. It was “dressed and painted after the manner of an Indian War Captain” that the trader and diplomat Sir William Johnson entered the city gates of Albany in August of 1746, at the head of a Mohawk delegation “likewise dressed and painted, as is usual when they set out in War.” A willingness to display a face painted according to indigenous conventions on certain key occasions, much like a familiarity with their languages, was a means of demonstrating solidarity with trading partners and allied warriors, of acquiring and maintaining a measure of influence among them.54 In different circumstances, putting on the painted disguises allowed colonists to register political protest under the cover of anonymity. “I immediately dressed myself in the costume of an Indian,” recalled George Hewes of his involvement in the Boston Tea Party of 1773. “[A]fter having painted my face and hands with coal dust in the shop of a blacksmith,” he fell in “with many who were dressed, equipped and painted as I was,” before reaching Griffin’s wharf. This thinly veiled impersonation of “Indians” (Mohawks to be more precise) fooled no one. But then again, these colonists were less concerned with passing off as something other than what they were than about registering their protest in flamboyant and symbolic style. Painted faces and hands embodied both an expression of long-standing colonial anxieties centered on indigenous neighbors beyond the frontier and of more recent anxieties centered across the Atlantic, on Great Britain. The painted Indian, representing the antithesis of King George’s tyranny, was a convenient symbol of the emerging American identity.55 Ø Ø Ø The rise of the transatlantic fur trading markets in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries transformed cosmetics use among the indigenous peoples of North America. Mirrors, by facilitating the precise application of paint to one’s own face, may have entailed a true revolution in face-painting practices, allowing for the more careful selfapplication of paint.56 The introduction of copper vessels may have made the collection of soot, used as a black pigment, somewhat easier. More significant was the introduction of manufactured pigments such as verdigris, red lead, and, more importantly, vermilion. By all accounts, aboriginal consumers exhibited a marked preference for vermilion over ochre. As Lafitau explained, the locally sourced pigments produced “a rather nice red, but that is not worth our vermilion.”57 128

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When and how, exactly, the transatlantic trade in pigments began must remain a matter of conjecture. Oral tradition among the French residents of Canada during the mid-eighteenth century had it that vermilion had been traded from the colony’s earliest days. “Many persons have told me,” reported the Swedish naturalist Pehr Kalm, in the mid-eighteenth century, “that they had heard their fathers mention, that the first Frenchmen who came over here got a great heap of furs from the Indians, for three times as much cinnabar [vermilion] as would lie on the tip of a knife.”58 Though this suggests that vermilion had been traded since the first decade of the seventeenth century, it is not until the century’s final decades that the earliest sure evidence of a transatlantic trade in red pigment emerges. In 1684, Cavelier de La Salle listed vermilion among the “small articles” which he was trading in the Great Lakes and asked for fifty pounds of it to be sent from France to “drive a profitable trade.” By the turn of the century, the French chronicler Bacqueville de La Potherie stated that a “great commerce” in vermilion was conducted in Canada.59 It appears in the English colonies at about the same time. In February 1687, Governor Thomas Dongan of New York mentions it in a list of “Merchandize commonly called Indian Goods.” In November of 1694, “6 pound vermilion” is listed among the goods that were to be presented to representatives of the Iroquois Confederacy at Albany.60 Vermilion was abundantly traded and offered as diplomatic presents by French, British, and Spanish merchants in every frontier zone throughout the eighteenth century.61 The rise of the transatlantic vermilion trade at the end of the seventeenth century may have something to do with technical advances. Since antiquity, vermilion had been derived from powdered cinnabar. “Vermilion mines” in Galicia continued to produce through the Middle Ages and early modern period.62 A process for synthesizing vermilion from mercury and sulfur was recorded in Europe as early as the eighth century, plausibly after having been carried from China via Arabia. From the twelfth century onwards, synthetic vermilion was used throughout Europe as an artist’s pigment.63 In the seventeenth century Amsterdam emerged as the center of production of vermillion using the “dry” process, which involved combining mercury with molten sulfur and heating it to the point of sublimation.64 In 1687, a German named Gottfried Schultz invented a new “wet” process which entailed heating a mixture of mercury and sulfur in a warm, caustic solution of ammonium or potassium sulfide. This more efficient and cheaper process was adopted in Amsterdam, which retained its dominance as a center of vermilion production until the early nineteenth century.65 The vermilion that the French exported to their North American colonies was thus, in fact, Dutch vermilion. Lacking evidence of a vermilion industry in Britain, the same might tentatively be suggested of the vermilion that reached the British colonies.66 Red lead, on the other hand, was something that Britain produced increasingly as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wore on. One source from 1670 mentions the presence of red lead mills at the lead mines in Cardiganshire, and four decades later others are mentioned in Glamorganshire.67 Given the lower value of red lead compared to vermilion, it is no surprise that it found its way into the hands of Britain’s allies and trading partners in North America. Governor Dongan’s 1684 enumeration of “Indian Goods” included not only vermilion, but also red lead. In 1711, Governor Robert 129

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Hunter of New York presented to Schagticoke headmen “5lb Red lead and half a pound of Vermilion for Paint.” Five years later a factor at Savano Town in South Carolina requested that his superiors allow him to use red lead to extend the more expensive vermilion and was likewise informed that “We do likewise consent that you mix the Vermilion and red Lead equally, as you sell the same.”68 Vermilion was frequently adulterated in this way in Europe—one early nineteenth-century source indicates that it is often “falsified by minium, colcotar, crushed brick, dragon’s blood, and realgar or arsenic sulfide.”69 Though lists of trading goods sometimes allude to both vermilion and red lead, and though they occasionally allude to “vermilion mixed” or “paint,” there is good reason to believe that the pigments described simply as “vermilion” in the records were not always pure mercuric sulfide. For traders there were good profit margins to be made in “vermilion,” which by volume and weight was one of the most expensive commodities on the North American fur trading market. The nineteenth-century historian François-Xavier Garneau’s claim that “as much as 800 francs have been obtained for a pound of vermilion!” was most probably an exaggeration.70 A pound of vermilion which cost Antoine Crozat only 5 livres in France was sold at his store in Mobile for more than three times as much in 1715.71 The Hudson Bay Company’s standard of trade through most of the eighteenth century hovered around 1 to 1.5 ounces (28 to 42 grams) of vermilion per beaver skin. To put this in perspective, a list of the value of various goods traded by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1749 indicates that a beaver skin could buy a full pound (450 grams) of beads, gunpowder, shot, or thread.72 Technical advances in the European manufacturing process and expanded trade relations with China, a great producer of vermilion or “China red,” meant that by the mid-nineteenth century a pound of vermilion could be had for four beaver skins (see Plate 17). Still, as Henry Rowe Schoolcraft remarked, it remained “generally too costly for habitual use.”73 Ø Ø Ø The impact of the introduction of vermilion on indigenous customs is exceedingly difficult to ascertain. Evidence of ochre use for a variety of ceremonial purposes, including face and body painting, through the nineteenth century and in a limited context to this day, is abundant in the ethnographic record. Vermilion, it is plain, did not entirely replace ochre. The high cost of the imported pigment, like the fact that some groups lived at a great distance from trading posts and maintained relatively little contact with outside traders, may explain why ochre continued to be used. In addition, it is tempting to think that notwithstanding the oft-stated indigenous preference for the vibrant hues of vermilion, some individuals and communities continued to prefer ochre because they could control the ritual dimensions of its extraction and thus maintain a relationship with the supernatural forces that inhabited the landscape. Imported vermilion or red lead, because it was decontextualized from the environment, may in some ritual circumstances have seemed a rather poor ersatz. The high price of vermilion should not be measured only in economic terms, for the impact of mercury- and lead-based pigments on the health of their aboriginal users 130

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gives cause to pause. From the earliest days of the cosmetics revival, the deleterious effects of these substances were a concern to specialists. By the second half of the eighteenth century, these effects were almost universally recognized in Europe. With respect to women’s use of vermilion on their cheeks (Fig. 7.1), Antoine Le Camus’ Abedeker, ou l’Art de conserver la beauté (1754) explains that it is “very dangerous; for by using it frequently they may lose their Teeth, acquire a stinking Breath, and excite a copious Salivation.”74 It was in no small part due to the intervention of medical professionals that the popularity of white and red face paint underwent a sharp decline in favor of a more naturalistic aesthetic. Still, the distribution and trade of vermilion in North America continued unabated. Perhaps the missionaries and officials who sought at various 7.1 A variety of Mohave women’s times to dissuade their aboriginal wards and allies face-painting patterns, each of which from painting themselves evoked this argument, bore a name such as “Rainbow,” but if that is the case it left no trace in the record. “Coyote Teeth,” “Yellowhammer Only in 1902 do we find a Commissioner of Belly,” “Butterfly,” etc. After Alfred Indian Affairs, William A. Jones, attributing “the L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians majority of the cases of blindness among the of California, Bureau of American Indians of the United States” to face painting in Ethnology, Bulletin 78 (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1925) an attempt to bring about its end in the country’s reservations.75 It was during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rather than the seventeenth or sixteenth, that the most fundamental transformation of aboriginal cosmetic culture occurred. On the one hand, the prized vermilion became more affordable and a wide variety of new pigments were introduced to the inventories of traders: Prussian blue, yellow lead chromate, green chromium oxide, ivory black or bone char, and zinc oxide or Chinese white.76 On the other, new power dynamics undermined political and cultural autonomy as never before. In the years that followed the War of 1812, as the strategic importance of allied warriors waned, the British and American government ceased to distribute presents of arms, ammunition, and other accessories of war among which vermilion had featured prominently until then. Warrior culture, for which imperial powers vying against one another had found uses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, now represented a threat to the stability and progress of the American and British (later Canadian) nations in their westward expansion. The nineteenth-century institution of reservations and increasingly rigid civilizing policies of the state allowed missionaries and government officials an unprecedented repressive power. The naturalistic shift taken by Western cosmetic culture left little room for the tolerance of indigenous face- and body-painting customs, nor did the rising concern 131

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with hygiene. Missionaries now objected to these customs with renewed vigor. Though vermilion continued to be traded well into the twentieth century to serve in various crafts, its use on the body was discouraged. Traders operating on many reservations were instructed not to sell pigments that could be used for face or body paint. At Metlakala in British Columbia, the factor was told that “No red paint or other articles of heathenism were to be offered for sale.”77 Painted peoples were now seen as belonging to the past.

Notes 1. Julia Tavares, Guide to Caribbean Prehistory (Santo Domingo: Museo del Hombre Dominicano, 1978), 15–16; Lesley-Gail Atkinson, The Earliest Inhabitants: The Dynamics of the Jamaican Taíno (Kingston ( Jamaica): University of the West Indies Press, 2006), 148–49. 2. Edward Gaylord Bourne, ed., Narratives of the Career of Hernando de Soto in the Conquest of Florida (New York: Barnes, 1904), vol. 1, 108, 113; vol. 2, 56, 136. 3. Ingeborg Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 14–24. 4. James P. Howley seems to have been among the first to conclude, without supporting evidence, that the fifteenth-century explorers of Newfoundland called the locals “red,” a claim which was repeated by the authoritative Handbook of North American Indians. See James P. Howley, The Beothuks or Red Indians: The Original Inhabitants of Newfoundland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 2–3, 10; and Barrie Reynolds, “Beothuk,” in William C. Sturtevant and Bruce G. Trigger, eds, Handbook of North American Indians (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978–2008), vol. 15, 101, 107. For the correction to this misconception, see Alden T. Vaughan, “From White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo-American Perceptions of the American Indian,” American Historical Review 87, 4 (October 1982): 948; Nancy Shoemaker, “How Indians Got to be Red,” American Historical Review 102, 3 ( June 1997): 625–44; and Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in EighteenthCentury North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 125–40. 5. John Brickell, The Natural History of North-Carolina (Dublin: James Carson, 1737), 316. See also Joseph-François Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians Compared with Customs of Primitive Times (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1977), vol. 2, 32. 6. John Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, & the Summer Isles (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1907), vol. 1, 55, 71, 76. For other references to bloodroot, see Brickell, Natural History, 279; Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, hereafter JRAD (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1896–1901), vol. 38, 251. 7. Ernst E. Wreschner, “Red Ochre and Human Evolution: A Case for Discussion,” and Comments and Reply by Ralph Bolton, Karl W. Butzer, Henri Delporte, Alexander Häusler, Albert Heinrich, Anita Jacobson-Widding, Tadeusz Malinowski, Claude Masset, Sheryl F. Miller, Avraham Ronen, Ralph Solecki, Peter H. Stephenson, Lynn L. Thomas, Heinrich Zollinger, all in Current Anthropology 21, 5 (October 1980), 631–44; Erella Hovers et al., “An Early Case of Color Symbolism: Ochre Use by Modern Humans in Qafzeh Cave,” Current Anthropology 44, 4 (August–October 2003), 491–522; Chris Knight, Blood Relations. Menstruation and the Origin of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 435–49; Rebecca Morris, “A Shroud of Ochre: A Study of Pre-Contact Mortuary Ochre Use in North America” (unpublished Master’s thesis, University of Leicester, 2007). It should be noted that archaeologist rarely perform chemical analysis on pigments and often use “ochre” as a generic term. 8. Michael D. Stafford et al., “Digging for the Color of Life: Paleoindian Red Ochre Mining at the Powars II Site, Platte County, Wyoming, U.S.A,” Geoarchaeology 18, 1 (2003): 71–90; D.C. Roper,

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“Plains Paleoindian Red Ochre Use and Its Possible Significance,” Current Research in the Pleistocene 4 (1987), 82–84; D.C. Roper, “A Comparison of Contexts of Red Ochre Use in Paleoindian and Upper Paleolithic Sites,” North American Archaeologist 12, 4 (1991), 289–301; D.C. Roper, “Variability in the Use of Ochre in the Paleoindian Period,” Current Research in the Pleistocene 13 (1996), 40–42; Robert E. Ritzenthaler and George I. Quimby, “The Red Ocher Culture of the Upper Great Lakes and Adjacent Areas,” Fieldiana: Anthropology 36, 11 (March 1962), 243–75; Morris, “A Shroud of Ochre.” 9. On ochre as a healing agent, see Joseph Velo, “Ochre as Medicine: A Suggestion for the Interpretation of the Archaeological Record,” Current Anthropology 25, 5 (1984): 674; A.R. Peile, “Colours that Cure,” Hemisphere 23, 4 (1979): 214–17. 10. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Stanford CA: CSLI, 1999). For a discussion and elaboration of their contribution, see Peter Newcomer and James Faris, “Basic Color Terms,” International Journal of American Linguistics 37, 4 (1971): 270–75; P. Kay and K. McDaniel, “The Linguistic Significance of the Meanings of Basic Color Terms,” Language 54, 3 (1978): 610–46; Barbara A.C. Saunders, The Invention of Basic Colour Terms (Utrecht: ISOR, 1992); Barbara Saunders and Jaap van Brakel, “The Trajectory of Color,” Perspectives on Science 10, 3, (2002): 302–55. 11. Victor W. Turner, “Colour Classification in Ndembu Ritual,” in Michael Banton, ed., Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (New York: Praeger, 1966), 80–81; Knight, Blood Relations. 12. Paul Proulx, “Algic Color Terms,” Anthropological Linguistics 30, 2 (Summer 1988), 135–49; Jean-André Cuoq, Lexique de la langue iroquoise (Montreal: J. Chapleau, 1882), 33. The relationship between ochre and blood, of course, is also signified by the Greek “haema,” which means bloods. 13. Johann Georg Kohl, Kitchi-gami: Life Among the Lake Superior Ojibway (London: Chapman & Hall, 1860). See, for example, Turner, “Colour Classification”; Knight, Blood Relations. 14. Jean-François Lozier, “Rouge Amérique: Le toponyme vermillon au Canada et aux Etats-Unis,” unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for the Study of Names, Montreal, May 2010. 15. Paul Douglas Campbell, Earth Pigments and Paint of the California Indians (Los Angeles: Sunbelt, 2007), 32; Julian Lips, Naskapi Law (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1947), 443, 485. 16. Stafford et al., “Digging,” 88; Richard Slobodin, “Kutchin,” in William C. Sturtevant and Bruce G. Trigger, eds, Handbook of North American Indians (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978– 2008), vol. 6, 517; Lloyd James Dempsey, Blackfoot War Art: Pictographs of the Reservation Period, 1880– 2000 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 44–45. 17. See for example Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Maximilian, Prince of Weid’s Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832–1834 (Cleveland: A.H. Clark, 1906), vol. 22, 328; Campbell, Earth Pigments, 116–17. 18. Andrew White, “A Briefe Relation of the Voyage unto Maryland” in Clayton Colman Hall, ed., Narratives of Early Maryland [1633–1684] (New York: Charles Scribner’s & Sons, 1910), 42–43; George Percy, “Discourse,” in Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter, 1606–1609 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 1: 130; JRAD, vol. 38, 253. 19. Marshall, History, 287–88. 20. For evidence of indigenous women’s limited use of paint, see John Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1876), 203; Brickell, Natural History, 316. For evidence that this was not the case everywhere, see Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (London: Gregory Dexter, 1643), 165; John Romeyn Brodhead et al., eds, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, hereafter NYCD (Albany NY: Weed, Parsons, 1856–87), vol. 7, 656; N. de Dièreville, Relation of the voyage to Port Royal in Acadia or New France (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1933), 295; Claude Charles Le Roy Bacqueville de La Potherie, Histoire de l’Amérique septentrionale (Paris: Jean-

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Luc Nion et François Didot, 1722), vol. 3, 43–44. On the use of black for mourning see for example JRAD, vol. 2, 73; JRAD, vol. 3, 131; JRAD, vol. 9, 43; JRAD, vol. 12, 27; Brickell, Natural History, 316. 21. JRAD, vol. 38, 249. See also JRAD, vol. 5, 23; Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs, 203–5. 22. Bacqueville de La Potherie, vol. 3, 43–44; JRAD, vol. 38, 253; Brickell, Natural History, 316; NYCD, vol. 3, 714. 23. Brickell, 316; JRAD, vol. 41, 111–13. 24. Alfred W. Bowers, Hidatsa Social and Ceremonial Organization, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 194 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1965), 239. In the same way, it was in visions or dreams that the rites, songs, dress, as well as paint colors and designs that distinguished the various military and healing societies common to the peoples of the Plains found their origin. See Clark Wissler, ed., “Societies of the Plains Indians,” in Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 9 (New York: Museum of Natural History, 1916). For the relationship between visionary experience and body paint in the Jivaroan context, see Anne-Christine Taylor, “Les masques de la mémoire: Essai sur la fonction des peintures corporelles jivaro,” L’Homme 165 ( January–March 2003), 235–40. 25. Alfred Louis Kroeber, ed., Handbook of the Indians of California (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1925), vol. 2, 729–30, 732–33. 26. Quoted by Sabine McCormac in Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas: South America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), vol. 1, 149. 27. Lafitau, Customs, vol. 2, 38. 28. Augustine of Hippo, De doctrina christiana: On Christian Doctrine (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 150, 157. 29. Jacques Pinset and Yvonne Deslandres, Histoire des soins de beauté (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), 44–48; also see Denis Menjot, ed., Les soins de beauté: Moyen Age—début des temps modernes. Actes du IIIe Colloque international, Grasse (26–28 avril 1985) (Nice: Centre d’Etudes médiévales, 1987). 30. Rierre Ruelle, ed., L’ornement des dames (Ornatus mulierum) (Brussels: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1967); Faye Marie Getz, ed., Healing and Society in Medieval England: A Middle English Translation of the Pharmaceutical Writings of Gilbertus Anglicus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). 31. Quoted in E. Rodocanachi, La femme italienne à l’époque de la Renaissance: Sa vie privée et mondaine, son influence sociale (Paris: Hachette, 1907), 106. 32. Ibid., 104–11. 33. Catherine Lanoë, La poudre et le fard. Une histoire des cosmétiques de la renaisssance aux Lumières (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2008); Carroll Camden, The Elizabethan Woman (New York: Appel, 1952), 175–215; Neville Williams, Powder and Paint. A History of the Englishwoman’s Toilet (London: Longmans, 1957); Farah Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006); Jesús Terrón González, Léxico de cosméticos y afeites en el Siglo de Oro (Salamanca: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Extremadura, 1990); Elizabeth Teresa Howe, “The Feminine Mistake: Nature, Illusion, and Cosmetics in the Siglo de Oro,” Hispania 68, 3 (September 1985), 443–51. 34. John Marston, The Malcontent, ed. George K. Hunter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 61–62. 35. James Cleland, The Institution of a Young Nobleman (Oxford: Barnes, 1607), 216; Annette Drew-Bear, Painted Faces on the Renaissance Stage: The Moral Significance of Face-Painting Conventions (Cranbury:

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Associated University Presses, 1994), 29–31, 73–82, 118; Frances E. Dolan, “Taking the Pencil Out of God’s Hand: Art, Nature, and the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England,” PMLA 108, 2 (March 1993), 224–39. 36. On the production of cosmetics in the early modern period, see Catherine Lanoë, La poudre et le fard and “La céruse dans la fabrication des cosmétiques sous l’Ancien Régime (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles),” Techniques and Cultures 38 (2002), http://tc.revues.org/index224.html, accessed 15 January 2010; Moraig Martin, Selling Beauty: Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society, 1750–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). 37. Horace Walpole, Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Sir Horace Mann (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1844), vol. 2, 402. 38. Quoted in Rodocanachi, La femme italienne, 107; see also 104–11. 39. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, eds, The Sermons of John Donne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), vol. 2, 343; Richard Brathwait, Ar’t asleepe Husband? A Boulster Lecture (London: R. Bishop, 1640); Thomas Tuke, A Treatise against Painting and Tincturing of Men and Women (London: Tho. Creed and Barn. Allsope, 1616). 40. Drew-Bear, Painted Faces, 102. 41. Joseph Swetnam, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, Unconstant Women; or, The Vanitie of Them, Choose You Whether (London, 1615); Stephen Gosson, Pleasant Quippes for Upstart Newfangled Gentlewomen (London: Richards, 1841). 42. Dolan, “Taking the Pencil,” 229. 43. Lanoë, La poudre et le fard and “La ceruse”; Martin, Selling Beauty, 73–96; Howe, “The Feminine Mistake.” 44. Lanoë, La poudre et le fard and “La ceruse”; Martin, Selling Beauty, 73–116; Rodocanachi, La femme italienne, 107. 45. William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania, eds Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund (London: Hakluyt Society, 1953), 70–71. Strachey was not alone in drawing a parallel. See, for example, de Dièreville, The voyage to Port Royal, 295. 46. Lafitau, Customs, vol. 2, 41. 47. Williams, Key, 192–93. 48. JRAD, vol. 18, 153; JRAD, vol. 29, 129; JRAD, vol. 59, 231. 49. JRAD, vol. 60, 93 50. Ray W. Pettengill, ed., Letters from America, 1776–1779: Being the Letters of Brunswick, Hessian, and Waldeck Officers with the British Armies during the Revolution (Port Washington NY: Kennikat, 1964), 71–72. Writing in 1640, one missionary described face painting as an “indifferent” practice, rather than “superstitious” one. JRAD, vol. 20, 187. 51. Quoted in Tracy Brown, “Tradition and Change in Eighteenth-Century Pueblo Indian Communities,” Journal of the Southwest 46, 3 (Autumn 2004): 468–69. 52. Ibid. 53. Brickell, Natural History, 316. 54. A Treaty between his Excellency … George Clinton … And the Six … Nations (New York: James Parker, 1746), 8; Timothy J. Shannon’s “Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick,

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William Johnson, and the Indian Fashion,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 53, 1 ( January 1996): 13–42. 55. John Warner Barber, The History and Antiquities of New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania (Hartford: H.S. Parsons & Co., 1842), 389; Bruce E. Johansen, The Native Peoples of North America: A History (Westport CT: Praeger, 2005), vol. 2, 169–71. 56. JRAD, vol. 38, 253. Compare, tentatively, with JRAD, vol. 4, 205. 57. Lafitau, Customs, vol. 2, 32 (retranslated by the author). 58. Peter Kalm, Travels into North America (Barre: Imprint Society, 1972), 491. 59. NYCD, vol. 9, 220; Bacqueville de La Potherie, Histoire, vol. 1, 365; vol. 3, 43; Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce de Lahontan, Mémoires de l’Amérique septentrionale ou la suite des voyages de Mr le Baron de Lahontan (La Haye: Frêres l’Honoré, 1704), 70. 60. NYCD, vol. 3, 400; NYCD, vol. 4, 126, 136. 61. References to gifts and exchanges of vermilion are too numerous to enumerate here. See for example NYCD, vol. 5; NYCD, vol. 6, 387, 721; NYCD, vol. 7, 281, 657, 787; NYCD, vol. 8, 718, 720; NYCD, vol. 9, 220, 707; NYCD, vol. 10, 558, 929; “List of Merchandise Granted by Governor John Reynolds’ Order to William Little from December 16, 1755 to February 15, 1757,” Public Records Office, Colonial Office 5, 646, fols 71–72; Brickell, Natural History, 316; Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, Histoire de la Louisiane (Paris: De Bure l’Aîné, Veuve Delaguette, Lambert, 1758), vol. 2, 184, 197; vol. 3, 166, 180, 193. 62. Jacques Savary des Brûlons and Philémon-Louis Savary, Dictionnaire universel de commerce: d’histoire naturelle, & des arts (Copenhagen: Claude Philibert, 1765), vol. 5, 879, 848. 63. Rutherford J. Gettens et al., “Vermilion and Cinnabar,” Studies in Conservation 17, 2 (May 1972): 47–48; Pamela H. Smith, “Vermilion, Mercury, Blood, and Lizards: Matter and Meaning in Metalworking,” in Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory, eds Ursula Klein and E.C. Spary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 29–49. 64. A.F.E. Van Schendel, “Manufacture of Vermilion in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam. The Pekstok Papers,” Studies in Conservation 17, 2 (May 1972): 70–82. 65. Gettens et al., “Vermilion and Cinnabar,” 50; Encyclopédie méthodique (Paris: Pancoucke, and Liège: Plomteux, 1789), vol. 6, 764; Jacques Accarias de Sérionne, La richesse de la Hollande: Ouvrage dans lequel on expose, l’origine du commerce & de la puissance des Hollandois … (London: Compagnie [des Indes orientales], 1778), vol. 1, 66; Théodore Château, Technologie du bâtiment: spécialement destiné aux ingénieurs, architectes … (Paris: A. Morel, 1866), vol. 2, 625. 66. Regarding France’s dependence on the Netherlands, see Savary des Brûlons and Savary, Dictionnaire, vol. 5, 143; Anonymous, Considérations sur l’Etat de Canada d’après un manuscrit aux Archives du Bureau de la Marina a Paris [October 1756] (Quebec: Literary and Historical Society of Québec, 1840?), 16. 67. William Henry Pulsifer, Notes for a History of Lead (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1888), 56, 74, 276–83; David John Rowe, Lead Manufacturing in Britain, A History (Beckenham: Associated Lead, 1983), 5–18. 68. NYCD, vol. 3, 400; NYCD, vol. 5, 286; Jo-Anne Fiske and William Wicken, eds, New Faces of the Fur Trade: Selected Papers of the Seventh North American Fur Trade Conference, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1995 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998), 211. The analysis of red pigments on Naskapi artifacts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveals the presence of both vermilion and red lead. Elizabeth A. Moffatt et al., “Analysis of the Paints on a Selection of Naskapi Artifacts in Ethnographic Collections,” Studies in Conservation 42, 2 (1997): 67–69.

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69. Jean-Baptiste Dumas, Traité de chimie, appliquée aux arts (Paris: Béchet Jeune, 1831), vol. 3, 630. See also Château, Technologie du bâtiment, vol. 2, 625. 70. François-Xavier Garneau, Histoire du Canada depuis sa découverte jusqu’à nos jours (Quebec: P. Lamoureux, 1859), vol. 2, 153. 71. Review of Duclos’ report by the Conseil de la Marine, September 1716, Archives nationales (France), Archives de la Colonie, C13A 4, fol. 271. 72. Elizabeth Mancke, A Company of Businessmen: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Long-Distance Trade, 1670–1730 (Winnipeg: Rupert’s Land Research Centre, 1988), 56; A Short State of the Countries and Trade Of North America Claimed by the Hudson’s Bay Company (London: J. Robinson, 1749), 25–26. 73. See price list for Fort Vancouver, in Fur Trade Papers, FN1245, Fort Nisqually Collection, Huntington Library; Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1851), 1: 234. 74. Antoine Le Camus, Abdeker ou l’Art de conserver la beauté (Paris: 1754), 82; Solange Simon-Mazoyer, “Le conflit entre les excès de la mode et de la santé au XVIIIe siècle: ‘L’habillage’ du visage,” in Vincent Barras and Micheline Louis-Courvoisier, eds, La médecine des Lumières: Tout autour de Tissot (Geneva: Georg, 2001), 41–53; Martin, Selling Beauty, 97–117. 75. Charles F. Lummis, “In the Lion’s Den,” Out West 16, 2 (February 1902): 189–91. 76. John Wesley Powell, Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1882–1883 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1886), 52. 77. Jean Usher, William Duncan of Metlakatla: A Victorian Missionary in British Columbia (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1974), 45, 67. For similar restrictions elsewhere, see Michael E. Harkin, The Heiltsuks: Dialogues of Culture and History on the Northwest Coast (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 90–91, 109; Annual Report of the Department of the Interior (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1894), vol. 2, 159.

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8 Indian Indigo Padmini Tolat Balaram

In the mid-1860s, Henry Thoby Prinsep, a member of the Anglo-Indian elite, began the record of his family’s history by describing his father’s decision to go to India. The latter, John Prinsep, went to India in the 1770s because his business prospects in the textile trade were limited in England. After failing to be made the partner of a linen draper he had been apprenticed to in London, John Prinsep joined the East India Company in 1771 and went to Calcutta. Within a few years, he was appointed Superintendent Cloth Merchant, charged with examining the quality of cotton goods that were supplied by “native manufacturers.” In the course of performing his duties, he became interested in indigo production. Chintz, one of the most popular Indian textile exports, was made using resist-dye methods, and indigo was most certainly a part of this dyeing process (see Plate 18). Prinsep experimented with indigo production, and in 1779, according to his son, “introduced the cultivation and manufacture of Indigo into Bengal after the San Domingo method.” He also obtained a land grant near Calcutta and entered “into an agreement to supply the East India company with indigo for six years.” His son ends his brief overview of his father’s accomplishments, stating: “The cultivation and manufacture of indigo thus introduced by John Prinsep flourished for one century during which it employed many thousands of the poorer classes and thus added to the prosperity of the country.”1 There is something odd about this statement, one that merits our investigation. Although the younger Prinsep did not overstate his father’s accomplishments, for John Prinsep did indeed succeed in producing indigo in Bengal, becoming wealthy and laying the foundation for the Prinsep dynasty in India, he did employ a phrase that rather remarkably erases more than two thousand years of indigo production in India. His phrase “the cultivation and manufacture of indigo thus introduced by John Prinsep” suggests that his father originated indigo production and manufacture in India, which, as we shall see, is simply not true. However, this narrative contains more than a kernel of truth because British planters, following in Prinsep’s steps, began in the 1780s to lease land from local feudal landowners (zamindars) to cultivate as indigo plantations and thereby inserted themselves into 139

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what had been primarily a very old production process handled and overseen by Indian cultivators and landholders respectively. In order to evaluate the Prinsep narrative and to understand what Prinsep and others like him did that was indeed new, we need to place this moment in the context of the history of indigo production in India and within the global production of indigo at that time, which also includes a consideration of the many different species of plants that fall under this broad term. This chapter will first provide an overview of the cultivation and manufacture of Indian indigo in its local and global historical contexts and then return to the British East India Company’s policies concerning indigo production in India during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Indigofera Plants in India Indigo was one of the reasons that trade with India was established by the British, with the founding of the East India Company in 1600. In addition to spices, colorful cotton textiles were what drew Europeans to India where they established trading centers, called factories, at a number of port cities along the Indian coast, including Bombay (Mumbai), Surat, Chennai, and Calcutta (Kolkata). India is home to forty members of the Indigofera genus, of which there are 250 to 300 species of plants, which are distributed throughout the tropical regions of the world. Indigofera coerulea, wild indigo, may have been the origin of Indigofera tinctoria, the chief source of commercial indigo. Other non-indigofera plants produce blue dye, also called indigo, but these plants do not produce blues of the same quality as Indigofera species such as tinctoria. Japanese indigo, for instance, is extracted from Polygonum tinctiorium and lacks the depth and intensity of the blues produced by Indigofera tinctoria. Out of forty indigenous species of Indigofera, ten are said to occur throughout the plains of India, ascending the Himalayas and the hills of India to an altitude of 3,000 to 5,000 feet (900 to 1,500 meters). About five species prefer temperate temperatures and thrive between 6,000 and 8,000 feet (1,800 to 2,400 meters). Western India, including Sind, which is now part of Pakistan, possessed 25 species of Indigofera plants, while Punjab and the North-West province of British India each possessed two local species. The Madras Presidency possessed three local species; while Bengal did not have any species peculiar to it. Thus three quarters of Indian Indigofera appears to be in the Western Presidency, which included areas of Bombay Presidency, Sind, and the Indus valley. “Bombay is the only region where a botanist has spoken of Indigofera tinctoria (the true indigo) as having been seen in what appeared a wild condition.”2 Not all indigo species give indigo dye. As a leguminous plant, it is also used as a green fertilizer. Leguminous plants are known to deposit nitrogen in the soil they grow on; hence it is still used as a rotational crop along with paddy in South India. Even presently in India, indigo is still cultivated as a fertilizer and also as a fodder. Out of 40 species that grew in India, mainly ten yielded sufficient dye for commercial extraction. During the period of British rule, four species were primarily cultivated for commercial extraction of indigo dye. These were: 140

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Indigofera anil L. Indigofera argentea L. Variety coerulea, often called wild indigo Indigofera suffriticosa Indigofera tinctoria L.

Indian Origin of Indigo According to George Watt, author of A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India (1890), Sanskrit-speaking people must have been first to make the acquaintance of Indigofera tinctoria, as the name “Nila” was used in all the languages of India, and later also spread to Europe. Here it is relevant to state that the other species of Indigoferas that are indigenous to India had their own separate vernacular names in all Indian languages, while only Indigofera tinctoria was known as “Nila” or “Nili” in all languages. At times a suffix was used in front of the word Nili or Nila to describe the variety of other indigo. A few examples are as mentioned below. Kannada Tamil Sanskrit Gujarati

ollenilli (“olle” means good) hennunilli (female indigo) aviri (“avi” means boiled) karundoshi (black indigo) nila (blue) and many other descriptive names like “vajranili” (hard blue) gali (decoction)3

The Gujarati word gali is based on the process of fermentation used for extracting and dyeing indigo. The word gali is from the verb gali javu which means to dissolve. For extracting the indigo dye, the plants are placed in water, in which the leaves disintegrate and the dye content present in the leaves dissolves in the water. Thus some names of indigo also explain the way it is extracted or used for dyeing. Nila not only meant “blue,” but was associated with black as well, because the dye plant was also used to prepare a black color before its property of achieving blue was discovered. Apart from blue, the word nila also means “dark” and is used as an adjective in the case of human beings, animals, plants, and minerals. The names nila, nil and nel are associated with a large number of plants, like the water-lily (Nymphea lotus, Nilufar, Nuphar), Sacred Lotus (Nelumbium), etc. Thus Nila substantively is the plant that yields a blue or dark-colored dye. So it seems that the meaning of the word nila ranges from the general to the specific and probably obtained its restricted meaning from Indigofera in India, and that too perhaps only during comparatively modern times.4 A few such words in Sanskrit are nilambar, meaning dark blue sky, nilgaay, meaning the blue cow, and nilavarna, meaning a blue-colored person like Lord Krishna. Before going further, it is important to know why Indian indigo was so much in demand and why it replaced many other blue dyes in the world. Indian indigo was sold in a cake form, which was made by extracting the dye from the plant. Hence it was more concentrated and pure, and the cakes could be preserved for many years. (The author has in her possession indigo cakes that are thirty years old and are still in good condition.) These dried indigo cakes were easy to transport and were light to carry. 141

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The quality of Indian indigo dye was also superior. Experiments conducted by the author in Japan proves the superiority of indigo dye (in form of indigo cake) extracted from Indigofera tinctoria over Japanese sukumo prepared using the Japanese indigo plant (Polygonum tinctorius) as well as Ryukyu ai (indigo) paste extracted from Assam indigo (Strobilanthes flaccidifolius—now known as Bapicacanthus cusia). For the experiment, 400 grams (just under a pound) of Indian indigo, 4 kilograms (just under 9 pounds) of Japanese sukumo and 1.1 kilograms (2 pounds) of Ryukyu indigo were placed in three separate vats and were fermented. The depth of blue achieved by dyeing twenty times in Japanese sukumo was same as dyeing four times in Indian indigo. Thus dyeing in Indian indigo proved to be much stronger than the Japanese indigo.

Early Mention of Indian Indigo around the World Indigo was used from ancient times in India. Most of the chintz found in the tombs of the royal patrons of Egypt “have been found to be dyed with safflower and indigo, which had surely gone from India, the natural home of indigo plant. That is, at about 4,000 BCE India had begun exporting dyestuffs to the countries called the cradle of Western civilization.”5 According to Panini, the famous Indian scholar of Sanskrit, colors and dyes used in the post-Vedic period were raga, red, black, laksha (lac dye), also called jalu, manjishtha (madder), nili (indigo), and rochana (orpiment).6 Indigo was mentioned by Dioscorides (60 CE) as Ivcikov; Pliny called it Indicum, and in Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (by an unknown author) it is mentioned as Ivcikov pehav or Indian black, exported from Barbaricon on the Indus. Though indigo was already exported from India, it was mainly used as a black dye outside India, as the complicated fermentation process of extraction as well as dyeing was not known elsewhere. Therefore in the thirteenth century Marco Polo was surprised to see the blue color achieved from indigo at Colium in the State of Travancore, India. He said, “They (Indians) also have an abundance of a very fine indigo (ynde).”7 Dutch order books from Nagasaki mention indigo as one of the items ordered by Japanese from India. An eisch boek (order book) on Dutch–Japanese trade contains a document, “Eisch van zijn keizerlijk Maijesteit voor’t Aanstaande Jaar A 1810” (The order of His Imperial Majesty for the following year, AD 1810). It lists indigo as one of the articles ordered by the Shogun (emperor) under the category of medicine.8 Not only the indigo dye, but the cottons dyed using indigo were also exported from India. Indigo flourished in Asia and the shrouds of the Egyptian mummies bear traces of this beautiful color.9 Indigo being a vat dye, pattern was mainly created by resistdyeing technique. A hoard of block-printed and resist-dyed fabrics, mainly of Gujarat origin, found in tombs of Fostat, Egypt are a good proof of large-scale Indian exports of cotton textiles to Egypt from the early medieval times until the nineteenth century10 (see Plate 19). In Indian chintz, indigo was used with the wax-resist technique to color part of a pattern or provide a dark blue or green ground color. Chintz was exported all over the world. Historical documents such as the Chinese Reikidai hoan (Precious Documents 142

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of Successive Generations), which covers Ryukyuamn contacts with China, Korea, and eight Southeast Asian port cities during the period 1424–1867, mentions large number of Indian textiles including chintz received by the King of Ryukyu (the Okinawa Islands) from the King of Siam (Thailand) and Malacca (Malaysia).

Indian Indigo in Europe Before the Portuguese voyages of discovery in the fifteenth century that established new commercial routes to India via the Cape of Good Hope, indigo reached Europe by the overland route via the Persian Gulf and Alexandria. Records show that twelfth-century Venetians were the first Europeans to use it. In Marseilles in 1228, it was known as “Indigo of Bagdad.”11 The East India Company, as early as the end of the sixteenth century, had exported indigo from Surat, Ahmedabad, and Bombay. Along with other Eastern products, indigo was brought to Europe by Portuguese merchants. Initially, the Dutch dyers, famous for the excellence of their colored fabrics, were supplied by Portuguese merchants, but political tensions between the Netherlands and Portugal interfered with this trade in indigo and spurred the founding of the Dutch East India Company, which sought to procure indigo supplies directly from India. The Dutch East India Company, formed in 1602, brought indigo to the Netherlands for local dyers and also re-exported it to other European countries. The flourishing Dutch trade provoked the envy of merchants of other countries. During the sixteenth century, indigo was used in Europe only in small quantities to heighten and deepen the blue color obtained from woad, which was the dye used in Europe to obtain the color blue. Woad was cultivated and manufactured in Germany, France, Prussia, Italy and England. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, European dyers began to understand that indigo was both economical and of superior quality.12 As indigo was proved to be of better quality, it started replacing woad. Woad cultivators, manufacturers, and merchants faced ruin, and started a strong anti-indigo campaign that branded indigo a “fugitive” dye and declared it to be “a pernicious, deceitful, eating, and corrosive dye.”13 It was known as “devil’s dye” in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The dyers of Nuremberg were compelled “to take an oath each year, that they would employ no indigo in their work.”14 This strong resistance to indigo led to its prohibition in France in 1598, in Germany in 1607, and in England in the beginning of the seventeenth century. During the time of Henry IV of France, the resistance to indigo became so strong that in 1609 its use became a capital offense and persons found using indigo were liable to the death sentence.15 Because Europeans did not know how blue dye was made from the indigo plant, they were dependent on Indian manufacturers for this dye. In 1664, the East India Company again started the export of indigo to Britain from India. By 1694 the company exported 1,241,697 pounds (563 metric tonnes) of dyes from Agra and Lahore, and 510,093 pounds (231 metric tonnes) from Ahmedabad. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the laws prohibiting the use of indigo were finally withdrawn in nearly all European countries and the demand for indigo started to increased. The high demand meant high 143

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prices for indigo, which led to efforts to cultivate indigo within the tropical and semitropical colonies of the British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese. The British planted indigo in the Carolinas, as Andrea Feeser explains in the next chapter, the Portuguese planted indigo in Brazil, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Spanish in Guatemala, and French planted indigo in San Domingo (Haiti), the last two producing what was considered the finest quality indigo in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

The British East India Company Returning to the Prinsep family memoir’s claim that John Prinsep introduced indigo cultivation into India, we can see now that indigo had been cultivated in India for thousands of years and in that sense he could not have “introduced” indigo to India. However, the claim that Prinsep brought indigo to India is qualified in another statement made by the younger Prinsep who says John Prinsep “introduced the cultivation and manufacture of Indigo into Bengal after the San Domingo method.” Bengal had not been a major source of indigo prior to the East India Company’s support for this venture, and Prinsep could therefore be considered as key in the process of encouraging the planting and production of indigo in Bengal. What do we make of the “the San Domingo method,” and how does this differ from Indian methods of cultivation? We must consider the possibility that the San Domingo method refers to labor practices, land management, horticultural expertise, and manufacturing techniques that were derived from San Domingo’s plantation system that favored large-scale production, slave labor, and intensive monoculture. San Domingo’s indigo was considered to be of the highest quality, rivaling the Spanish-produced indigo of Central America, and so to claim that one was bringing the San Domingo method of production to British India meant that one was bringing new techniques and new labor regimes that would improve the quality of the indigo grown and manufactured in India. This narrative of improvement is evident in a range of nineteenth-century economic treatises on India, its natural resources, and manufacturing capabilities, written by Britons and Europeans living in India and serving in the colonial bureaucracy. In 1816 M. de Cossigny’s treatise advocating “European methods” over the Indian process of extracting dye from indigo plants was published in the Transactions of the Asiatick Society. His argument was that traditional Indian methods may look simple and easy, with their outdoor earthenware jars, but require a great deal of skill not easily apprehended by the casual observer who has not “duly examined and weighed the extent of the detail of their process.” De Cossigny contends that the expense of building “large vats of masonry, and the machinery employed by Europeans” makes the European method ultimately cost-effective because of the scale of the operation: [O]ne man can, in the European method of manufacture, bring to issue one vat containing fifty bundles of plant, which according to their nature and quality, may afford from ten to thirty pounds of Indigo; whereas, by the Indian process, one employed during the same time would probably only produce one pound of Indigo; the European method is therefore the most simple, as well as every art where machinery is used instead of manual labor.16

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The European method was portrayed by its British promoters and chroniclers as efficient, productive, and key to increasing indigo production in India. This narrative of European efficiency and productivity was repeated John Forbes Royle’s Essay on the Productive Resources of India (1855), an encyclopedic overview of India’s agricultural and manufacturing productivity, including a lengthy section on indigo, sugar, tea, and opium. Of indigo, he writes: Few histories of commercial products are more instructive than that of Indigo, which we see an article of export in the earliest times, from the country [India] where the plant is indigenous. It formed one of the principal articles imported by the East-India Company in the first century of commerce, but was soon supplanted when European skill was applied to the culture of the plant, and the manufacture of Indigo, in the West-Indies and southern parts of North America. It was restored again to the country of its birth, by the very means by which it had been wrested thence, that is, by the application of European skill and energy, as well to the culture of the plants as to the chemistry of the manufacture.17

European skill and energy are depicted as the catalysts for improved quality and productivity. However, we may question his reasoning based on what we will learn from Andrea Feeser’s careful reconstruction of indigo production in South Carolina; in short, Native Americans and African-Americans greatly contributed to the success of Carolina indigo as a viable commodity. Such stories have yet to be told about Haiti’s past, but no doubt enslaved Africans and indigenous peoples contributed to San Domingo’s dominance of the market in indigo. In eliding native and local labor and expertise, this narrative of European skill and energy works to justify colonialism and other forms of European supervision over peoples declared too ignorant or insufficiently modernized to compete in the global marketplace. In addition to eliding native expertise and craft knowledge, Royle’s description of the history of competition between the East Indies and the West Indies for dominance in the indigo trade does not mention three important political events that tipped the tide in favor of Indian indigo over New World indigo. India’s success in competing against its rivals—San Domingo and the Carolinas—was due to multiple factors, among them new labor practices, to which we will turn shortly, and, even more importantly, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution. These three revolutions had catastrophic effects on indigo production in the Americas. At war with France for more than two decades, beginning in 1789, the British were cut off from French supplies of indigo, which also were interrupted by the Haitian revolution. The East India Company realized in the 1780s that indigo supplies on the world market were low and destined to be disrupted for decades, especially with the prospect of the end of the slave trade in the British West Indies, which occurred in 1806, and emancipation in 1838. As Edward Balfour argues in his Encyclopedia of India (1873), the superior article manufactured by the French and Spaniards in the West Indies, would have long held the produce of India in subordination, if the anarchy and wars incident to the French Revolution, especially when they reached San Domingo, had not almost annihilated the trade from the West, and consequently proportionally fostered that in the East.18

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India became the ideal site for Britons to get control over the world trade in indigo. Royle portrays the British East India Company (EIC) as rescuing indigo from its local producers by providing “skill and energy,” financial backing, and manipulation of growing conditions. Although Indian indigo in the seventeenth century had been so popular in Europe, it was declared in the eighteenth century to be inferior to indigo produced in the New World. Royle explains that the methods of production were responsible for an inferior product, as reported in the “Proceedings of the East India Company”: [L]ike so many other Indian products, though intrinsically good, its value was diminished by carelessness in preparation as well as in packing. It was them recommended that the sand and dirt which adhere to the outside should be avoided, as frequent complaints had been made, that the sand injured the mills in grinding it.19

Up until the 1780s, Indian-grown and -produced indigo could not compete with French and Spanish as well as the British producers “in the West Indies and the southern parts of North America,” who gave “their attention to the culture and manufacture of Indigo, in such large quantities and so successfully.”20 However, with the backing of the British East India Company, indigo from India went on to dominate the market until the end of the nineteenth century with the invention of chemical dyes that mimicked indigo’s blues. What did the EIC do to “increase the production of Indigo, and to improve its quality”? What were the “extraordinary efforts” that changed the methods of indigo production? Among these efforts was a contract with Prinsep “at prices which were intended to encourage growth,” which meant that Prinsep was guaranteed a certain price for his indigo whether or not it sold for that price in England. The Company sustained losses for the next few years, but its support helped bolster Prinsep’s and other British planters’ attempts to intensify and organize indigo agriculture and manufacture. After 1787, however, the Company decided not to purchase any more indigo from Bengal so as to stimulate competition among planters and encourage them to bring “the article to its greatest possible state of perfection.” The Company did not abandon these planters, but instead sent them instructions on manufacturing, reports from dyers and brokers in England, and specimens of indigo so that planters would pay “due attention … to all parts of the process.” The Company also remitted duties and lowered fees on freight and tonnage, and, most importantly, it loaned money to the planters using the projected production of indigo as security for these “large advances of money.”21 Not only did the EIC give favorable loans and lighter levies for British planters in Bengal, they also discouraged competition from Oudh, Agra, and other provinces in the north. Arguing that the Company’s good name was damaged by the inferior quality of the indigo produced in the north, the EIC levied extra transit duties on indigo produced in regions not under the direct rule of the East India Company. The combination of providing incentives to British planters in Bengal and taxing indigo from other regions had the additional effect of undermining traditional methods of indigo production practised by local planters and of disrupting local trade practices. These measures were effective in establishing British control over indigo production, so much so that the Court of Directors announced in 1792: “it affords us much pleasure 146

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to remark that the article, as to quality, is still increasing in reputation. It has already surpassed the American and French, and there is no doubt but, by perseverance and attention on the part of the planters, it will effectually rival the Spanish.”22 Royle praised the EIC for its support of Bengal’s indigo plantations with their initial “extensive purchases” and a willingness to sustain losses as experiments with indigo production were carried out, and for “the advances which they [EIC] still continued to make.”23 He credited the EIC with establishing indigo as “one of the staple products of Bengal.” Indian-produced indigo was consumed within Britain and exported by Britain at a rate nearly ten times that of American indigo. Although Royle praised the EIC’s role in fostering indigo production in India, other economic reports reveal that the British planters and their method of production were not necessarily a source of good for the Indians who were the cultivators of the indigo plants and the workers who made the dye. Royle’s account does not go as far as Prinsep’s progeny in claiming that indigo production “employed many thousands of the poorer classes and thus added to the prosperity of the country.” Unpacking the Prinsep quote, we can see that he really does not assert that the poor were made prosperous, rather that they were employed and that the “country” (whatever that means) was made prosperous. In fact, there is evidence that the plantation system in Bengal, established by Britons and complicated by Mughal systems of land tenure, was productive of much misery for small farmers and agricultural workers. The EIC’s declaration of the Permanent Settlement in 1793 reinterpreted the role of zamindars, who under Mughal law had hereditary rights as tax collectors over land in their jurisdiction, and transformed them into English-style landowners with proprietary rights. The Settlement treated zamindars as if they as if they were members of the English gentry and squirearchy, allowing zamindars to exercise authority over those who occupied and cultivated the land as if they were tenants. Abuses crept into this system, and the cultivators, landless peasants who worked in conditions not dissimilar from those of sharecroppers, were compelled to grow indigo and sell it at a fixed low rate. In 1830 a law was passed making failure to fulfill contracts subject to criminal prosecution, thus leaving cultivators, the agricultural workers, totally at the mercy of the indigo plantation managers. However, this law was repealed in 1835. “Complaints of enforced cultivation of an unprofitable crop on the one hand, and of the want of protection against dishonest cultivators on the other hand became rife.”24 An article exposing these inequities, titled “Blue Mutiny,” published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1861, explains that the small farmers were being coerced into contracts to grow indigo with British manufacturers, who would set the price for indigo very low, far below market value. [T]he ryots have been cultivating for years at a yearly dead loss, expending their time and capital in a kind of agriculture of which the produce neither fed their children nor filled their pockets, and which at last became odious in the highest degree … [T]he price paid for the bundles of the plant has been for years so much below the fair market value, or so manifestly below the return of other country produce, that the “bad balances,” as they are termed, have continued to increase against the ryot’s name till the total of his debt rendered his deliverance hopeless … [T]he whole relation of manufacturer to ryot appears one of such glaring inequality and unfairness …. 25

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As a result of these disturbances in Bengal, the indigo industry migrated elsewhere. Though in quality Bengal indigo was the most superior, Bihar, the North-West provinces, and Madras produced increasingly larger quantities of indigo. Among the other reasons for this shift was the willingness of the cultivators of Madras and upper India to grow indigo, since in these regions it did not conflict with but improved the food crops with which it was grown in rotation. Despite the company’s favorable policies toward Bengal’s Anglo-Indian indigo industry, the company also allowed indigo cultivation and manufacture in Madras, where trials made on indigo seeds were approved as early as 1791. The company allowed the remittance of duty from 5 percent to 2½ percent on Madras indigo in 1792. By 1798, encouragement was given to Indians to take up cultivation and manufacture of indigo. But whether to allow new indigo factories in Madras or not was debated, as the company feared Madras indigo might over-stock the market in Britain. Nevertheless, the company went ahead and encouraged indigo production in Madras and Bihar, though Bengal planters protested this expansion.26 Unlike Bengal’s large indigo plantations, Madras’s land tenure system was different, and ryots, small farmers, who were considered the proprietors of their land, were contracted by British businessmen to grow indigo. Balfour describes this system in positive terms: [T]here is no system of forcing the cultivation upon the ryots, who are much too independent to submit to such a process. The trade is quite free and the system of advances to the tenantry has done a great deal to improve their condition as well as facilitated the collection of the revenue. The cultivation of indigo is not fixed; it extends or contracts with the demand for the article. It has, however, been steadily increasing of late years, many of the richer ryots cultivate it and manufacture it on their own account. Native capitalists also engage in the trade… [C]ultivation and manufacture of indigo by natives, without European superintendence, [was] in the ratio of 10 to 1 of that produced under European management.27

Indigo agriculture in Madras was small-scale, mixed with other crops, and less centrally controlled, consolidated, and supervised by British agents than in Bengal. But, as some were quick to point out, Madras indigo was of inferior quality and held a smaller market share than Bengal indigo. According to Balfour, exports from Bengal for the decade ending in 1814 was the annual average of 5,600,000 pounds (2,200 metric tonnes); in the next decade it rose to 7,400,000 (3,356 tonnes) with Madras in the 1830s averaging 1,383,808 (627 tonnes).28 Due to the improved fertility of the soil and the gradual removal of import-export duties and taxes on green indigo plants between 1875 and 1882, the trade was further encouraged. Production of indigo increased in Madras up to 68 percent within the 32 years from 1855 to 1877 as cultivation expanded into canal irrigated areas; the number of cultivators increased as did the number of factories owned by Indians. However, the ryot system was not without its problems as the cultivators were easily exploited by indigo manufacturers. In 1870s, difficulties arose, for instance in Bihar, between the planters and cultivators. Farmers were forced to cultivate indigo by British indigo factory owners. Small farmers who tilled their land to grow their own food crops 148

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were also forced to cultivate indigo. They were given a small advance of money to purchase the seedlings or were provided with the seeds, against which they were compelled to sell their crop to the factory owner at a very low price. Indigo farmers earned so little from this system of forced labor that it was not sufficient to feed their families.29 Bengal’s indigo production was based on large-scale, intensive monoculture (essentially the West Indian plantation model of production) and Madras’s model of production was small-scale, mixed, and family-farmed, incorporated into the local conditions of agricultural production. These two models of indigo production were supported by the colonial government that took over from the East India Company in the mid-nineteenth century.30 There was certainly some internal competition between regions, including the northern states, but as a whole, India dominated indigo production up until after World War I when chemically compounded blue dyes began to compete with indigo in terms of price.

Decline of Natural Indigo and Its Trade In 1856, Sir Henry Perkin, a British chemist, prepared the first coal-tar-derived (aniline) dye. This was the beginning of synthetic dyes, which led ultimately to the development of chemical indigo. In the 1860s German chemists Adolph Von Baeyer and A. Emmerling succeeded in synthesizing indole, and by 1882, Baeyer along with Drewsen synthesized indigotin, a synthetic version of indigo, which was at this point more expensive to manufacture than natural indigo. However, in the 1890s, a series of chemical breakthroughs overcame the problem of expensive synthetic dyes: in 1890, details of Heumann’s synthesis of indigo from phenyglycocal were published; in 1893, Kalle & Co. introduced their “Indigo Salt” to the market, and in 1897, an artificial indigo, under the name of “Indigo Pure” was introduced by Badische Anilinund Soda-Fabrik.31 Prior to World War I, Germany (through control over intermediaries, extensive patent rights and other means) maintained a substantial monopoly of the dyestuff industry, including the production of indigo. As more inventions and manufacturing of chemical blue dyes of various sorts started taking place, the European demand for Indian indigo declined. Not only this, but chemical indigo and other synthetic, chemical dyes slowly came to India, replacing the consumption of natural indigo, which was locally produced. Baeyer’s discovery had a large impact on India, which in the 1880s had 1.4 million acres (567,000 hectares) devoted to cultivation of the indigo plant, and saw this shrink to 214,000 acres (87,000 hectares) by 1912.32 Although indigo cultivation did receive brief stimulus during World War I and II due to the shortage of synthetic dyestuffs, the number of acres of land in India set aside for indigo cultivation fell dramatically in the twentieth century, as will become clear in Table 8.1.

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Table 8.1 Area under cultivation and productive of dye33 Years

Area (thousands of acres)

Production of dye (thousands of acres)

1896–97

1,688.9

168.7

1913–14

127.6

26.8

1918–19

292.0

48.6

1929–30

75.7

14.4

1934–35

59.6

10.2

1939–40

38.3

5.3

1943–44

57.1

9.0

1948–49

30.0

4.9

1953–54

11.7

1.2

1954–55

11.1

2.7

1955–56

10.6

2.6

Although indigo is still produced in India today, chemical dyes dominate the global trade in blue. The traditional methods for making indigo dye are labor- and skillintensive. Once the plants are harvested (Fig. 8.1), they are collected and piled high in cement tanks or steeping vats. The plants are compressed in the steeping vats that are

8.1 Harvesting indigo plants. Photo: author

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8.2 Boiling the extracted indigo to thicken the indigo paste. Photo: author

8.3

Cutting the indigo extract into cake form. Photo: author

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filled with water, completely submerging them. They are soaked for 24 hours, during which time the soluble dye content that exists mainly in the leaves dissolves and the liquid turns light green in color. This flows into the next vat, the beating vat, where laborers bound the pulp for almost two hours; agitating the liquid helps coagulate the dye particles and with oxidation the liquid turns blue. The solution remains static for another 12 hours during which time the dye collects at the bottom of the beating vat. The surplus water on top is drawn out. The dye is then collected and boiled to quicken the evaporation of whatever water remains (Fig. 8.2). The pulp is strained into what is called a dripping vat where the water drains for 24 hours and the dye collects on the cloth. The dye is then put under pressure and transformed into slabs that are cut into three-inch (8 cm) square cakes and dried in the shade (Fig. 8.3). Indigo is a vat dye and needs to be soluble in an alkaline solution. Once oxidized the reduced indigo (referred to as indigo white) turns into its original state, indigotin, which is insoluble in water or alkaline and the color is fixed. Dyeing and oxidating are repeated to get the depth of color that is required. In Uravakonda, indigo is reduced in huge earthenware jars that are placed underground. Indigo cassia tora seeds, water of lime, and unrefined sodium carbonate are also put in the vat and reduction takes place naturally after 15 days. The smell, taste, and color reveal the condition of the vat. Later, after more ingredients are added and a batch of yarn dyed, the vat remains in continuous use for years. The vats in Uravakonda are about thirty years old. The traditional techniques using the color-resistant process (where the fabric or yarn is tied and dyed or alternatively printed with wax or mud and then dyed) is ideal for indigo dyeing. In some areas of Andhra, indigo is used to paint directly on the fabric, producing the kalamkaris (“pen-drawn”) textiles of the Shrikalahasti area. Printing with indigo dyes is done directly on all fabrics, cotton, silk and wool. Vats are specially prepared depending on the fabric. Silk and wool require sweet vats while cotton dyes do better in a salt vat with a high alkaline content. Intense and careful planning is required to prepare and maintain an indigo vat (see Plate 20). When one looks at the samples of old fabrics, brocades, patolas, kalamkaris, and clothes dyed in indigo, the rich color of the natural dye makes the contemporary synthetic dye pale in contrast.

Notes 1. H.T. Prinsep, “Autobiographical Memoir” (c. 1865), vol. 2 of Three Generations in India, 3 vols, BL IOR, MS Eur. C 97, 13–14. I thank Beth Tobin for sharing these materials with me. 2. George Watt, A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India, 6 vols (London: Allen, 1890; Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing), vol. 4, 383. 3. Ibid., 391. 4. Ibid., 391. 5. Purnendu Narain, Dyes and Colour Industry in India (Bombay: Puran, 1946), 6. 6. Panini, a scholar of Sanskrit language, is considered as the founder of the language and literature. He was born in Shalatula, a town near to Attock on the Indus river in present-day Pakistan. Various

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historians date him to the fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh century BCE. For an overview of the history of indigo, see Jenny Balfour-Paul, Indigo (London: British Museum, 1998). See also Victoria Finlay’s chapter “Indigo,” in Color: A Natural History of the Palette (New York: Random House, 2004). 7. Watt, Dictionary, vol. 4, 391. 8. Minoru Omori, “The Eisch Boek in Dutch Japanese Trade,” in Asian Trade Routes: Continental and Maritime, ed. Haeliquist Karl Reinhold (Copenhagen: Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies; and London: Curzon Press, 1991), 181–92. 9. Padmini Tolat, “Indian Indigo and Its Use,” unpubl. manuscript, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, 1980, 34. 10. Martand Singh and Jyotindra Jain, The Jayakar Volumes (Development Commission for Handlooms, Government of India and Handicrafts & Handlooms Exports Corp. of India, c. 1986), 8. 11. Watt, Dictionary, vol. 4, 391. 12. Tolat, “Indian Indigo.” 13. Declaration by the German Diet in 1577; cited in Edward Balfour, Cyclopaedia of India and of Eastern and Southern Asia: Commercial, Industrial, and Scientific, 3 vols (Madras, 1873), vol. 3, 5. 14. Ibid., 6. 15. Watt, Dictionary, vol. 4, 393. 16. Asiatick Researches (London, 1816), vol. 3, 417. 17. John Forbes Royle, Essay on the Productive Resources of India (London, 1855), 100–101. 18. Balfour, Cyclopaedia, vol. 3, 5. 19. Royle, Essay, 95. 20. Ibid., 96. 21. Ibid., 96–99. 22. Quoted by ibid., 99. 23. Ibid., 101. 24. Watt, Dictionary, vol. 4, 397. 25. Anonymous, “A Blue Mutiny,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 63 ( January 1861): 98–107, 101. 26. Watt, Dictionary, vol. 4, 396–99. 27. Balfour, Cyclopaedia, vol. 3, 8. 28. Ibid., 6. 29. For these reasons, Gandhiji led Champaran Satyagraha against the forced cultivation of Bihar indigo in 1916. See also Blair B. Kling, The Blue Mutiny: The Indigo Disturbances in Bengal, 1859–1862 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966). 30. In the 1816 edition of Asiatick Researches, published by the Asiatick Society of Calcutta, the debate was carried on between Claude Martin (who was against European methods) and de Cossigny over these two models: the modernized, large-scale operation overseen by European investors versus the small farmer alternating indigo with food crops. This argument demonstrates that both models had proponents within the colonial bureaucracy.

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31. See R.D. Welham, “The Early History of the Synthetic Dye Industry,” Journal of the Society of Dyers and Colourists 79, 5 (1963): 181–85. See also Matthias Seefelder, Indigo in Culture, Science and Technology (Landsberg (Germany): Ecomed, 1994). 32. For a discussion of ways in which British indigo planters and manufacturers worked to improve the quality of their indigo as a safeguard against the encroachment of synthetic dyestuffs, see Prakash Kumar, “Plantation Science: Improving Natural Indigo in Colonial India, 1860–1913,” British Journal for the History of Science 40 (2007): 537–65. 33. This chart is from B.N. Sastri, The Wealth of India: A Dictionary of Indian Raw Materials and Industrial Products (New Delhi: Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, 1959), vol. 5 in the series Raw Materials.

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9 The Exceptional and the Expected: Red, White, and Black Made Blue in Colonial South Carolina Andrea Feeser

One of the chief stories of South Carolina’s colonial period describes how a teenage girl named Eliza Lucas (later Pinckney) introduced indigo to the colony and helped make it an important staple for South Carolina. Indeed, the account of her successful experiments growing indigo on her father’s plantations has become a staple in both popular and scholarly books about South Carolina. Her tale is so legendary that in 1989 Eliza Lucas Pinckney was inducted into the state’s business hall of fame, the only woman with that honor. Her story is one of the few colonial era narratives that highlight a woman’s achievements, which surely explains in part why it is recounted with frequency. At times the Eliza Lucas Pinckney indigo tale mentions assistance she received from her father, neighbor, husband, and dye makers from the island of Montserrat, and occasionally the work of her slaves is noted. However, South Carolina’s indigo story is largely white: an adventure that stars a young white woman and that sometimes includes white men in supporting roles. A more accurate history of Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s work with indigo demonstrates that slaves on Lucas and subsequently Pinckney plantations were key players in South Carolina’s indigo story. These slaves were both black and red—African, AfricanAmerican, and American Indian—and in the following close examination of LucasPinckney documents and colonial records, their contributions emerge. Some of the archival information is robust, adding up to an almost full life-portrait of a slave who proved instrumental in helping the Lucas-Pinckney clan achieve success with indigo. Other documentation just barely sketches the lives of other enslaved persons who played less dramatic but still important roles within the family indigo concern. The former figure, a man initially called Quash and ultimately christened John Williams, was an individual Eliza Lucas Pinckney depended upon. A mulatto slave carpenter, he was likely the driver who supervised her field slaves’ labors on the plantation where she first grew indigo. This man, who was probably her trusted associate as she experimented 155

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with indigo, was certainly the artisan who made the wooden vats that ensured she oversaw the production of fine quality dye. The latter individuals mentioned above made indispensable but less distinctive contributions to the Lucas-Pinckney indigo project. Because these laborers’ work was that of field hands and house slaves whose efforts to run the plantation and family home were mostly taken for granted, their names appear in Lucas-Pinckney records only when they are connected with specific financial transactions or counted in inventories as possessions. Indeed, family and colonial documents show that it is the exceptional as well as the expected that become keys to understanding how people on Lucas-Pinckney plantations—whether white, black, or red—are written into the historical record. The efforts of the white men who aided Eliza Lucas Pinckney have been retrieved from colonial sources by scholars such as David L. Coon. He has highlighted the specific contributions her father George Lucas, her husband Charles Pinckney, her hired dye makers Nicholas and Patrick Cromwell, and her neighbor planter Andrew Deveaux made to Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s indigo concern.1 His work and that of others who draw on period publications demonstrate that Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s white helpmates appear prominently in family documents if the Lucases and Pinckneys found their labor extraordinary. This is the case with George Lucas and Charles Pinckney, who made key decisions about producing indigo and who owned the plantations where it was grown and processed. Therefore quite a bit of information about them is available. However, there is less to be learned about the Cromwell brothers and especially Andrew Deveaux since they were viewed as hired help in the first instance and a minor consultant in the second. By carefully studying the primary material on indigo making at LucasPinckney plantations, it is possible to discern a similar dynamic in play for the slaves who labored at these and related sites. Because John Williams’ work on indigo vats made a major contribution to the families’ enterprise and was thus highly valued, it is possible to document him as a major figure in the Eliza Lucas Pinckney indigo tale. Since the field labor and housework of other slaves was found insignificant, they are rendered less visible.

Wappoo Plantation: Where a Young White Woman and Her Slaves Try Indigo Eliza Lucas Pinckney dominates the legend of South Carolina indigo because many publications on South Carolina history portray her as an extraordinary woman whose work was unusual for the colonial period.2 Women of the age, especially of the planter class, are typically thought of as mothers and household managers. However, women beside Eliza Lucas Pinckney had jobs other than raising children and maintaining homes. Nicola Phillips documents that women were fairly prevalent in eighteenthcentury business, Beverly Lemire reveals that they played a key role in the huge garment industry, and Mary Ferrari shows that some ran Charleston enterprises.3 Nevertheless, since Eliza Lucas stands alone as an agricultural innovator and is thereby considered special, she is largely represented as an exception to the rule that merits special distinction. 156

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Although Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s work to cultivate and process indigo is important, and her story deserves to be told, her success with the dye plant would not have been possible without the African, African-American, and Indian slaves on her family’s properties. A number of these individuals labored at Wappoo, her first indigo-growing plantation, called thus for the creek upon which it depended for irrigation, transportation, and dye making. The creek was in turn named for indigenous people who once lived nearby, but who perished from disease introduced by early colonists.4 Acquired by Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s grandfather John Lucas in 1714,5 Wappoo Plantation represented a part of the Charleston region colonized by English families (largely from the Caribbean) or owned by absentee Britons like John Lucas who invested in plantation agriculture. The predominant population of the area that counted red and white peoples amongst its numbers was black: enslaved persons who toiled on plantations to clear, plant, and harvest provisions as well as staples. At the time of John Lucas’s investment, such products were primarily food stuffs and timber.6 John Lucas’s son George brought most of his family with him from Antigua to live at Wappoo in 1738: his sickly wife, his teenage daughter Eliza, and his little girl Polly. By the following year George Lucas had purchased two additional plantations near today’s Beaufort and Georgetown, which he hired white overseers to run.7 He then mortgaged his Antigua and South Carolina properties for funds to advance his military career.8 George Lucas subsequently returned to Antigua to serve in the war commencing with Spain, and became the Caribbean island’s lieutenant governor, a responsibility which prevented him from returning to his wife and daughters. When he left South Carolina, Lucas gave responsibility for his holdings in the colony to his eldest daughter. Seventeen at the time, Eliza Lucas was placed in the common, but frowned-upon, position of running a plantation with too few white males in the household (there were none in her case).9 Although she had several white neighbors whom she contacted regularly, including Andrew Deveaux (whom she would consult about indigo10), she spent most of her time with her reclusive mother, her sister, and about twenty slaves. Sales records of the Wappoo property together with Lucas missives paint a general picture of the plantation when Eliza Lucas lived there.11 Wappoo consisted of the home that she occupied with her family, a barn, outbuildings, 600 acres (243 hectares) of land, and stands of trees that Lucas, an avid botany enthusiast, had slaves plant. Her formal education did not include botany, but she acquired a great deal of knowledge about plants through her own initiative. Since she was curious about and interested in all things vegetal, when given responsibility for her father’s plantations she worked eagerly to make them produce crops. Along with observations about and delight in native vegetation, Lucas’s letters record her efforts to get plants from the Caribbean to thrive in South Carolina.12 Although she found cultivation inspiring, Lucas’s letterbook suggests that she worked hard at planting because her father had incurred marked debt.13 While mortgaging his property to purchase a coveted military commission enabled George Lucas to further his standing and political ambition, it put pressure on his agricultural estates to earn money. He needed his South Carolina plantations to succeed since his sugar plantations, like those owned by others in Antigua, were increasingly less profitable.14 Although he spent only a brief time in South Carolina investigating its potential, George Lucas seemed 157

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sure enough of the land he bought there, and of his daughter as his surrogate, to send her various types of seed from Antigua with which she might experiment. Eliza Lucas tried them all, had success with indigo, and directed her slaves to focus their efforts on growing the plant and making dye from it.

A Black Helpmate Eliza Lucas wrote in a letter to a close friend that she spent some time in her Wappoo fields every day,15 but certainly not to supervise all of the work performed there: she would have needed a driver to manage her field hands closely. Drivers often had a lot of responsibility and therefore frequently ranked more highly than field laborers: it was not uncommon for them to come from the station of artisan. As Joyce E. Chaplin states in her book on eighteenth-century agriculture in the Lower South, period travelers observed that black drivers frequently “managed much of the day-to-day direction of agricultural activities.”16 In his work on eighteenth-century slave life, Philip D. Morgan further elaborates that “one identifiable type” of driver was a slave tradesman, a person who would far exceed the appraised value of other slaves because he played two critical roles on a plantation.17 Therefore Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s Wappoo driver was most likely her mulatto slave carpenter Quash. That Quash may have served as Eliza Lucas’s righthand man at Wappoo is further suggested by an entry in the young woman’s letterbook of 1742, a document that points to her close ties to the man. In this entry she mentioned a letter to her father about slaves charged with fleeing to Florida’s St Augustine, where the Spanish offered South Carolina runaways safe haven to antagonize their British enemies. Lucas wrote, “They accused Mol[att]o Quash. I was at his trial when he proved himself quite Innocent. The ring leader is to be hanged and one Whyped.”18 This attempted escape took place not far from Wappoo and three years after South Carolina’s Stono Rebellion, the largest slave revolt in British North America during the colonial period. In the rebellion’s wake, slaves brought to trial were dealt with harshly (as Lucas’s account makes evident) unless local feeling and planters’ personal ties swayed presiding justices. Eliza Lucas’s advocacy for Quash, implicitly at his trial and explicitly in her letter to her father, suggests that she trusted and valued him, probably holding him in esteem because they worked together closely.19 While it is not certain that Quash served as Lucas’s Wappoo Plantation driver, it is certain that he had an active role in the ultimate success of the indigo project she began there. Her experiments with the dye plant are described in Lucas’s early 1740s letterbook entries and a missive she wrote to her son Charles in 1785,20 and can be pieced together further from additional period records. Eliza Lucas first had her slaves plant indigo seed in the summer of 1740. Although the resulting crop was largely destroyed by frost, her slaves harvested some seed which they grew the following summer. Her 1741 yield was low, but she had enough plants to discuss with her fellow indigo planter Andrew Deveaux and with which the dye maker Nicholas Cromwell could work. Cromwell, who made indigo dye in Montserrat, was hired by George Lucas to teach his daughter and two family slaves how to make dye cakes from indigo plants.21 158

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Although Cromwell did work with Eliza Lucas and some of her slaves, he seems to have sabotaged the venture with the blue dye. Lucas reported that Cromwell “made some brick Vats on my Fathers plantation on Wappoo Creek,” but also made “a great mistery” of the dye-making process. She further maintained that Cromwell compromised the dye by adding too much lime at a crucial mixing stage.22 Despite this setback, the young woman had her slaves undertake subsequent plantings. Wappoo produced little indigo from 1742 to 1743, but in 1744, Lucas slaves made a good amount of dye with the help of Nicholas Cromwell’s more reliable brother Patrick. Eliza Lucas then had her overseer at Garden Hill Plantation growing and making indigo, and had much success with this project as well23 (see Plates 21 and 22). Lucas had large ambitions for indigo, and they were ultimately realized through her continued efforts, those of her father and new husband Charles Pinckney, and especially through Quash’s labors. In a 1744 letter to her father George Lucas, written shortly after her marriage to Pinckney, Eliza Lucas Pinckney wrote that her husband had begun attempts to get the family’s indigo into the English market by sending six pounds of her dye to London.24 It was evaluated favorably there, and a letter of 3 December 1744 to Charles Pinckney published in the 1 April 1745 issue of the South Carolina Gazette suggested that further good indigo from the colony would serve British interests: I have shown your indigo to one of our most noted brokers in the way, who tried it against some of the best French, and his opinion it is as good … When you can in some measure supply the British demand, we are persuaded, that on proper application to Parliament, a duty will be laid on foreign growth, for I am informed, that we pay for indigo to the French £200,000 per annum.25

Determined to ensure the quality of dye produced on his plantations, George Lucas turned to Quash to guarantee the excellence of the family’s indigo. Although Lucas retained the services of Nicholas Cromwell, he remained unsure of the dye maker and worried that Cromwell’s brick vats were unreliable. In a letter to Charles Pinckney, Lucas wrote that he was considering Cromwell’s assertion that the dye he made for the family failed because his brick dye works had not been built soon enough to season properly.26 However, a letter dated 24 December 1744 from Lucas to Pinckney shows that the former ultimately distrusted Cromwell’s vats. In the correspondence Lucas charged Quash with making wooden dye works, believing that the slave’s vats would perform better than those made to Cromwell’s specifications. Lucas wrote to Pinckney: I have since recollected upon my wife telling me the indigo Nicholas Cromwell made gave linen a red cast, that it may be possibly continue some time, if not always, as the work is made of bricks. I therefore desire Quashy may be put immediately, to make an indigo work of the same dimensions, with the brick one at Wappoo on Garden Hill Plantation, with plank and timber, the plank to be well joined, and pin’d [?], with wood to the frame of the inside, that it may be tried there with a small quantity of ground, planted there, and if a difference appears, another such work may be made at Wappoo ….27

Although Nicholas Cromwell’s brother Patrick had used brick vats and produced good dye, Lucas feared that subsequent dye made in these vats would be poor. Convinced that brick could compromise dye color but that timber likely would not, Lucas relied on Quash to improve the family’s indigo concern. 159

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Indeed, it is very possible that Garden Hill’s first successful crop was indigo produced in 1745 after Quash made wooden dye works at the plantation. The plantation overseer’s 1745 account sheet shows that in this year he shipped to George Lucas’s London agent indigo valued at more than £225.28 Certainly by 1746 the Lucas-Pinckney clan was committed to Quash’s wooden vats, for one document from this period states that the slave spent 33 days producing such works at Garden Hill and elsewhere.29 It is thus apparent that without Quash, the indigo produced under the direction of Eliza Lucas Pinckney and her white helpmates might well have failed. Charles Pinckney’s mid-to-late 1740s letters and accounts show how much the Lucas and Pinckney families valued Quash’s skills and the extent to which they relied on them to secure their standing. Missives written between Pinckney and his fatherin-law demonstrate that the two men even battled over Quash’s services. Sometime between late 1744 and spring 1745, Lucas asked Pinckney to insure Quash and ship him to Antigua by “prime sailer.”30 Pinckney argued that he needed the slave and wanted to keep him, and on 22 May 1745 Lucas withdrew his request, although he maintained that he could “make considerably more of [Quash’s] labor ….”31 Some time that year, Pinckney realized his designs for Quash: the planter began purchasing materials for a Charleston residence, and in 1746, he put the slave in charge of the entire building project. In a long list of written instructions for Quash dated 4 November 1746 (which demonstrates that the slave read, wrote, and kept accounts), Pinckney penned the following: “In your calculation you are desired to distinguish and set down what the Carpenters work comes to; what the Joiners, including the Dining room and what without the dining room, and what the stairs & Venetian window separately come to.”32 Pinckney’s directives describe an ambitious building project—a stately home with a great deal of woodwork. Quash was paid well for overseeing this work, for Pinckney’s accounts book features a debit next to the slave’s name that reads: for “3 years & 3 months allowance at £200 pr. annum from 1st Jan. 1746 to 1st April 1750,—£650.”33 In addition to managing a large construction project, it seems that Quash applied his own woodworking skills in the Pinckney home, for along with the handsome allowance he gave Quash, Pinckney also paid his building supervisor on three separate occasions “to encourage him in his carving work.”34 Although the house burned down in Charleston’s great fire of 1861, in 1896 a family member who knew the Pinckney residence well published a description of it with details about the home’s woodwork: The window on … [the] staircase (one of the most remarkable features of the house) was very beautiful, of three arches with heavily carved frames, and a deep window-seat extending the whole length of the landing-place … The whole house was wainscoted in the heaviest paneling, the windows and doors with deep projecting pediments and mouldings in the style of Chamberlayne. The mantelpieces were very high and narrow, with fronts carved in processions of shepherds and shepherdesses, cupids, etc., and had square frames in the paneling above, to be filled with pictures ….35

Given the authority that Pinckney gave to Quash, along with the significant amount of money the planter paid the slave, it is entirely possible that Quash wholly or partially produced the Pinckney home’s sophisticated carving. 160

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One additional notation in Pinckney’s building accounts demonstrates how highly he valued Quash—a debit that reads “to his freedom £750.”36 Pinckney purchased Quash along with other Wappoo Plantation slaves in January 1749 or 1750 after his father-in-law died and upon the mortgage foreclosure of George Lucas’s South Carolina properties. In the record of this sale, Quash is also listed as John Williams,37 and it is by this name that Pinckney refers to him in the 12 May 1750 article that made Williams a free man. This document shows how much Pinckney and his wife held Williams in esteem. Charles Pinckney authored the manumission, which Eliza Lucas Pinckney witnessed and signed. It reads in part: Now know ye that the said Charles Pinckney in consideration of the good faithfull service of the said John Williams heretofore done and performed and for diverse other good causes [?] and valueable considerations one thereunto especially moving … do mannumise and set free the said John Williams by whatsoever name he may heretofore have been known or called from all slavery bondage and restraint to me whatsoever ….38

Although the personal services that persuaded the Pinckneys to free their slave are not clear, it is clear that Williams’s work as an overseer and carpenter enabled the Lucas and Pinckney families to succeed with indigo and to create a city home that instantiated pride in their accomplishments. For Williams was likely Eliza Lucas’s driver at Wappoo Plantation while she experimented with indigo, and he made many of the wooden vats for the indigo that secured the Lucas-Pinckney clan’s fortune and prestige. His skills as a supervisor and carpenter also guaranteed that Eliza Lucas Pinckney and her husband possessed a Charleston residence that visibly demonstrated their standing. The historical record shows that Williams also benefited from his skills, for at a time when very few people of color were free and financially well off in South Carolina, Williams was both. A July 1750 deed shows that the Reverend Alexander Garden, head of the Charleston Anglican Church and the man who baptized Williams in 1746,39 purchased two subdivisions of four town lots for the former slave from the Pinckneys.40 Garden held these lots in trust for Williams’s daughters Amy, Mary, and Sabina, two of whom Williams was able to buy out of slavery for £200 in 1751.41 In less than ten years, Williams acquired additional land, and with 400 acres near the mouth of Santee River, he arranged to repay Garden in part for his loan.42 This 1758 transaction listed Williams as a St James Parish carpenter and planter (and therefore a slave owner himself ), and a record of 1763 shows that at this time he owned 600 acres (243 hectares) along the Santee.43 However, that year his fortunes reversed, for a 1763 notice states that Williams needed to sell his property and leave the province.44

More Black as well as Indian Slaves Help Make Blue While John Williams’s final circumstances remain mysterious, the entire lives of the other slaves that worked Lucas and Pinckney plantations at first appear wholly so, for only snippets of text appear about them. However, it is possible to glean important information about these slaves in documents that list them as property and/or that 161

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describe these enslaved persons’ skills. One Lucas plantation inventory lists the names, genders, relative ages (whether adult or child), and some of the occupations of all the slaves that the family owned, and another inventory documents (less completely) those at Wappoo.45 Further, the letters between George Lucas and Charles Pinckney that feature a battle over Quash for his carpentry skills, include a tussle over a cook named Dick, who must have been equally admired for his abilities to warrant potentially strained relations among the two planters. Moreover, Pinckney kept detailed records when he hired out slaves, especially for his house slave Bettina and “Nurse Molly” who worked for others while the Pinckneys lived in England during part of the 1750s. These brief notices yield a sense of how and how hard Pinckney slaves worked: clearly Dick cooked extremely well, Bettina kept a very clean house, and Molly healed the sick. Further records demonstrate that other slaves were accomplished individuals: some show that in addition to Quash, Barbuda, C. Quaca, N. Quaca, Pompey, Quamina, Say, and Sogo were also woodworkers, and that Pompey was Quash’s apprentice.46 Additional family records provide racial designations for a few of these enslaved people. Indian Peter must have been named thus because he was entirely or partially Native American. Mary Ann and her two children Prince and Beck were African and Indian since she was labeled a “mustee,” the period term for a person with both native and black blood.47 Dick and carpenter Quash were also racially marked for both were described as mulattos.48 The origins of these slaves, as well as the others at Wappoo, are undocumented. However, they were likely acquired in South Carolina and very possibly born there. Although some Native American slaves were sent to the Caribbean to rid the colony of actual or perceived enemies, a good number were retained, appearing as chattels in South Carolina property records of the time.49 And although mulattos born in the Caribbean might be sold at the Charleston slave market, the Lucas and later Pinckney mulattos might well have been fathered by a white South Carolina planter or overseer since such men commonly forced or induced slave women into sexual relations.50 It is even possible that Quash and any other mulatto slaves at Wappoo were the offspring of the man who oversaw the plantation on behalf of John Lucas, for if they were born shortly after John Lucas acquired the property in 1714, they would have been in their early twenties when Eliza Lucas took over the plantation in 1739. In a certain sense, these family records that only feature slaves’ names and roles relay key information. First, and with respect to Wappoo, it is evident that twenty slaves were necessary to run a successful indigo plantation: Quash, Dick, Mary Ann, Dick, Lynn, Sawney, Indian Peter, Isaac, Pompey, Sarah, Mo (left blank), Beck, Molly, Nanny, Mary, Peter, Pompey, Douglas, Betty, and little Gulla.51 It is also clear that working under Eliza Lucas and probably John Williams, some of these slaves brought indigo seed to plants and that others produced dye cakes from the harvested indigo. And further, additional slaves must have worked in the plantation home to help Eliza Lucas run her affairs there. In cases where descriptive appendages appear with names—“Indian” placed in front of Peter and “mustee” placed after Mary Ann—it becomes evident that the Lucas and later the Pinckney families possessed slaves who were wholly or in part black, and also owned slaves who had Native American blood. Although it is not known if these Indian individuals worked in the house or in the fields, like all of the other family slaves 162

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they contributed labor to keep the Lucas and Pinckney plantations running. If not directly, then certainly indirectly, these people aided the planters’ undertakings with indigo. Therefore, on land named for a native tribe—Wappoo—slaves who were part Indian, and in Peter’s case perhaps entirely Indian, worked with black slaves to make the LucasPinckney clan famous for producing a major staple in South Carolina. Although the Lucases and Pinckneys did not consider these slaves’ contributions as valuable as John William’s vats and later his extensive work on a Charleston Pinckney mansion—for they are not mentioned extensively in family documents—these people certainly should join Eliza Lucas Pinckney and her white confreres in the historical record. For Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s accomplishments were not only possible because of help she received from her fellow Britons, but because of the labor of each one of her African and Indian slaves. Indeed at Wappoo, still celebrated as the birthplace of one of colonial South Carolina’s most successful staples, red, white, and black made blue.

Notes 1. David L. Coon, “Eliza Lucas Pinckney and the Reintroduction of Indigo Culture in South Carolina,” Journal of Southern History 42, 1 (1976): 61–76. 2. This dynamic is evident in the children’s book by Laurie Krebs, A Day in the Life of a Colonial Indigo Planter (New York: PowerKids, 2004), an overview of Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s involvement with indigo typical of the histories that appear in guidebooks, textbooks, and websites, as well as brief overviews of colonial agriculture in scholarly publications. 3. Nicola Phillips, Women in Business, 1700–1850 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006); Beverly Lemire, Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade before the Factory, 1660–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); and Mary Ferrari, “‘Obliged to Earn Subsistence for Themselves’: Women Artisans in Charleston, South Carolina, 1763–1808,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 106, 4 (2005): 235–51. 4. For an overview of the Wappoo see “South Carolina–Indians, Native Americans–Wappoo,” South Carolina Information Highway, 2009, www.sciway.net/hist/indians/wappoo.html, accessed 2 July 2009. Any surviving Wappoo were probably absorbed into the mixed population of so-called Settlement Indians, peoples who maintained a livelihood by living alongside Britons established in Charleston and its environs; for a brief discussion of Settlement Indians, see Chapman J. Milling, Red Carolinians (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), 62–4. 5. Harriet Simons Williams, “Eliza Lucas and Her Family Before the Letterbook,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 99, 3 (1998): 259–79. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 277. 8. Ibid., 272–4. 9. By 1726, South Carolina planters were encouraged to hire one white man for every ten slaves, although this act was often subverted. See Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the EighteenthCentury Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Williamsburg VA: Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1998), 221. 10. Coon, “Eliza Lucas Pinckney,” 69–70.

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11. Elise Pinckney, ed., The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972); and South Carolina Gazette, Charleston, SC, 11 June 1744. 12. July 1740 entry in Pinckney, Letterbook, 8; and Eliza Lucas to George Lucas, 4 June 1741, in ibid., 16. 13. Williams, “Eliza Lucas and Her Family,” 261. 14. Ibid., 261. 15. Eliza Lucas to Mary Bartlett [1742], in Pinckney, Letterbook, 34. 16. Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730– 1815 (Williamsburg VA: Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 85. 17. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 222. 18. 7 January 1742/3 entry in Pinckney, Letterbook, 57. 19. Eliza Lucas’s support for Quash was clearly heartfelt, for the Lucas family had a recent history of foregoing sentiment amidst accusations of insurrection. A chilling document in Britain’s National Archives records the names and occupations of 88 Antigua slaves executed in 1737 for supposedly conspiring against their masters. Among those gibbeted, burned, or broken on the wheel was George Lucas’s Cesar, who perished by fire. See the “List of negroes executed for the late conspiracy at Antigua and of others banished,” 26 May 1737, Board of Trade Original Correspondence, 1737–40, The National Archives, Public Records Office (hereafter PRO), CO 152/23. 20. See Pinckney’s letterbook entries between 1740 and 1744 in Pinckney, Letterbook, 5–71; and Eliza Pinckney to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, 10 September 1785, Manuscript Collection, Charleston Library Society, Charleston, SC (hereafter MC/CLS). 21. George Lucas to Charles Pinckney, 30 January 1744, Pinckney Family Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress (hereafter PP/LC). 22. Eliza Pinckney to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, 10 September 1785, MC/CLS. 23. Pinckney, Letterbook, xix. 24. Harriott Horry Ravenel, Eliza Pinckney, Women of Colonial and Revolutionary Times, South Carolina Heritage Series 10 (1896) (Spartanburg SC: Reprint Company, 1967), 104–5. 25. South Carolina Gazette, 1 April 1745. 26. George Lucas to Charles Pinckney (sometime between November 1744 and 22 May 1745), PP/LC. 27. George Lucas to Charles Pinckney, 24 December 1744, PP/LC. 28. Pinckney, Letterbook, xix. 29. Alice R. Huger Smith and D.E. Huger Smith, eds, The Dwelling Houses of Charleston, South Carolina (Philadelphia and London: J.B. Lippincott, 1917), 366. 30. George Lucas to Charles Pinckney (sometime between November 1744 and 22 May 1745), PP/LC. 31. George Lucas to Charles Pinckney, 22 May 1745, PP/LC. 32. Huger Smith and Huger Smith, Dwelling Houses of Charleston, 371. That John Williams was extremely knowledgeable about building is further evident from a later entry in Charles Pinckney’s account book: the former bought an architecture book from the latter sometime around 1754 (see fold out in the back of the ledger, PP/LC). 33. Huger Smith and Huger Smith, Dwelling Houses of Charleston, 367.

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34. Ibid., 366. 35. Ibid., 371–72. 36. Ibid., 366. 37. Andrew Rutledge and William Boone, attorneys for Charles Alexander to Charles Pinckney, bill of sale for five slaves, 5 January 1750, South Carolina Department of Archives and History (hereafter SCDAH). 38. Charles Pinckney, manumission document for John Williams, 12 May 1750, PP/LC. 39. John Williams’s baptismal record can be found in A.S. Salley, Jr, ed., Register of St Philip’s Parish, 1720– 1758 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, n.d.), 137. 40. Charles and Elizabeth Pinckney to Rev. Alexander Garden, in trust for John Williams, two subdivisions of four town lots, 16 and 17 July 1750, South Carolina Deed Abstracts, 1719–1772, vol. 2 (Easley SC: Southern Historical Press, 1984), 213. 41. Joseph Pickering to John Williams, receipt for purchase of three slaves, 14 October 1751, Miscellaneous Records, Charleston County, 1754–58 (hereafter CA/CCPL), record 80A, 105. Williams purchased Mary and Sabina (here listed as Sabrina) along with Peter, all three of whom were listed as children of Molly, a slave owned by Pickering. 42. John Williams to Benjamin Garden, Sampson Neyle, and Francis Bremar, trustees for Ann Stiles, security on bond, 23 and 24 October 1758, South Carolina Deed Abstracts, 1719–1772, vol. 3, 80. 43. South Carolina Gazette, 6 August 1763. 44. Ibid. 45. The South Carolina Department of Archives and History (SCDAH) has several documents that detail Lucas-Pinckney property, both in terms of land and slaves. The most complete record of slaves owned by George Lucas with whom his daughter worked is a list that provides the names, occupations, genders, and relative ages of slaves at Garden Hill Plantation on the Combahee River and in Charlestown. Because this list postdates Lucas-Pinckney’s indigo experiments, it does not contain a specific record of the individuals who worked at Wappoo but instead names all the slaves George Lucas had in South Carolina along with those he owned in Antigua. To the best of my reckoning, Lucas’s South Carolina slaves at Garden Hill were: coopers Sogo, Quamina, Say; sawyers Pompey, N. Quaca, Barbuda, C. Quaca; boatmen Davie, Dick; and field hands Isaac, Caesar, Toby, Sam, Tom, Quash, Acora, Peroa(?), Harrie, Armstrong, Jamie, Gift, Franswa, G. Peter, Gull, Nero, Jugg, Carolina, Cuffie, Sambo, Charles; with the following hands designated as boys—Quashee, June, Say, Gulla, Samson, George, Tomie, Dave, Jupiter, Macrue, Jonas, Joe, Sambo, Adam, Isaac; and the following listed as “Negro women”—Grace, Bess, Gibba, Kett, Kelli, Billie, Flora, Mimba, Mallie, Mar, Rachel, Lucinda, Present, Ancilla, Phillis, Babie, Sarah, Jean; and the following listed as girls—Nanny, Bettie, Phillis, Doll, Dido, Susan, Marie, Hanna, Sarah, and Bella. Lucas slaves at Wappoo were: carpenter Quashy, his apprentice Pompey, Dick the cook, Dick the smith, Lynn the bricklayer, Sawney (also a bricklayer?), Indian Peter, Douglas (a boy), Dickey Copland, Old Judy, Mary Ann and her child (all names comes from George Lucas to Charles Alexander, release from mortgages on five plantations, 25 August 1746, SCDAH). Another document dated two years earlier lists the Wappoo slaves as: “Mullatto Quash, Mullatto Dick, Mulatto Marianne, Dick, Lynn, Sawney, Indian Peter, Isaac, Pompey, Mollys Sarah, Mo[left blank], Beck, Molly, Mollys Nanny, Mary, Gullas Peter, Gullas Pompey, Gullas Douglas, Gulla’s Betty, and little Gulla,” Charles Pinckney to George Lucas, acceptance of Wappoo Plantation and 20 accompanying slaves as dowry, 1 May 1744; CA/CCPL, Miscellaneous Records, Charleston County, 1746–49, 375. See also Charles Dunbar to George Lucas, release from a 1738 mortgage of a 600-acre plantation on Wappoo Creek near Charles Town, 23 August 1746, SCDAH. As the above lists of slave names makes evident, some Lucas slaves had the same or similar names. Quash (later John Williams) is also called “Quashy” in the first list (which designates him a carpenter) and in correspondence quoted subsequently between

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George Lucas and Charles Pinckney. The first list also shows that another Quash was an adult male field hand, and Quashee was a boy field hand. 46. Ibid. 47. Andrew Rutledge and William Boone, attorneys for Charles Alexander to Charles Pinckney, bill of sale for five slaves, 5 January 1750, SCDAH. 48. Charles Pinckney, certificate that he received from George Lucas upon his marriage to Elizabeth Lucas, the plantation Wappoo and 20 accompanying working slaves, 1 May 1744, SCDAH. In this document, Mary Ann (spelled Mariann) was also described as a mulatto. 49. For a record of Indian slaves owned by South Carolinians from 1683 to 1795, see William Robert Snell, “Indian Slavery in Colonial South Carolina, 1671–1795,” PhD diss., University of Alabama, 1972, 184–240. 50. See Winthrop D. Jordan, “American Chiaroscuro: The Status and Definition of Mulattoes in the British Colonies,” The William and Mary Quarterly 19, 2 (1962): 183–200; and Donald L. Horowitz, “Color Differentiation in the American Systems of Slavery,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3, 3 (1973): 509–41. 51. Ibid.

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10 Prussian Blue: Transfers and Trials Sarah Lowengard

The first discovery of Prussian blue, or prussiate of iron, as related by Stahl, was, like many other interesting discoveries, purely the effect of accident. About the year 1710, Diesbach, a chemist at Berlin, wishing to precipitate the colouring matter of cochineal from a solution or decoction, in which it was combined with a portion of green vitriol, or sulphate of iron, borrowed for that purpose from his neighbour Dippel, an alkali, upon and from which the latter had several times distilled an animal oil, and which had thereby become impregnated with the animal colouring part of Prussian blue; consequently this alkali, when mixed with the decoction of cochineal, or rather with the iron contained therein, immediately and most unexpectedly produced a very beautiful blue colour. The experiment being repeated, and always with the same effect, Diesbach availed himself of the discovery; and this new colour was made known and sold under the name of Prussian blue; and the means of producing it were kept secret until the year 1724, when Dr Woodward published an account of the process in the Philosophical Transactions.1

The story of Prussian blue is an often-repeated one, found in books about artists’ colors, technical treatises on pigment-making, and in both academic and popular histories about colors and chemistry.2 As a story of discovery and invention, it follows a familiar trajectory. The search for substance A yields the unknown B. The clever (or desperate) investigator explores this accidental result and discovers its possibilities. Substance B becomes valuable in its own right, perhaps even more so than original substance A. Combinations of accidents and eureka moments—exploited disruptions, rather than a deliberate search—frequently drive our understanding in the history of discoveries. This is especially true of explanations for developments in the early modern period, as contemporary sources are frequently unverifiable. In studying an epoch where the social and philosophical structures of the sciences appear to be so different from our own, the “fortuitous accident” provides an explanatory outline that does not challenge modern beliefs or expectations. Factual if not always accurate, fortuitous accident stories always leave unasked questions. What assumptions do we make about the nature of invention and discovery when we accept them without question? In the story of the color Prussian blue, for example, we might ask about the need for new blue coloring materials in early eighteenth-century artisan communities. Did demand contribute to its success? Was the identification of Prussian blue as a manufactured color important to early producers 167

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or consumers? Later investigators used Prussian blue as a model to create other colors and it was recommended as a textile colorant, food additive, laundry aid, printer’s color and chemical indicator. How was this versatility significant in its history? What do the uses and the transformations of Prussian blue suggest about the substance as an artisan commodity and a chemical object? Plates 23–26 give some indication of the scope and intricacy of this investigation. A comprehensive examination of eighteenth-century records—presentations to scientific societies by well-known savants, directives issued by improvement societies and responses to them, popular or casual descriptions, formulas, and information about artifacts colored with Prussian blue—returns complexity to the history of the color. This depth in turn permits us to position Prussian blue more accurately within eighteenthcentury discussions of chemistry and artisanship. The substance is significant as one of the first laboratory-made pigments, one with antecedents but no clear analogies in practices or in theories. In this discussion, I plan to return some nuance to the story of Prussian blue. My own interest lies in the ways this artisanal material engaged eighteenth-century chemists and physicists; my focus will be the transformation of Prussian blue, always a chemical product, into a chemical object. In re-examining the history of Prussian blue, I will address the questions I posed above, and others. I will begin by building on the story of the fortuitous accident that led to the creation of Prussian blue. Then, because academic interest in this substance was centered in France by the mid-eighteenth century, I will look at the examinations sponsored by the Paris Academy of Sciences (the Académie Royale des Sciences), scientific investigations with many embedded social meanings. And finally, I will look at transfers of Prussian blue, its international investigations, and its divergent uses. First, a reminder: in the eighteenth century, Prussian blue was not a single substance. The choice and quality of materials, the skill of the preparer, and the recipe used led to differences in the visual result, and supported the idea that the product or products of each maker was unique.3 The substances with which the pigment was mixed and the preparation of the surfaces to which it was applied affected both appearance and stability. Eighteenth-century chemists and physicists who worked to understand the nature of Prussian blue accepted these variables as typical of any manufactured item. Thus the blue colors called Paris blue, Hamburg blue, Antwerp blue, Turnbull’s blue, bronze blue, and a few other names were simultaneously Prussian blue and distinct colors.4 It is important to keep this idea in mind as ideas about the production and uses of Prussian blue are suggested, established, and changed.

Origins and Early Development The story of Prussian blue outlined above first appeared three decades after its discovery, when the German chemist Georg Ernst Stahl included it in a compendium of useful or interesting anecdotes.5 Information about Diesbach, the colormaker Stahl identified, is scarce: we know nothing about his training and practice or about his relationship to his “neighbor,” Johann Conrad Dippel. This deficiency limits the ways we can assign 168

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expectations and motivations to Diesbach’s work. We do know somewhat more about Dippel, however. A Pietist theologian, scholar, and chemist who is often described as an alchemist, he is most significant to the early history of Prussian blue for his invention and sale of a nostrum, Dippel’s Animal Oil, distilled from animal bones.6 Unlike Bancroft’s interpretation, Stahl’s squib provided no discovery date. If Dippel and Diesbach were the discoverers of Prussian blue and that event did take place in Berlin—neither can be definitively confirmed—it occurred between 1704 and 1707, when Dippel resided there.7 Technical art research has confirmed that Prussian blue was available in commerce before 1706, but we know nothing about the initial transfer of Prussian blue, from mistake to viable commodity, or about its early integration into artisan or consumer interests. The fortuitous accident story implies that Diesbach and Dippel brought Prussian blue to market, but this may not be accurate. We do know that by 1708 a blue coloring material, probably based on the substance we attribute to Diesbach-Dippel, was sold in Berlin by Johann Leonhard Frisch.8 Alexander Kraft has remarked on Frisch’s promotional activities regarding Prussian blue, particularly the way he obscured the identity of the inventors.9 In his correspondence, Frisch was circumspect about his involvement in the production of Prussian blue, but he built an extensive network for his color. In letters to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz he mentions sales in Paris, London, St Petersburg and several German towns.10 In 1710, Frisch arranged for the insertion of an unsigned note about Berliner Blau, as he named it, in the inaugural volume of Miscellanea Berolinensia.11 The article extolled the pigment as an inexpensive substitute for ultramarine, one that was easy to work and less susceptible to change than the common blue pigments indigo, azurite, and bice. This first published mention assigns to Prussian blue features of its modern identity, particularly its designation as a carefully prepared laboratory substance that performed better than native alternatives. The claim that Prussian blue, as a manufactured material, improved upon natural equivalents persisted despite later evidence to the contrary. It is noteworthy that the first published mention of Prussian blue is, in essence, an advertisement, especially as it appeared in a periodical sponsored by the Berlin Academy of Sciences (the Kurfürstlich-Brandenburgische Societät der Wissenschaften). Why was Prussian blue sold under the aegis of the Academy, as the article also notes? It was a novelty but not yet a chemical object, a substance of interest within the community of chemists. No evidence points to interest in Prussian blue at the Academy, except for Frisch’s involvement. Several factors may have contributed to the placement of this article about Prussian blue. It could be that such chemical investigations were not then a viable undertaking for Academy members. Perhaps tests of quality made by artists were considered sufficient guarantees. Perhaps the early connections between Prussian blue and the Berlin Academy were due to social rather than scientific relationships. Or perhaps Frisch resisted, preferring to keep the lucrative details to himself. We do not know. An interesting feature of some recent studies of Prussian blue has been the confirmation of its early use through technical examinations of objects.12 Such reports indicate that the pigment was quickly added to the palette of colors used on architecture, for “coarse painting” (vehicles, signs, theatrical sets), and for works of art. 169

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The variety of uses implies that early Prussian blue was available in a range of qualities and a corresponding range of prices. Instructions to artists about use of Prussian blue appeared in print by 1721, suggesting knowledge about if not necessarily familiarity with the pigment.13 Yet although these sources frequently offered as replacement for the far more expensive ultramarine, it was just as frequently dismissed as inadequate. Prussian blue faded quickly and changed color in the presence of certain other pigments. Both chemists and artisans issued cautions regarding its use.14

Dissemination and Investigation In 1724, the German chemist-apothecary Caspar Neumann, then residing in Leipzig, wrote to John Woodward, the Secretary of the Royal Society of London. To discharge a debt of gratitude, Neumann asked if Woodward, on behalf of the Society, would accept the formula, for a “certain blew die of as deep a Colour as that of the flower Gentianella is.”15 His description continued: “The first Inventor of it lives in Berlin; his name is Mr Frisch, Conrector of the school of that Town, who is the onely Man that prepares it, and Sells a great quantity of it for Italy, and Germany, and I don’t know but for England too.”16 Neumann further noted that, rather than ask Frisch for the instructions, he experimented to discover the recipe. Neumann’s recipe (in Latin) was duly received and published, without reference to him, in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.17 Neumann’s letter answers an important question: why was the formula for Prussian blue first published in England? But this addition to the story also realigns the structure of its early history. Neumann offered the Royal Society someone else’s secret: by 1724 Prussian blue was useful information, a commodity to share with the public. Furthermore, Neumann implies that he had no difficulty unlocking the secret to create his own version of Frisch’s blue. Kraft and others have suggested that Frisch’s monopoly (if he had ever held one) was ended by 1720 and the production of Prussian blue may have been an open secret before then.18 Dippel almost certainly manufactured Prussian blue in the Netherlands, where he lived after 1707, and there are suggestions that Diesbach sent the instructions to a former student working in Paris, who sold it as bleu de Paris.19 Neumann’s offer to the Royal Society and the subsequent publication of the formula therefore may not mark its earliest dissemination. It does indicate the point, twenty years after discovery, when Prussian blue reached the attention of philosophical as well as practising chemists. Access to the formula ignited interest in Prussian blue and did transform it into a chemical object, something worthy of chemical investigation independent of its interest to artists. Publication of Neumann’s formula for Prussian blue in what was then the most respected and widely disseminated scholarly periodical established a ground-level standard of knowledge about Prussian blue for savants and amateurs of arts and sciences. A report on Prussian blue written by the chemist John Brown followed the printed instructions for its preparation in the Philosophical Transactions. This essay is believed to be the first published discussion of the nature of Prussian blue (Fig. 10.1).20 170

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Brown reported on the tests (proofs) of the formula that would have been undertaken before endorsement of a material to be used in commerce.21 He is also credited with identification of iron (in oxblood) as a critical component of Prussian blue. In his report, Brown mused that “[i]t would be curious to know what gave the first hint for the production of so fine a color from a combination of such materials,” suggesting again that the scientific community of the time was 10.1 The formula for Prussian blue included only beginning to become aware of the by Peter Shaw in his book of Chemical Lectures (London, 1734) was a translation of the mysteries of Prussian blue.22 Savants in London and Berlin did publication in Philosophical Transactions of the not immediately take up the implied Royal Society of London. A version in modern English is included at note 57. Image courtesy challenge, but members and associates of Smithsonian Institution Libraries of the Paris Academy—the Académie royale des Sciences—did. In France, Prussian blue became a chemical object, a model that explained or confirmed prevailing notions about chemical combination and the nature or value of scientific studies and a substance that would be improved for its consumers through this understanding. The French chemist and apothecary Etienne-François Geoffroy must have set to work on Prussian blue almost immediately upon reading the articles in the Philosophical Transactions: he presented his initial essay about Prussian blue to the Paris Academy in November 1725, the first of dozens of studies presented to French institutions—the Paris Academy, the Conseil de Commerce, and provincial scientific or improvement societies—during the eighteenth century. Geoffroy’s explorations positioned Prussian blue as an interesting and problematic chemical substance.23 Calling on both contemporary ideas of chemical elements and the affinity theories of composition he was instrumental in developing, Geoffroy confirmed Brown’s finding that iron was the source of the blue color, and he tested other animal substances such as horn, skin, and hoofs as substitutes for the recommended dried bullock’s blood. He explained the formation of Prussian blue from such diverse materials as a process analogous to soapmaking.24 A quarter-century later, members of the Paris Academy heard reports on the research into Prussian blue undertaken by the abbé François Ménon. 25 Ménon, who was not an academician and so could not represent himself, built his work on Geoffroy’s investigations. His predecessor had tested alternate animal materials; Ménon tried to determine what kind of Prussian blue other metals might create. Would they perhaps create Prussian red, Prussian green or Prussian brown? Ménon was also interested, as Geoffroy had been, in the role played by phlogiston in the formation of Prussian blue. He discussed reasons why some Prussian blue pigments had a reddish tone and 171

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offered a mechanical explanation. When properly made, the phlogiston in the pigment “varnished” the iron molecules, preventing Prussian blue from becoming rust-colored. This was one of several observations Ménon made that explained or corrected the undesirable qualities of Prussian blue pigments. In another, equally important discussion, Ménon described a way to adapt the Prussian blue pigment to dye cloth. It is not clear whether this new use for the color Prussian blue was the first practical transformation, but it is the first with a demonstrable connection to ongoing chemical understanding.26 Creating color in or on textiles presented a series of chemical and physical challenges to eighteenth-century scientific investigators, challenges that had to be tempered with aesthetics and economics. The adaptation of Prussian blue to the requirements of textiles connected studies of this substance to an ongoing mandate to determine the nature of dye processes and so improve methods. Investigations undertaken for the Paris Academy led to Jean Hellot’s treatise on coloring wool (1750) and work by Pierre Joseph Macquer, Hellot’s successor as the head of the chemistry section, on silk dyeing.27 A new source of blue colors for textiles would have had great advantages for France. Michel Pastoureau has called blue the most significant color of the eighteenth century; its rise in popularity is apparent in building and furnishing colors as well as clothing and artworks.28 In eighteenth-century France, as elsewhere in Europe, the use of imported indigo was replacing woad, a native source for blue colors. Indigo and woad were both excellent dyes, but processing requirements made each difficult to use in the multicolored printed or painted designs that were then so fashionable. A new coloring material for textiles, one that would not rely on the woad-growers in Provence or indigo shipments from English, Dutch or Spanish colonies would give a decided advantage to French manufactures. Geoffroy had also suggested converting Prussian blue into a textile color and, in a posthumously published essay, noted analogies between Prussian blue and black colors. Both processes require combinations of astringents. Some techniques to dye cloth black used vitriol (iron sulfate) as a source of coloring particles, but frequently the first step in creating a good black-colored fabric was dyeing with blue.29 Ménon in his essay discussed Prussian blue as particularly appropriate to that role, as iron solutions were known to damage wool: the transformation of iron into Prussian blue coloring particles rendered them safe. Ménon continued his description of his experiments, noting also a technique to color cotton and wool. For this, he adapted common printing or dyeing processes to include solutions of colcothar, or other forms of ferrous sulfate.30

Investigation and Analysis Eighteenth-century authors of chemical studies of Prussian blue suggested that practical outcomes such as improved stability and increased coloring power might result from investigations into its nature. Such statements reflect the belief held by members of the Paris Academy and similar institutions that discoveries about materials and processes of artisanship would increase the value of related commodities. Yet transforming a 172

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pigment into a dyestuff was an unusual endeavor, even at the Academy. To understand why it was possible, we need first to consider the similarities and differences in the creation of these two different branches of coloring materials. The basic formula for lake pigments, such as the cochineal red identified as Diesbach’s original goal, has been known for millennia.31 The process is reasonably simple: a coloring source is boiled in water. The color-infused liquid is collected and alum (potassium ammonium sulfate, a white powder) dissolved in it. A colored precipitate forms. Filtered and washed, the precipitate becomes the pigment. 32 Translation of Neumann’s and subsequent recipes for Prussian blue follow this procedure; the sole difference is the need to first convert the bull’s blood into a viable coloring source. Calcination, the technique used to make this conversion, was understood as the critical step in all recipes for Prussian blue, the one that determined both the color and the quality of the pigment.33 In eighteenth-century explanations, calcination concentrated the phlogiston, the substance that controlled color.34 The practice was a common processing technique and an analytical tool in chemistry, but unusual in color-making operations. Dyers and colormakers recognized similarities between the lake pigments and dyes made from the same or similar coloring substances. In dyeing, the fiber or fabric is first treated with a metallic salt, frequently alum. Subsequent immersion in an infusion of the coloring substance created color on the cloth. So, although Pierre-Joseph Macquer suggested that the conversion of Prussian blue into a dyestuff was unusual (“Les couleurs de la teinture son extrêmement différentes de celles qu’on emploie dans la Peinture”) this was not strictly so.35 Prussian blue may have been the first synthetic dyestuff, but its general preparation process, like that of Prussian blue pigment, had analogies in common practice.

Artisans and Academics, Hierarchies and Rivalries Despite the common eighteenth-century belief that chemical and mechanical investigations could enhance practical outcomes, advice regarding artisan use of Prussian blue offered by academicians through the Paris Academy always referenced assessments made by un-named painters. This practice was probably a result of politics and social hierarchies both within and outside of the Paris Academy. Throughout the eighteenth century, the chemistry section at the Paris Academy was led by men who were trained as physicians or physicists. These savants often lacked experience-based understanding of matter and its changes. Academicians with practical capabilities, those who had trained as apothecaries, provided the missing skills and information, especially in chemistry experiments: throughout the century all official reports regarding chemical matters included at least one of the apothecary-academicians as co-author.36 These men, who included Geoffroy, Antoine Baumé, Guillaume-François Rouelle, and Louis-Claude Cadet de Gassicourt, held less well-compensated positions within the Academy and so maintained positions within their corporate community. They owned or managed dispensaries and often held lucrative positions as lecturers or advisers to the royal household. The business interests of the apothecary-academicians may have kept them 173

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from the highest positions in the Paris Academy, but their presence was necessary and, in general, welcomed. Away from the Academy, relations among Parisian apothecaries, marchands épiciers (the larger group of spice merchants and dealers, which included apothecaries) and the painters’ guild (the Académie de St-Luc) were often strained. Representatives quarreled about rights to sell items, and appeals to government entities were common. Describing recommendations as common knowledge, or citing approval from within the relevant corporate community was thus a strategy used by the apothecary-academicians to avoid creating or exacerbating conflicts. A problem adjudicated at the Paris Academy in 1764 highlights the issues and their consequences. Masters from the painters’ guild seized the Prussian blue factory of sieurs Gly and d’Heure, pointing to sale of painters’ materials as an ancient right of the guild; violators were subject to confiscation of property.37 Gly and d’Heure protested: they owned a chemical factory, not a color manufacture. Hellot examined the case and sided with the manufacturers. Prussian blue is a chemical product, he stated, so not one controlled by the painters’ guild. The manufacture was reopened and production resumed. Roger Hahn has described efforts by the Paris Academy to “throttle” the Société des Arts, the Société Libre d’Emulation and similar voluntary associations dedicated to the improvement of commerce as infringements on crown-granted rights and duties.38 Similar territorial battles were also fought between the Academies. LouisBernard Guyton de Morveau, the Dijon-based lawyer and chemist, was notably reprimanded by the Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1783, when he suggested zinc white pigment as a viable and less toxic alternative to lead white. The masters of that institution commended de Morveau for his “laudable efforts and his ardor toward useful discoveries in the Arts,” but suggested that chemists should concern themselves with improvements to already-accepted colors, and not the search for new ones.39 The ongoing struggles for recognition and reward were largely a phenomenon of Paris-based or Paris-focused corporate and academic communities. Distance from Paris and a more relaxed hierarchy granted some freedom for interactions within the provincial associations. Members of the Rouen Academy (Académie des sciences, arts et belles lettres de Rouen), for example, included industrialists and apothecaries such as Louis-Guillaume de la Follie and Charles-Pierre Le Chandelier in addition to local physicians, professors, and nationally known savants.40 And in a similar manner, Ménon’s position as an outsider may have rendered his comments to the Paris Academy more curious than threatening. As a correspondent rather than a member of the Paris Academy, and an amateur rather than a formally trained chemist or physicist, he may have had greater latitude in suggesting new uses for a substance under study. Nevertheless, Ménon’s effort to transform Prussian blue into a dyestuff led to some protective actions by Academy members. In their report about Ménon’s essay, Hellot and Rouille state that Ménon knew their colleague Macquer had discovered a way to use Prussian blue to dye cloth. They implied, for the record, that Macquer was only awaiting approval by the Controleur géneral to announce his invention.41 Macquer may have considered Ménon’s work a threat to his claim as inventor and the lucrative 174

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privilege that could accompany it; he submitted a plí cacheté to the academy soon after Ménon’s first essay was presented.42 And, as if to solidify his position, Macquer implied in his own essay about Prussian blue that Ménon’s work was faulty. Macquer suggested that the animal nature of Prussian blue made it better suited for animal fibers such as wool and silk, rather than the cotton Ménon tested.43 Within the story of the transformation of Prussian blue into a dyestuff, as in the stories of its invention as a pigment, is an implicit assumption of immediate success and broad adoption. Careful consideration of Macquer’s published and unpublished descriptions, and other presentations to the Conseil de Commerce suggest differently. Despite positive endorsements, Prussian blue-as-dyestuff had difficulties just as Prussian blue-as-pigment did. Certain problems may have been a result of Macquer’s own assumptions about production requirements. His Prussian blue dye process, for example, mimicked that used for indigo and woad dyeing in its call for multiple immersions to achieve deeper shades. The advantages of early Prussian blue dyestuffs were thus only those of local manufacture and perhaps price; using Prussian blue would be as time-consuming and labor-intensive as the dyestuffs it replaced. Lack of stability was also a problem for Prussian blue dyes, as it had been for the pigment. More troubling was the rough or scratchy feeling of the finished cloth—especially as indigo and woad were known for the soft hand they imparted. Thus it is not surprising that evidence of early uses of Prussian blue on textiles is almost exclusively as a paint rather than dye (Plate 27).44 The announcement that Prussian blue could be used as a dye did lead to continued interest its improvement in France and internationally. In the 1760s, the London-based Society of Arts offered a premium for “the best Specimen of Woollen Cloth, or Yarn, dyed on the Principle of making Prussian blue,” but this prize was never awarded.45 A more successful impetus to Prussian blue dyeing appeared in the early nineteenth century. At that time the combination of blockades, a declining woad industry and growing interest in dye chemistry led the French government to offer a reward for new studies of Prussian blue dyeing.46 Although claimed as a mid-eighteenth century invention, the textile dye Prussian blue was not a viable commodity until the nineteenth.

Later Studies and Studies in Other Regions Through the end of the eighteenth century (and beyond), Prussian blue maintained its position as a chemical and physical object worthy of investigation, and efforts by the scientific community continued to transform it in new ways. Macquer had published the details of his investigation of Prussian blue in 1752, following the success of his treatises on practical and theoretical chemistry.47 The discovery not long after of an iron-rich water source in the Paris suburb of Passy led to suggestions of ways to reformulate Prussian blue manufacture to exploit the find.48 There were many efforts to improve manufacture. Le Chandelier, the Rouen-based apothecary, assembled and studied the known techniques in the late 1760s. 49 In an essay about Prussian blue read at the Rouen Academy in 1771, he admitted that his efforts to find a less expensive production method were unsuccessful. New studies modernized explanations of the 175

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nature of Prussian blue and, as Geoffroy had before, used those explanations to model prevailing chemical theories. An investigation by Guyton de Morveau, announced in 1772, found that Prussian blue was more than just phlogiston-saturated iron particles. Guyton’s analysis identified the creation of a unique acid in the production process. This acid was named prussic acid. Studies of the chemistry and uses of Prussian blue took place outside of France in the eighteenth century, too. Again from about 1760, Prussian blue was transformed once more, into a tool of the analytical chemist. It is probably not a coincidence that this shift within the chemical laboratory from study-object to reagent was initiated by chemists in Germany and Scandinavia. Chemical pursuits in those regions, whether theoretical or practical, were often focused on the needs of the mining and metallurgical industries. The Berlin-based apothecary and analytical chemist Andreas Marggraf described his use of Prussian blue to identify iron in solutions, and to establish that certain reactions had taken place.50 The needs of a good-quality reagent and those of a good-quality pigment were similar, it seems. In a two-part presentation to the Academy of Sciences at Stockholm (Kungliga Vetenskapsakademin), the Swedish chemist Karl Wilhelm Scheele outlined his experiments to test the purity of the pigment he made and to describe the uses of this pure Prussian blue within the laboratory.51 Torbern Bergman, an apothecary and chemist based in Uppsala, used Prussian blue to explicate his theory of affinity. 52 As Marggraf had, Bergman also recommended its use to confirm the presence or behavior of alkaline precipitates. In a discussion of Prussian blue published near the end of the eighteenth century, the academic and industrial chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal remarked that “much reasoning has been extended on the etiology [of Prussian blue].”53 Guyton de Morveau had recently identified three dozen savants who had, in less than a century, examined the nature and uses of Prussian blue; his list was almost certainly incomplete.54 These chemical explorations of Prussian blue also inspired a search for other colors based on the structure of Prussian blue and identification of a Prussian blue and a Prussian red in their “natural” form.55 Transfers to other pigments continued during the nineteenth century, as when Charles Hatchett adapted the process to substitute copper for iron, creating Hatchett’s brown.56 Prussian blue was transformed into a new model for pigments and for chemistry but it remained a puzzling substance, a chemical object worth investigating.

Conclusions Prussian blue was in many ways an exemplary eighteenth-century chemical object. The story of its discovery draws attention to its origins as a laboratory-based, manufactured substance—although one with antecedents from the natural world. Dissemination of a formula to the scientific community led to investigations and transformations, as dozens of artisans, apothecaries, and chemists sought the essence of Prussian blue. The new uses that were the result of those efforts transformed Prussian blue from one artisan commodity to others, from a source for theoretical explanation 176

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to an analytical tool. Within these transfers and trials, Prussian blue guided and demonstrated contemporary thinking about chemistry, and about chemistry and modernity. The transfers and trials of Prussian blue therefore serve as a model in one more, overarching way—as a model that fully incorporates eighteenth-century ideas about practical endeavors and their value.

Acknowledgments I began thinking about Prussian blue as a problem in history and chemistry in 1985, the year I first attempted to prepare it. Nicholas Eastaugh encouraged me to collaborate on a comprehensive history of the substance more than a decade ago and this chapter owes much to that endeavor. Mimi Kim provided valuable advice on an early draft. Elsbeth Geldhof, paint specialist and owner of Blue Tortoise Conservation, kindly and enthusiastically researched and prepared the color samples shown in Plates 23–26. I am grateful to them, and to many other teachers and colleagues who have listened, challenged, and advised me as I have tried to sort out the many meanings of this very useful substance. Finally, I thank Beth Fowkes Tobin, Andrea Feeser, and Maureen Daly Goggin for inviting me to contribute to this volume, and for their frequent and wise counsel. For the interest of readers, a modern translation of Shaw’s 1734 instructions for making Prussian blue are shown below.57

Notes 1. Edward Bancroft, “On Prussian Blue,” Experimental Researches Concerning the Philosophy of Permanent Colours: And the Best Means of Producing Them, by Dyeing, Calico Printing, &c. (Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1814), 45. 2. Representative samples include Joshua Cohen, “Thirty-Six Shades of Prussian Blue,” Triple Canopy 8 (April 2010), at http://canopycanopycanopy.com/8/thirty_six_shades_of_prussian_blue, accessed October 2010; Michel Pastoureau, Bleu: Histoire d’une couleur (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 123; L.J.M. Coleby, “A History of Prussian Blue,” Annals of Science 42 (1939): 206–11; Karl Wilhelm Scheele, “Experiments on the Colouring Matter in Berlin or Prussian Blue. 1782,” The Chemical Essays of Charles-William Scheele. Translated from the Transactions of the Academy of Sciences at Stockholm. With Additions (London: For J. Murray, 1787), 321. 3. See, for example, Jean Hellot, “Sur la Préparation du Bleu de Prusse,” Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences … avec les mémoires de mathématique & de physique… tirez des registres de cette Académie for 1756 (1762): 53–59. 4. Barbara H. Berrie, “Prussian Blue,” in Artists’ Pigments: A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics, vol. 3 (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art/Oxford University Press, 1997), 191–218; Nicholas Eastaugh et al., The Pigment Compendium: A Dictionary of Historical Pigments (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004), 308–9. 5. Georg Ernst Stahl, Experimenta, Observationes, Animadversiones, CCC Numero Chymicae et Physicae (Berlin, 1731), 281–83. Stahl (1660–1734) was, after 1716, court physician to the King in Prussia.

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6. E.E. Aynsley and W.A. Campbell, “Johann Konrad Dippel, 1673–1734,” Medical History 6, 3 ( July 1962): 281–86, at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1034731/pdf/medhist00166-0089. pdf, accessed October 2010. 7. Jens Bartoll, “The Early Use of Prussian Blue in Paintings,” presented at the Nineth International Conference on NDT of Art, Jerusalem, Israel, 25 May 2008, at http://www.ndt.net/article/art2008/ papers/029bartoll.pdf, accessed October 2010. 8. Regarding Johann Leonhard Frisch (1666–1743) see the Deutsches Biographisches Archiv: Part I 352, 163–82; 512, 63–72; Part III 268,167–69. 9. See the discussion in Alexander Kraft, “On the Discovery and History of Prussian Blue,” Bulletin for the History of Chemistry 33, 2 (2008): 61–67. 10. Johann Leonard Frisch, Briefwechsel mit Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1896). 11. “Notitia Coerulei Berolinensis nuper inventi,” Miscellanea Berolinensia 1 (1710): 377–78. 12. Jo Kirby, “Fading and Colour Change of Prussian Blue: Occurrences and Early Reports,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 14 (1993): 62–71; Jens Bartoll et al., “Early Prussian Blue: Blue and Green Pigments in the Paintings by Watteau, Lancret and Pater in the Collection of Frederick II of Prussia,” Technè: La science au service de l’histoire de l’art et des civilisations 25 (2007): 39–46; Bartoll, “The Early Use.” 13. Bartoll, “The Early Use,” 5. 14. Anon., “Of the Prussian Blue,” in The Art of Drawing and Painting in Water-colours … (London: Printed for J. Peele, 1732), 45–46; Edward Hussey Delaval, An Experimental Inquiry into the Cause of Changes of Colour… (London: Printed for J. Nourse 1777), 29–43. On Delaval’s discussion of Prussian blue see also Joao Jacinto de Magellan to Pierre Joseph Macquer dated 1 April 1775, Bibliothèque National de France Macquer correspondence M-W Ms. Fr./12306 /25–28. 15. “Extract of a Letter from Caspar Neumann to Doctor Woodward,” June 1723, Archives of the Royal Society, RBO/11/103. The letter was read to the Society on 9 January 1724. See RSL (Cl.P/11ii/2). 16. Neumann to Woodward. 17. John Woodward, “Praeparatio Caerulei Prussiaci Ex Germania Missa ad Johannem Woodward, M.D. Prof. Med. Gresh. R.S.S.,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 33 (1724–25): 15–17. 18. Alexander Kraft, “On Two Letters from Caspar Neumann to John Woodward Revealing the Secret Method for the Preparation of Prussian Blue,” Bulletin for the History of Chemistry 34, 2 (2009): 134. See also Rudolf Forberger, Die Manufaktur in Sachsen vom Ende des 16. bis zum Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1958), 77, 148. 19. J. Bearn, The Chemistry of Paints, Pigments and Varnishes (London: Benn, 1925), 85–86; Alfred Franklin, “Bleu de Prusse dit aussi bleu de Berlin (Fabricants de),” Dictionnaire historique des arts, métiers et professions (Paris: Welter, 1906; repr. 1969). Both works name the first Paris manufacturer but give different names. 20. John Brown, “Observations and Experiments upon the Foregoing Preparation,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (1683–1775), 33 (1724–25): 17–24. The paper was read to the Society on 16 April 1724, RSL (RBO/11/126). 21. Sarah Lowengard, “Parameters of Color Quality,” In The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), at http://www.gutenberg-e.org/lowengard/B_Chap01. html#20, accessed October 2010. 22. Brown, “Observations,”17.

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23. Etienne-François Geoffroy, “Observations sur la Preparation de Bleu de Prusse ou Bleu de Berlin,” Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences … avec les mémoires de mathématique & de physique … tirez des registres de cette Académie (1725): 153–72, at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k35266.image. r=prusse.f396.tableDesMatieres.langEN, accessed October 2010; Etienne-François Geoffroy, “Nouvelles Observations sur la Préparation du Bleu de Prusse,” Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences … avec les mémoires de mathématique & de physique … tirez des registres de cette Académie (1726): 220–37, at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k35266.image.r=prusse.f396.tableDesMatieres.langEN, accessed October 2010. 24. Geoffroy, “Observations,” 161. 25. François Ménon, “Mémoire sur le Bleu de Prusse,” Mémoires de mathématique et de physique, présentés à l’Académie royale des sciences, par divers sçavans, & lûs dans ses assemblées 1 (1750): 563–72; and Ménon, “Second Mémoire sur le Bleu de Prusse,” Mémoires de mathématique et de physique, présentés à l’Académie royale des sciences, par divers sçavans, & lûs dans ses assemblées 1 (1750): 573–92. Ménon (d. 1749) had been the sécretaire perpetuel of the Académie des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts d’Angers. In Paris, he worked closely with the academician René de Réaumur. 26. Other uses for Prussian blue included laundry bluing, confectionery and coloring paper. 27. Jean Hellot, L’Art de la teinture des laines et etoffes de laines … (Paris, 1750); Pierre Joseph Macquer, L’Art de teinture en soie (Paris, 1763). 28. Pastoureau, Bleu, 123. 29. Claude-Joseph Geoffroy, “Différens Moyens de Rendre le Bleu de Prusse Plus Solide à l’Air, & Plus Facile à Préparer,” Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences … avec les mémoires de mathématique & de physique … tirez des registres de cette Académie for 1743 (1746): 35, at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ cb32786820s/date. 30. Ménon, “Second Mémoire,” 587–92. Colcothar is ferric oxide, particularly the residue created by heating ferrous sulfate. 31. Ralph Mayer, The Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques, rev. edn (New York: Viking, 1957), 36, 94. 32. In modern terminology, a lake pigment is a coloring agent precipitated onto an inert binder, typically a metallic salt. 33. Claude-Joseph Geoffroy, “Différens Moyens,” 48; Peter Shaw, “Way of Preparing an Animal Colour Called Prussian Blue,” in Chemical Lectures, Publickly Read at London in the Years 1731, and 1732; and Since at Scarborough, in 1733; For the Improvement of Arts, Trades, and Natural Philosophy (London: Printed for J. Shuckburgh; and Tho. Osborne, 1734), 180. 34. Phlogiston was the conjectured fourth element of eighteenth-century chemistry; it joined sulfurs, salts, and mercury as a component of all substances and can be understood (somewhat inaccurately) as “notoxygen.” Its significance to color production was demonstrated by the way substances, especially metals, changed color on the addition of heat. Captured at the right moment and at the right color, this property could be made permanent. 35. Pierre-Joseph Macquer, “Sur une Nouvelle Espèce de Teinture Bleue,” Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences … avec les mémoires de mathématique & de physique … tirez des registres de cette Académie for 1749 (1753): 111, at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb32786820s/date. 36. On the apothecary-chemist see Ursula Klein, “Apothecary-Chemists in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” in New Narratives in Eighteenth-Century Chemistry, 2007, 97–137, at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-14020-6278-0_6, accessed October 2010. 37. “Mémoire lu par Hellot écrit par sieurs Gly et d’Heure concernant son bleu de Prusse,” 6 and 9 February 1765, Archives de l’Académie des Sciences pochette.

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38. Roger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 105–12. 39. “L’Académie pense qu’en aplaudissant aux louables tentatives de M. Morveau et à son zèle pour les découvertes utiles aux Arts, que la chimie devroit moins s’occuper à chercher de nouvelles couleurs qu’à perfectionner celles dont on est déjà en possession.” “Rapport … de MM. les Commissaires du Blanc de Zing,” 6 July 1782, Procès-verbaux de l’Académie royal de peinture et de sculpture 1648–1793 (Paris, 1889), vol. 9, 116. 40. Charles-Pierre Le Chandelier (1713–75) was a Rouen-based apothecary-chemist. See Archives biographiques françaises, part 1, 0623, 136. Louis Guillaume de la Follie (1739–80), a Rouen-based savant and industrialist, was about to be named Inspector of Royal Manufactures when he died in a laboratory accident. See Archives biographiques françaises, part 1, 576, 384–88; part 2, 378–80. 41. Jean Hellot and Guillaume-François Rouelle, “Procès-verbal sur le Second Mémoire sur le Bleu de Prusse de M. l’abbé Menou [sic],” read 26 April 1749, Procès-verbaux de l’Académie royale des Sciences 68 (1749). 42. Pierre-Joseph Macque, Pli cacheté no. 23, dated 23 April 1749, Archives de l’Académie des Sciences. 43. Macquer, “Sur une Nouvelle Espèce,” 263. 44. “Conseil Utile pour le Commerce, de Mr. D.L.F.,” CARAN F/12/2259 January 1778. Sara Reiter and Beth A. Price, “An Eighteenth-Century Chinese Painted Silk Dress from the Philadelphia Museum of Art: A History of Analysis and Condition,” in The Conservation of Eighteenth-Century Painted Silk Dresses, ed. Chris Paulocik and Sean Flaherty (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), 21–36. 45. Premiums Offered by the Society Instituted at London for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (London: For the Society, 1763), 26. 46. “Rapport sur le Prix pour un Moyen de Réduire la Consommation d’Indigo,” 3 July 1810, CARAN F/12/2240; “Bleu de Prusse—Autres Soumissions,” 1810–12, CARAN F/12/2252; Description du procédé de M. Raymond … pour teindre la soie avec le bleu de Prusse, Paris, 1811. Agustí Nieto-Galan, “Between Craft Routines and Academic Rules: Natural Dyestuffs and the ‘Art’ of Dyeing in the Eighteenth Century,” in Material and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory, eds Ursula Klein and Emma Spary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 248–50. 47. Pierre Joseph Macquer, “Examen Chimique de Bleu de Prusse,” Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences … avec les mémoires de mathématique & de physique … tirez des registres de cette Académie for 1752 (n.d.): 79–86, 60–77. 48. Louis-Claude Cadet de Gassicourt, “Eau Minérale Nouvellement Découverte à Passy, chez M. Calsabigi, & Procédé Abrégé pour en Retirer le Bleu de Prusse Avec des Réflexions sur l’Utilité de ce Bleu,” Journal oeconomique, November 1755. 49. Entry for Le Chandelier in Archives biographiques françaises, part 1, 0623, 136. 50. Andreas Sigismund Marggraf, “Examen Chymique de l’Eau,” in Opuscules chymiques, vol. 2 (Paris: chez Vincent, 1762), 1–71, at http://num-scd-ulp.u-strasbg.fr:8080/134/. 51. Karl Wilhelm Scheele, “Experiments on the Colouring Matter in Berlin or Prussian Blue. 1782,” in Chemical Essays of Charles William Scheele (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1966), 319–35; Karl Wilhelm Scheele, “Dissertation on Prussian Blue. Part II. 1783,” in Chemical Essays of Charles William Scheele, 391–405. 52. Torbern Olof Bergman, “Column Twenty-fourth, Acid of Prussian Blue,” in A Dissertation on Elective Attractions (Printed for J. Murray, 1785), 164–66; Bergman, Physical and chemical essays; tr. by E. Cullen, vol. 2, 1788.

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53. Jean-Antoine Chaptal, “On a beaucoup raisonné sur l’éthiologie de ce phénomène,” Elemens de chimie, vol. 2 (Montpellier: de Jean-François Picot, 1790), 335. 54. Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, “Acide Prussique,” in Encyclopédie méthodique. Chymie, pharmacie et métallurgie, vol. 1 (Paris: chez Panckoucke; Liège: chez Plomteux, 1786), 225. 55. Eastaugh et al., The Pigmment Compendium, 308–10. 56. Charles Hatchett, “On the Utility of Prussiate of Copper as a Pigment,” Journals of the Royal Institution of Great Britain 14 (17 January 1803): 306–8. 57. The following is a modern translation of Shaw’s “Way of Preparing an Animal Colour Called Prussian Blue.” Take 4 oz each of crude tartar [potassium hydrogen tartrate] and nitre [potassium nitrate]. Pulverize and mix them together. Roast until the mixture ceases to crackle and has formed a fixed salt [a solid substance that resists the action of fire]. While it is still hot add 4 oz dried and finely powdered oxblood. Heat this mixture in a closed container until it is friable. Grind lightly, then add (again while hot) it to two quarts of boiling water. Boil for half an hour and strain the liquid. Wash the residue several times in fresh water. Put the liquids together, and evaporate them to two quarts. Next, heat an ounce of green vitriol [iron sulfate] in a closed container until it is white. Dissolve this calx in six ounces of rain-water and then filter the solution. Dissolve ½ pound of crude alum [potassium aluminum sulfate] in two quarts of boiling water. Add this mixture to the vitriol solution while hot. Place the heated tartar-nitre solution into a large vessel and add to it the vitriol-alum solution. The mixture will bubble up and turn green. As the liquid is bubbling pour it from one vessel to another. Let it rest and when the bubbling has stopped strain the through a linen cloth. The pigment will remain on the strainer. Using a wooden spatula place the pigment into a small new pot. Pour on it two or three ounces of spirit of salt [hydrochloric acid], and a beautiful blue colour will immediately appear. Stir well then let rest overnight. Clean the pigment by rinsing repeatedly in rain-water, allowing sufficient time for the precipitate to subside. Drain in a linen strainer, and dry gently.

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Part III Making Colored Objects

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

11 Glass Bracelets in the Medieval and Early Modern Middle East: Design and Color as Identity Markers Stéphanie Karine Boulogne

Even though a profusion of ornamental colored glass bracelets dated between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries CE have been found in archeological digs from Arabia to India to Southeast Asia, little is known about them. Archeologists have tended to focus their studies on ancient material culture found in these sites rather than on Islamic artifacts from later periods. Only recently have archeologists paid attention to glass bracelets excavated from urban, rural, and funerary archeological sites. Among the few archeologists who have studied Islamic glass bracelets, Maud Spaer and Yoko Shindo have developed ways to differentiate these bracelets by their techniques and by their decorative patterns.1 In this chapter, I argue that color should be added to shape and pattern as a way to identify, classify, and date these bracelets as well as locate the site of their manufacture, and map their movement through Islamic trade routes within the region that occupies the space between the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. Further, drawing on historian M. Tahar Mansouri’s observation about the importance of color in “defining community boundaries,” I suggest that glass bracelets found in archeological excavations feature particular colors that may have been identifying markers of belonging to one or more communities during the late medieval and early modern period (1200–1800).2 For color, notably on cloth, has often been used to signal identity differences among various social, religious, ethnic, and regional groups in Islamic Mediterranean societies. In the seventh century CE, from the beginnings of Islam, glass was manufactured in the Middle East. Glass and crystal were sold in Iraq at Basra’s Suq Balluriyin, and both were considered as desirable as the engraved glass from Baghdad.3 In the Mamluk period (1260–1517), glass enameled with gold that was made in Damascus and Aleppo of the northern Bilad al-Sham (the Bilad al-Sham corresponds more or less to present-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine; see Fig. 11.1) is well documented and may have been exported to places as far away as the Golden Horde territories.4 Palestine’s Hebron 185

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11.1 Locations of glass bracelet sites and workshops in Bilad al-Sham, twelfth to eighteenth centuries. Source: H. David and S. Boulogne

workshops were producers, if not originators, of glass bracelets from the beginning of the thirteenth century, and their work was mixed with imports of Indian material.5 Glass bracelets were manufactured in two ways. As described by Yoko Shindo, the most ancient method involved “bending a glass rod and joining the two ends,” and the other way, “the most commonly employed technique in the Islamic era,” involved “winding glass around the circumference of a metal rod and gradually pushing open 186

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the center hole while rotating the rod to form the bracelet.”6 Islamic bracelets can be identified through their shape, design pattern, and color as falling into two periods: the Mamluk period (1260–1517), and the Ottoman period (1517–1800s) during which clothes, cloth, carpets, illuminated manuscripts, and mosaics displayed a characteristic play of “color geometry,” particularly under Mongol influences (1258–1400), even if glass bangles do not seem to characterize Central Asia. This chapter offers details culled primarily from archeological digs to explore that “color geometry” as it shows up in colored glass bracelets, and speculates on both the origins of the manufacture of the colored glass and the production of the colored bracelets. The story of the colored bracelets reveals expanding, complicated trade patterns throughout the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Tentative Geographic Distribution of Bracelet Colors Archeologists have found monochrome glass bracelets manufactured in ancient times. For instance, bracelets of turquoise blue date from ancient Pharaonic Egypt.7 Monochrome material is characterized by many smooth, turquoise blue bracelets, particularly in the northern Bilad al-Sham in Damascus, Masyaf, and Beirut, from both the Mamluk and Ottoman periods. However, according to initial investigations in the southern Bilad al-Sham, these are virtually absent both from medieval period archeological excavation levels at sites such as Tell Abu Sarbut, Khirbat Faris, and Tell Hesban (including late medieval levels for this site), and from late Ottoman levels from Hubras (see Fig. 11.1). By contrast, polychrome bracelets generally date from much later, from the Mamluk to the Ottoman periods. A few exceptions are those polychrome bracelets attributed to seventh- and eighth-century Umayyad Bilad al-Sham such as in Khirbat Minyeh in Palestine,8 as well as to early Abbasid Iraq (a few bracelets from Suse dated to the ninth century are preserved in the Louvre Museum). The multicolored decorative design on bracelets from the late medieval period can be distinguished based on multiple color samples that form individual groups.9 In the 1970s, Théodore Monod was one of the first to draw attention to the decorations and varied colors of these objects basing his conclusions on a corpus found in sub-Saharan Africa and in Yemen. Middle Eastern monochrome and polychrome bracelets that date from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries come from both fortified and unfortified urban contexts. These include capitals such as Fustat in Egypt, Damascus, and Aleppo; rural towns such as Masyaf, Qasr al-Hayr of the northern Bilad al-Sham; villages in the southern Bilad al-Sham such as Umm Qais, Tell Abu Sarbut, Tell Dair Allah, Tell Hesban, Khirbat Faris, Khirbat Minyeh, and Tell Erani; as well as commercial ports such as al-Tur in Egypt and Shihr in Yemen10 (see Plate 28). Generally, these glass bracelets consist of a colored glass core covered with a layer of glass of a similar, but more often of a distinct, tint. (A few enameled examples dating to the same period are known only from the Damascus Citadel.) 187

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The chromatic scale represented in these examples is extensive: blue, white, translucent brown, yellow, orange, and green. Red was rarely used, but purple is sometimes found in samples from Beirut and Masyaf. The colors were combined with special decorative techniques, such as millefiori as well as marvered (glass rolled on a flat hard surface) and sanded effects. It is possible that the layering of colors corresponds to one or another particular techniques. A few rare bracelets, some with identical color combinations—for example, one made of small drops of blue, yellow, and red glass—have been identified in the Bilad alSham and north and south of the region. These include bracelets from Tell Abu Sarbut and Tell Erani,11 Shihr, and those found in Dvin in Armenia dating to the thirteenthcentury.12 The partially translucent bracelet found on a corpse bought in Hebron in the nineteenth century and preserved in the Österreichisches Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna, displays a set of vivid colors: orange, blue, turquoise, green, yellow, black, and white. Bracelets found on another corpse in Masyaf are combinations of red, pink, and orange with white, yellow, or green (see Plate 28 for a glass bangle from Masyaf castle excavation in Syria). The variety of bracelet colors found in Hadramaut (Yemen) is much less extensive than those identified with the Bilad al-Sham and Egypt. In fact, unlike the many different examples of design and color combinations made in the Middle East and described above, studies on material from Shihr-Shabwa in Hadramaut and Kawd amSaila in Aden Gulf show that the same style and colors were largely used throughout this area. Variations were made using green combined with numerous hues, with yellow and red being the most frequent13 (see Plates 29 and 30). This is also the case for the material from Kawd am-Saila for the period between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.14 The styles most frequently found at Shihr have high pointed cross-sections as do a series of bracelets decorated with drops of brownred, blue, and yellow glass. Styles common in the Greater Syria region are also featured in bracelets of Hadramaut. Such styles include a translucent model decorated with an internal thread, associated with Fustat (Egypt) as well as Beirut, Masyaf, Damascus, and Khirbat Faris, and a white, brown, and gold bracelet15 linked to Beirut. Rare monochrome purple examples have also been discovered there. Therefore, between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries, two main types of bracelets seem to be characteristic of the Middle East. The first consists of variegated polychrome groups from the eastern Mediterranean composed of a mix of colors obtained using highly developed techniques such as millefiori and marvering. These polychrome bracelets are usually found in the company of monochrome examples— turquoise in the north and more dark green and brownish green in the south of the Bilad al-Sham (in Jordan for example). The second group consists of examples from Arabia between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries that display a range of colors principally based on green or combined with green. However, the material found on sites in sub-Saharan Africa, at Teghazza for example, is comprised mostly of monochrome material (turquoise blue, yellow, green).16 According to initial investigations, this material seems to be more closely associated with the finds from the Bilad al-Sham and Egypt than with those from Hadramaut on the Arabian Peninsula. 188

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Place of Origin: From Colored Glass Sticks to Bracelets It may be possible to trace the origins of these bracelets by using their color and style to make distinctions between those from the eastern Mediterranean and those from the Arabian Peninsula. New information based on archeometric results and recent studies of archeological material suggest that coloring agents (minerals and other chemical compounds) in the glass can be helpful in pinpointing the locations where the glass was made (see Fig. 11.1). After studying a sample of 36 fragments from the bracelets found at Tell Abu Sarbut and Khirbat Faris in central Jordan, Julian Henderson argues for three possible origins for the glass used to make these bracelets. Given the ash components that come from the Middle East in the analysis of 19 fragments, the first place of origin is local, and the colors in this instance are pale purple, opaque red, and emerald green. Henderson’s archaeometric data suggests that this glass may come from Tyre (Lebanon), Serje Lemani (Turkey), Raqqa (Iraq), and Nishappur (Iran).17 A second group of very pure glass was identified based on the analysis of five bracelet fragments that are blue, green, and turquoise.18 Connections have been established between this material and the constituents of the eighteenth-century mosaics in the basilica of Torcello, in northern Italy, which have some Syrian components. The third provenance, suggested by the analysis of nine fragments, comprises glass containing a large amount of aluminum oxide. Parallels based on this ingredient suggest similarities to glass from India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia.19 The bracelet fragments that were analyzed are dark brown, translucent blue, and emerald green, and a typological group can be identified, consisting of smooth, dark bracelets with semi-circular cross-sections. The coloring agents described by Henderson are all of metallic origin and the colors have a constant of blue and green for all three hypothesized provenances. In addition, the local “Oriental” provenance for the pale purple and opaque red should be noted associated with the turquoise blue of the “Italian” group of minerals, and the link between dark brown, translucent blue and emerald green should be drawn with Central Asia, Southeast Asia and India.

“Color” Workshops, Slag, Sticks (or Ingots), and Bracelets THE NEAR EAST AND ARABIA Manuscripts dating from the medieval period through to the eighteenth century describe the manufacture of glass bracelets in a Hebron workshop and scholars have established that there were many other glass workshops located in the Middle East. Archaeological evidence supports the idea that glass bracelets were made in this area. This evidence consists of plain and decorated colored ingots, or “sticks” of glass that were found at Shihr in Hadramaut20 and at Hubras in Jordan.21 These sticks display decorative patterns and elements that are similar to the bracelets discovered at these sites, thus suggesting that the bracelets were of local manufacture but not necessarily using local materials—those sticks could be imported.22 189

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Textual sources link specific colors with particular workshops. In twelfth-century manuscripts from the Genizah of Cairo, red is associated with Beirut23 and purple with Jerusalem.24 Nevertheless, hardly any red or purple glass has been found in the Bilad al-Sham or Yemen, and only a few purple bracelets, which date from post-1300, were found in these areas at Masyaf and Shihr. However, at Shihr, green and purple slag (scrap glass), crucibles, and the remains of a workshop, dating after the fourteenth century, have recently been found.25 Yellow- and green-colored enamel and its manufacture are described by al-Biruni in the eleventh century in the Kitab al-Jamahir wa al-Jawahir.26 This yellow and green enamel is associated with India, where it was being manufactured until quite recently.27 It therefore appears that glass sticks made elsewhere were transported from glass manufacturing centers either in the eastern Mediterranean or from even further away in India, Indonesia, or China and brought or sold to villages and other locations in the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula where they were turned into bracelets by local artisans. It seems likely they were delivered as colored, pre-manufactured sticks of glass, to large workshops like the one in Hebron, which has been producing glass from the thirteenth century up to the present. Craftsmen, in turn, may have taken these ingots from such workshops, and gone out into remote regions, both urban and rural, to collect commissions.28 INDIA, CHINA, SOUTHEAST ASIA, EUROPE There is much evidence to suggest that trade between the Middle East and the Far East in decorative glass and ceramic objects was well developed and quite complex during this time period. The glass rods described above seem to have been a common format used for the distribution of glass. Glass bracelets and ingots as well as pottery produced in the Middle East during the middle and late Islamic periods have been found in excavation sites in Southeast Asia. In a ship found wrecked off Brunei (on the north coast of Borneo), green glass bracelets and monochrome turquoise blue ingots were found in jars dated to the fourteenth century.29 (The ship was sailing on the route between China and Arabia.) The cargo also contained some dichromatic bracelets similar to those identified in Shihr, and those found in Julfar (in today’s United Arab Emirates) that were dated between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries.30 At Pengkalan Bujang, in the Malaysian Peninsula, some mold-blown decorated crockery and glass bracelets were found, some of which are turquoise blue.31 These could be linked to Middle Eastern pottery of the Mamluk era and Chinese pottery of the same period, from the end of the Song and early Yuan dynasties.32 Likewise, glass and ceramic objects manufactured in Asia as well as Europe have been found in excavations in the Middle East. At al-Tur al-Kilani, a commercial port in Sinai, Egypt (which, in 1380, replaced the port of ‘Aydhab), archeological finds include, in addition to bracelets from Hebron workshops, some pottery dated to after the fifteenth century attributed to Thailand, Myanmar, and Vietnam, as well as a profusion of bracelets attributed to India and some samples of Venetian glass.33 It is surprising that a Venetian origin has never been suggested for glass bracelets, even though fragments of 190

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Venetian glass are mentioned in excavation reports from Hadramaut and from al-Tur al-Kilani.34 Not only were glass objects and glass rods exchanged across vast distances, other raw materials along with techniques for making glass bracelets also traveled far from their originating sources.35 Exchanges occurred within the Middle East and between India and Arabia, particularly in the shape of primary materials (such as sand and ash) and of techniques such as enameling.36 Further trade in glass between these areas and Europe developed during the medieval period as glass was used in jewelry to imitate precious stones thought to have talismanic powers, a belief carried over from ancient times. Perhaps the enameled glass trade in eastern France during the late medieval period was the product of such an exchange. Anne-Francoise Canella explains that in Argonne, at the borders of Lorraine and Champagne, trade was already flourishing in the fourteenth century, peaking in the sixteenth century, and that “monastic glass workshops produced goods … and also glass for small jewelry,”37 which perhaps possessed “numéraire” value, meaning it could be used as currency. Further, the manufacture of glass bracelets is described in Theophilus’s twelfth-century northern Germany manuscript, the Schedulae.38 Besides the karimis, Muslim merchants located on the Mediterranean, who traded long-distance with India and East Asia from the twelfth century onwards, some European merchants also engaged in this commercial expansion: Venetians distributed their merchandise to the far reaches of the Mongol territories as with the fourteenthcentury tin they transported via Constantinople.39 In the sixteenth century, T. Pirès, a Portuguese traveler, mentions exchanges based around Venetian glass on the road from Cairo to Yemen.40 Indian merchants were trading along the Yemeni coast too,41 and the diplomatic exchanges between the Mongols and the Mamluks that featured Chinese Yuan silk, for example, also occurred in the Bilad al-Sham.42 This long-distance trade reflects substantial commercial expansion between the twelfth century and the Ottoman period, which is particularly characteristic of the Red Sea area. The Silk Road on the sea was much used, and trade with India and Asia is supported by archeological evidence, such as the Chinese pottery found in profusion in the Bilad al-Sham, particularly during the Ayyubid period (from 1171–1260).43 Glass was imported to the Middle East from as far away as the Mediterranean region, and China and Korea.44 Indeed, bracelets created using Indian and Chinese glass were found in Middle Eastern Mamluk and Ottoman markets next to bracelets made of local glass. Itinerant craftsmen working with colored rods, on commission, would have incorporated styles and colors associated with the Middle East into their bracelets even though the materials were of foreign manufacture.

Bracelet Colors as Identifying Markers The variegated colors of the Middle Eastern glass bracelets and the greens and yellows of Hadramaut glass bracelets discussed above can tell us a lot about the people they adorned (see Plate 30). Indeed, by building on the work of researchers on the role 191

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of color in the Islamic world, it is possible to argue that the colors of glass bracelets signaled a particular identity and/or affiliation probably associated with religious groups within and outside of Islam. Scholars have investigated the role of color in communicating Islamic social and religious positions. Fabric has played a key role in formulating hypotheses about color’s meanings. For example, Tahar Mansouri’s study of the significance of color is based primarily on clothing.45 Other researchers have analyzed the social meanings of Mongol color codes by linking colored cloth with tribal cultures. For instance, Thomas T. Allsen argues that gold woven into a fabric or interwoven with silk represents a resurgence of golden emblems in myths central to the Indo-Iranian cultures that were conquered by the Mongol empire. He observes that “the intimate linkage between the sun, imperial authority, and gold has, therefore, a continuous history that can be traced by to deep antiquity, as history that all of the nomads, Iranian, Turkic, and Mongolian, have in their turn shared.”46 Using color as a social marker was a common practice in both the eastern and western regions of the Middle East. For instance, the Abbasids (of 750–1258) preferred black for the military turban and the banners they flew, but they also developed at the beginning of their reign colored banners that represented tribal units.47 48 Further, in sixth-century Central Asia, color identified the tent of the Turk polity called the Qaghanate; Zemarchus, the first Byzantine in the “valley of gold,” was received there in a tent lined with multicolored silk.49 Blue, which has a long history the world over, may have had significant meaning in the Middle East as well as Southeast Asia. It is a typical color of monochrome goods from before Christian times and well beyond, such as the Egyptian glass pastes and turquoise bracelets that have been discovered in the Middle East from later dates. Some that were found in excavated sites in the northern Bilad al-Sham may have been manufactured in such commercial centers as Beirut, Damascus, and Masyaf during the Mamluk and Ottoman periods. Other bracelets with turquoise-colored glass have been uncovered in shipwrecks in Southeast Asia. Michel Pastoureau’s study of the color blue demonstrates that it was the most commonly used color in clothing in occidental countries.50 Because blue is frequently the symbol of protection against the evil eye, and was a common feature of Islamic dress, it is possible that its function in bracelets was also to protect its wearers.

Middle Eastern Variegated Bracelets What should we make of the polychrome glass bracelets originating from Arabia and traveling to India, which are distinct from one site to the next? Perhaps their colors and their combinations possessed magical properties with prophylactic virtues for the wearer, warding off evil and bad fortune. This is the hypothesis most often put forward when scholars try to explain the symbolism of the sparkling colors used on bracelets. Such use is based on a Bronze Age tradition and is found in the medieval custom of wearing colored stones around the wrist.51 During the period examined 192

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here it seems that the properties conferred on colored stones were sought in glass imitations.52 Furthermore, the use of striped, variegated, and mixed-color fabric was the fashion in the Middle East; whereas, in Europe, multicolored cloth and clothing was unusual and considered so remarkable that in the fifteenth-century court of Anjou, a woman dressed in a variety of colors was called “Madame de toutes les couleurs.”53 In Spain, during the Nasride period (from the second quarter of the thirteenth to the fifteenth century), Muslim mudejares (Muslims in Christian lands) wore multiple colored bands up to their calves, and in the fifteenth century Granada, Muslim women wore layers of dresses of different colors.54 The colorful clothes known as mullbad muhattam, made in Basta and Granada during the fifteenth century, were popular with the Muslims of the hassa in Granada. And in the lists of presents sent by the Merenide Sultan Abu I-Hasan to the Mamluk Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad during the embassy of 738, Hejira mentions clothes embroidered with gold “of wool and stiff silk and with many colors.”55 In the Bilad al-Sham, beginning in the Burji Mamluk period (1382–1517), a variety of cloths decorated with embroidery and characterized by geometric motifs was described as a local, domestic craft and meant for the populace, as opposed to another variety of cloths imitating Chinese Yuan silks (1279–1368) that were primarily reserved for the elite.56

Green, and Yellow and Green Bracelets from Hadramaut Archeological finds reveal that glass bracelets from Yemen’s Hadramaut are less varied in color than those in Greater Syria’s Bilad al-Sham where, as noted above, rich and diverse colors are present. In Hadramaut, and particularly at Shihr, the colors in the bracelets revolve around green with some dichromatic associations of yellow or red57 (see Plates 28 and 29). Parallels exist between a series of Hadramaut bracelets (found in large numbers) decorated with superimposed layers of glass with a ribbed cross-section (reflecting a style found both in Armenia and the Bilad al-Sham), and very similar styles, decorated using the same technique as those found in Kholapur in western India when it was under Shiite Bahmani domination in the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries.58 Furthermore, there are many other green examples from Masyaf Castle, an Ismaili and Mamluk fortress in Greater Syria. Finally, at Qalat (fort) Bahrein, an engraved reddish-brown cornelian Shiite stone and a green bracelet was found with a female skeleton in a post-Islamic dated tomb.59 It is possible that the green and yellow-green bracelets from Shihr and Kawd amSaila belong to specific communities.60 Merchants moved between Hadramaut in southern Yemen and western India, with some settling in western India and building Muslim communities.61 Perhaps these merchants were responsible for the trade in glass rods and other glass wares between Yemen and western India. It is also possible that itinerant Yemeni craftsmen who must have had portable furnaces and carried colored ingots themselves made bracelets in regions such as India that were distant from the Arabian Peninsula. Blue, yellow, green, and yellowish-green feature prominently in Islamic dress; green is a traditional color of Islam. In addition to its connection with Muhammad, 193

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green represented the color of paradise, and green may have also been viewed as a healing color. The type of yellowish-green bracelets found at Shihr also shows up on Islamic costumes. One example found at Jabel Adda in Nubia is dated to the late thirteenth century and is preserved in Cairo’s Museum of Islamic Art.62 Further, yellow and green clothing also appears in the sixteenth-century illuminated manuscript The Sumame-i Humayun, which contains a representation of two glassblowers and a glassblower’s workshop at court. These glassblowers wear yellow and green costumes; one is in a white turban while the other’s is red and white.63 Because of trade ties with China, it is possible that these greens, and specifically the green glass in bracelets, are also linked to Chinese beliefs about green jade. In China, when worn in the circular form of the “bi” disk, jade is believed to have curative properties.64 Islamic green bracelets might then have carried these associations.

General Conclusion Archeometric analysis of glass bracelets found in archeological excavations of medieval Islamic sites in the Middle East and Arabian Peninsula reveals that several workshops, either primary or secondary, are linked to specific communities. For instance, the preliminary results of archeometric analyses carried out on samples from excavations at Khirbat Faris and Tell Abu Sarbut in the southern Bilad al-Sham (in Jordan) suggest provenances, both local and foreign, that can be differentiated according to types of glass. The component ingredients of smooth brown and dark green bracelets are, for example, close to those found in glass from Southeast Asia, India, and Sri Lanka; those for multicolored glass bracelets, particularly for a style well represented from Armenia to Yemen, contain some local ash, the chemical elements of which are similar to those from Raqqa (Euphrates, Syria), Tyre (Lebanon) and Serçe Lemani (Turkey). The discovery of archaeological material at Shihr in Yemen and at Hubras in Jordan has shed further light on the matter: the presence of purple and green glass slag and sticks of colored glass attest to the artistic manufacture of some bracelets locally. However, the place where the glass itself was produced remains to be identified. Textual evidence suggests that specific colors were characteristic of particular glass workshops. For instance, manuscripts from the Genizah in Cairo refer to the red associated with Beirut in the twelfth century and the purple that is often said to be from Jerusalem, while in the thirteen and fourteenth centuries green seems to have been characteristic of South Yemen and Hadramaut. Finally, the colors that characterize these accessories, which are often unique to a particular site, can be linked to Islamic cloth and clothing. As a colored costume was often enlisted to mark Islamic communities and their beliefs, it seems more than likely that colored ornaments such as bracelets would be used and can be considered in similar ways, and specifically, to signal social and religious identity. Finally, the evidence to date of archeological findings and textual artifacts draws attention to a vibrant global market that drew together peoples of diverse social, cultural, and religious backgrounds in a lively and beautiful “color geometry.” 194

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Acknowledgments I want to thank very much Professor Christian Darles for his authorization to work around the material from his survey at Shabwa (Yemen) and for permission to take pictures; also Isabelle Ruben for her work around the translation of the text into English, and the editors for their very helpful remarks and editorial work. This chapter is devoted to the memory of my father, J.-P. Boulogne.

Notes 1. Theodore Monod, “Sur un site à bracelets de verre des environs d’Aden,” Raydan (1978): 111–25; Maud Spaer, “The Islamic Glass Bracelets of Palestine—Preliminary Findings,” Journal of Glass Studies 34 (1992): 44–62 (hereafter “Preliminary Findings”). 2. Colors are also very important in Mongol codes, as explained by Thomas T. Allsen, who tackles the links between colors used on cloth and tribal culture and language in Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire: A Cultural History of Islamic Textiles (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1997). 3. A.J. Naji and Y.N. Ali, “The Suqs of Basrah: Commercial Organization and Activity in a Medieval Islamic City,” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 24, 3 (1981): 298–309. 4. Mark Kramarovsky, “The Import and Manufacture of Glass in the Territories of the Golden Horde,” in Gilded and Enamelled Glass from the Middle East, ed. Rachel Ward (London: British Museum, 1998), 96–100. 5. Spaer, “Preliminary Findings”; Yoko Shindo, “Islamic Glass Bracelets found in the Red Sea Region,” unpubl. paper presented at the 13th Congress of Annales Internationales d’Histoire du Verre (1986): 269–76; Yoko Shindo, “Glazed Pottery and Glass,” Artifacts of the Islamic Period Excavated in the Raya al-Tur Area, South Sinai, Eygpt (Tokyo: Waseda University, 2009), 23–35, esp. 30. 6. Yoko Shindo, “The Classification and Chronology of the Islamic Bracelets from al-Tur, Sinai,” Cultural Change in the Arab World 5 (2001): 73–100, esp. 77. 7. From India (such as Kopia where they date to 5 BCE); see A.K. Kanungo and R.H. Brill, “Kopia, India’s First Glassmaking Site: Dating and Chemical Analysis,” Journal of Glass Studies 51 (2009): 11– 25. From Southeast Asia—Vietnam, Thailand, Korea—where they can be translucent green and dated to the first century BCE; see Miriam Haidle, “Glass Bangles from Krek 52/32 and Their Implications for the Dating of the Mimotien Culture,” Asian Perspective 40, 2 (2001): 195–208. 8. Spaer, “Preliminary Findings.” 9. These groups are usually accompanied by monochrome material, from Arabia to India (Kholapur, Nevasa, Maski, Hastinapur) and sub-Saharan Africa (Sankalia); H.D. Sankalia, “The Antiquity of Glass Bangles in India,” Bulletin of Deccan College Research Institute 8, 3–4 (1947): 252–59; Theodore Monod, “Bracelets de verre polychromes du Sahara occidental au Népal,” Le cuisinier et le philosophe (1982): 55–63. 10. Shindo, “Islamic Glass Bracelets”; Shindo, “Glazed Pottery and Glass”; H. Hathan, unpublished doctoral thesis, “Masyaf et les fortifications ismaéliennes au Proche-Orient aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles,” Universitaire Paris-IV Sorbonne; A. McQuitty et al., “Mamluk Khirbat Faris,” in The Mamluks and the Early Ottoman Period in Bilad al-sham: History and Archaeology ( Jordan: Khiraat Faris, 1997–98), 181–226; Maud Spaer, “The Pre-Islamic Glass Bracelets of Palestine,” Journal of Glass Studies 30 (1988): 51–61; Spaer, “Preliminary Findings”; Margreet L. Steiner, “An Analysis of the Islamic Glass Bracelets from Tall Abu Sarbut,” in Sacred and Sweet Studies on the Material Culture of Tell Deir ‘Alla

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and Tell Abus Sarbut, by Margreet L. Steiner and Eveline J. van der Steen (Dudley MA and Leuwen: Peeters, 2008), 231–40; Stéphanie Boulogne, “Glass Bangles from Hubras: Archaeological Inventory and Stratigraphic Data,” at http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/view_by_stamp.php?label=IFPO&action_ todo=view&langue=en&id=halshs-00471742&version=1 (2007): 460–64, accessed 29 May 2011. 11. Maud Spaer et al., Ancient Glass in the Israel Museum: Beads and Other Small Objects ( Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 2001), 197. 12. H.M. Janp’oladyan, Srednvekovoe steklo Dvina IX–XIII vv., no. 7 in the series Hayastani hnagitakan hushardzannerě (Erevan: Izd- vo AN ArmianskoÌ SSR, Institut arkheologii i ėtnografii 1974), 129. 13. Stéphanie Boulogne and Claire Hardy-Guilbert, “Glass Bangles of al-Shīhr Hadramaut (Fourteenth– Nineteenth Centuries), a Corpus of New Data for Understanding of Glass Bangle Manufacture in Yemen,” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, 40, ed. Janet Starkey (London: British Museum, 2010): 135–48. 14. See Monod, “Sur un site,” for Darles’ collection of bracelets found in the surface at Kawd am-Saila area. 15. Boulogne and Hardy-Guilbert, “Glass Bangles.” 16. Theodore Monod, “A propos des bracelets de verre sahariens,” Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Afrique Noire 34 (1975): 703–18. 17. Robert H. Brill, “Appendix 3: Chemical Analyses of Some Glass Fragments,” in Nishapur: Glass of the Early Islamic Period, ed. Jens Kröger (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), 211–35; Brill, “Chemical Analyses of Some Early Indian Glasses,” Archaeometry of Glass (1987): 1–25; George F. Bass, “Naure of the Serçe Limani,” Journal of Glass Studies 26 (1984): 64–69. 18. See Stéphanie Boulogne and Julian Henderson, “Indian Glass in the Middle East? Medieval and Ottoman Glass Bangles from Central Jordan,” Journal of Glass Studies 51 (2009): 53–75. See also Irena Andreescu-Treadgold et al., “Glass from the Mosaics on the West Wall of Torcello’s Basilica,” Arte Medievale 5, 2 (2006): 87–140. 19. Robert H. Brill, “Chemical Analyses of Some Early Indian Glasses,” XIVth International Congress on Glass 1986, ed. H.C. Bhardwaj (New Delhi: Congress on Glass, 1987), 1–27; James W. Lankton and Laure Dussubieux, “Early Glass in Asian Maritime Trade: A Review and an Interpretation of the Compositional Analyses,” Journal of Glass Studies 48 (2006): 121–44. 20. Boulogne and Hardy-Guilbert, “Glass Bangles,” 135–48. 21. Boulogne, “Glass Bangles from Hubras,” 460–64. 22. Amongst the finds from Sheikh Othman were some sticks, described by Revoil, that have been dated to the antique period; see A. Minot, “Recherches sur l’origine des Perles de Zanaga,” Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Afrique Noire 16 (1954): 1–21. 23. David Whitehouse, “Red Glasses from Beirut,” Journal of Glass Studies 46 (2004): 195. 24. Rachel Hasson, “Islamic Glass from Excavations in Jerusalem,” Journal of Glass Studies 25 (1983): 109– 13. 25. Claire Hardy-Guilbert, “Archaeological Research at al Shihr (1996–99),” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 31 (2001): 69–79. 26. Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, Kitab a-jamāhir fi ma’rifat al-jawāhir, trans. H.M. Said as The Book Most Comprehensive in Knowledge on Precious Stones (Islamabad: Pakistan Hijrah Council, 1989), 216–17. 27. Francis Buchanan, An Account of the District of Shahabad in 1809–1810, Buchanan MS 4 (Patna: Patna Law Press, 1939), 583–86.

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28. See Stéphanie Boulogne, “Reflet d’un art popular: Les bracelets de verre coloré de la period medieval (1171–1517) et ottoman (1517–1864) du Bilād al-Shām,” unpubl. doctoral diss., University Paris-IV Sorbonne (2006–7). 29. Nathalie Huet, “Eléments de parure, bracelets et perles,” in La Mémoire engloutie de Brunei, une aventure archéologique sous-marine (Paris: Edition Textuel, 2001), 129–37. 30. John Hansman, Julfar: An Arabian Port (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1985), 79–83. 31. Alastair Lamb, “Old Middle Eastern Glass in the Malay Peninsula,” Artibus Asiae (1966), 74–88. 32. However, blue and green bracelets found at Palembang, dated to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, are attributed to China and not India; see John N. Miksic et al., “Archaeology and Early Chinese Glass Trade in Southeast Asia,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 25, 1 (1994): 31–46. Also, in India, although the local manufacture of glass bracelets has been confirmed in many medieval sites (in numerous excavation reports), one study mentions a majority of European imports shown in trading registers as beginning in the seventeenth century and increasing into the nineteenth century. 33. Shindo, “Glazed Pottery and Glass,” 30–31. 34. Arthur Lane and R. Serjeant, “Pottery and Glass Fragments from the Aden Littoral with Historical Notes,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1948): 108–33; Minot, “Recherches.” 35. The use of certain techniques, such as the mosaic glass from Masyaf or enameling, because they were associated with a specific workshop, might be a way for archeologists to figure out an object’s origin. 36. Steffano Carboni, “Gregorio’s Tale,” in Gilded and Enamelled Glass from the Middle-East, ed. Rachel Ward (London: British Museum, 1998), 101–6. 37. Anne-Francoise Cannella, Gemmes, verre coloré, fausses pierres précieuses au Moyen-Âge. Le quatrième livre du “Trésorier de Philosophie naturelle des pierres précieuses” de Jean d’Outremeuse (Liège: Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Liège, 2006), 121. 38. Stéphanie Boulogne, “La production de bijoux d verre dans l’espace Islamique medieval et tardif: Un artisanat specialisé,” paper presented at the Annales Internationales d’Histoire du Verre, Anvers (2009): 261–69. 39. Mihnea Berindei and Guistiniana M. O’Riordan, “Venise et la Horde d’Or fin XIIIe: Début XIVe siè. A propos d’un document inédit de 1324,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 29, 2 (1988): 243–56. 40. This aspect had been introduced in Boulogne and Hardy-Guilbert, “Glass Bangles.” 41. Eric Vallet, “Les communautés musulmanes de la côte indienne face au Yémen (XIIIe siècle–XVIe siècle),” Hypothèses 1 (2004): 147–56. 42. Bethany J. Walker, “Rethinking Mamluk Textiles,” Mamluk Studies Review 4 (2000): 167–217. 43. Axelle Rougeulle, “Medieval Trade Networks in the Western Indian Ocean (Eighth–Fourteenth Centuries): Some Reflections from the Distribution Patterns of Chinese Imports in Islamic World,” in Tradition and Archaeology: Early Maritime Contacts in the Indian Ocean, eds Himanshu Prabha Ray and Jean-Françious Salles, 159–80 (New Delhi: Lyon Manchar, 1996); Marcus Milwright, “Central and Southern Jordan in the Ayyubid Period: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 16 (2006): 1–27. 44. Lee In-sook, “Ancient Glass Trade in Korea,” Papers of the British Association for Korean Studies 5, Special Issue on Korean Material Culture (1994): 65–82. 45. Tahar Mansouri, Du Voile et du Zunnar: Du code vestimentaire en pays d’Islam (Tunis: Les Editions L’Or du Temps, 2007), 147–68. 46. Allsen, Commodity and Exchange, 66–7.

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47. Khalil ‘Athamina, “The Black Banners, and the Socio-Political Significance of Flags and Slogans in Medieval Islam,” Arabica 36 (1989): 307–36. 48. Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, “Rituels et symbols politiques dans le Moyen-Orient contemporain,” in Avec Arabes puissance de l’amitié, eds Abd El Hadi Ben Mansour and Jacques Frémeaux (Paris: Presses universitaires de la Sorbonne, 2005), 199–232. 49. Allsen, Commodity and Exchange, 65. 50. William Gervase Clarence-Smith, “Locally Produced Textiles on the Indian Ocean Periphery 1500– 1850: East Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia” (2005), 1–39. Research paper online at http://www2.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/Research/GEHN/GEHNPDF/PUNEClarenceSmith.pdf, accessed 29 May 2011. 51. Spaer, “Preliminary Findings”; Steiner, “An Analysis of the Islamic Glass Bracelets,” 231–40; François Thureau-Dangin, “Rituels et amulettes contre Labartu,” Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale 18 (1921): 161–98. 52. Cannella, Gemmes. 53. Michel Pastoureau, “Formes et couleurs du désordre: Le jaune avec le vert,” Médiévales 4 (1983): 71. 54. Rachel Arié, “Quelques remarques sur le costumes des Musulmans d’Espagne au temps de Nasrides,” Arabica 12, 3 (1965): 248, 254. 55. Ibid., 250. 56. Walker, “Rethinking Mamluk Textiles.” 57. Boulogne and Hardy-Guilbert, in “Glass Bangles,” discuss glass bangles from Darles’ survey in Shabwa in Hadramaut. 58. This aspect was stressed in Boulogne and Hardy-Guilbert, “Glass Bangles.” 59. Timothy Insoll, The Archeology of Islam (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 124. 60. A few such bracelets, though small in diameter, have been discovered during the Julfar excavations. See Stephanie Boulogne, “The Glass,” in Julfar Al Nudud Survey 2010, by Robert Carter (Oxford: Oxford Brookes University Heritage 2011). 61. Vallet, “Les communautés muselmanes.” 62. Louise W. Mackie, “Towards an Understanding of Mamluk Silks: National and International Considerations,” Muqqarnas 2 (1984): 127–46. 63. Marilyn Jenkins, “Islamic Glass: A Brief History,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 44, 2 (1986): 56. 64. Gan Fuxi, “The Silk Road and Ancient Chinese Glass,” in Ancient Glass Research along the Silk Road, eds Gan Fuxi et al. (Hackensack NJ: World Scientific Publishing, 2009), 41–108, esp. 83–84.

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12 The Colorful Court of Gabriel Bethlen and Catherine of Brandenburg Éva Deák

Gabriel Bethlen ruled between 1613 and 1629 in the Principality of Transylvania. His second wife, Catherine of Brandenburg, succeeded him on the throne and ruled during 1629 and 1630. This chapter is a quantitative study of the color of the clothes that were worn in their courts, and examines a range of visual, material, and written texts as sources for recovering information about the clothing of Transylvanian elites. The most important sources for this study of these luxury textiles are the pricing regulations passed by the Transylvanian Diets, two lists of inventory of Catherine of Brandenburg, the Account Book of Gabriel Bethlen, and the latter’s Last Will and Testament. I created two databases using the last two sources, which enabled me to analyze quantitatively the materials and colors purchased for the princely court and the colors worn by the Prince. Based on two rather short inventories, I made a similar analysis of the clothes and textiles owned by Catherine of Brandenburg. Colorfulness was one of the most important characteristics of the appearance of the elites in early modern Transylvania. The diversity of terms describing color used in the sources bears witness to the vibrancy of the attire worn. My analysis of Transylvanian price regulations shows how color differentiation affected the price of textiles. I study lower- and higher-quality textiles separately and focus on the luxury textiles worn by the elites in the princely court. The center of my investigation is the colors worn by the Prince and the Princess and I compare these colors to one another. In the case of Bethlen’s coats, I also examine the color combinations of the garments and their linings.

Transylvania in the Early Modern Period Transylvania was part of the Hungarian Kingdom during the Middle Ages. The Ottoman expansion in the region resulted in a tripartite division of the Hungarian Kingdom, whereby Transylvania became a vassal of the Ottoman Empire. The country was independent in its home affairs; however, it was subordinate to the Ottoman Empire 199

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in foreign affairs and had to pay an annual fee to Constantinople from the second half of the sixteenth century until the end of the seventeenth century.1 The first half of the seventeenth century was one of the most prosperous times for the Principality of Transylvania in terms of economy and culture, as well as for its international political role. The reign of Gabriel Bethlen (1613–29) began the “Golden Age of the Principality.”2 Although he was also elected King of Royal Hungary after his successful military campaign against the Habsburgs in 1620 at the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, he refused the crown. The Peace of Nikolsburg (1621) expressed the increased political significance of the Transylvanian Principality and enlarged its territory. After the death of his first wife, Zsuzsanna Károlyi, daughter of important Hungarian nobles (1622), Bethlen asked for the hand of Catherine of Brandenburg (1602–44), sister of the Elector of Brandenburg. Catherine was elected successor to her husband as ruler by the Transylvanian Diet soon after their marriage, in 1626. Although she ruled only for a brief period after the death of Bethlen (1629–30), who left no offspring, she is a remarkable example of an elected female ruler in early modern Europe.3 The primary domain for social representation during the early modern era was court life.4 The increasing political role and wealth of the Principality was manifest in the appearance of the princely couple as well as their courtiers.5 Therefore in this chapter, I study the use and significance of colors in the court at the capital city Alba Iulia (Gyulafehérvár, Weissenburg).

Research Sources A great variety of sources relate to the clothing of the Transylvanian court. First are the preserved articles of clothing and materials from the period. Several garments from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries survive, including a Magyar-style gown owned by Catherine and Bethlen’s richly decorated mente (long overcoat) (see Plates 31 and 32). Visual sources comprise the second group of sources: paintings, engravings, and printed and hand painted costume books. Among written sources, contemporary descriptions of court and diplomatic events, historical works, memoirs, diaries, and correspondences occasionally relate to my subject. I also considered normative sources: sumptuary laws, diet pricing controls, sermons, and moralistic literature. Further, I examined published and manuscript records of inventories, dowry registers, shopping lists, inventories of estates, and testaments. The book whose title translates as “The Household of Gabriel Bethlen” is one of the source publications I used most extensively.6 The three most important reference sources for my study are the price restrictions passed by the Transylvanian Diets, the Account Book of Gabriel Bethlen, and his Last Will and Testament. During Bethlen’s reign the Transylvanian Diet issued four different price restrictions between 1625 and 1627.7 The regulation of 1626 is the first one to address the price of imported textiles, under the subtitle, “Pricing regulations for sellers and merchants,” listing textiles of different quality; “Price of silk materials” was another list.8 The Account Book of Gabriel Bethlen contains detailed shopping lists 200

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from the period between 1615 and 1627. These consist of entries describing diverse, most often luxury goods: gourmet food, costly apparel, furniture, silverware, coaches and caparisons (horse coverings), articles for personal use and so on. A great part of the shopping lists contain textiles bought for the court.9 The Last Will and Testament of Bethlen (henceforth Last Will) starts with the political testament of Bethlen, in which he advises his successor on governance of the country and foreign affairs, with special attention to the relations to the Ottoman Empire. The second part of the document deals with his property. His heirs are listed in order of rank and degree of relationship. The Holy Roman Emperor and his son, the Swedish king, the Elector of Brandenburg, Bethlen’s wife Catherine of Brandenburg, and his brother István Bethlen are at the beginning of the list.10 The entries listed under each name include important effects such as money, goldsmith works, horses and caparisons, coats, carpets, and land, typically in this order. Most items are described in detail, specifying material, color, decoration, and style, so that the will could be executed unambiguously after the death of the Prince.11 Since Bethlen only dealt with his own articles of clothing, male garments are listed, and among them only the most valuable pieces: the various styles of coats (suba, mente and dolmány) are bequeathed specifically. He handed down exotic animal skins (panther and tiger only), and a few pieces of textiles as well. Footwear, hose, shirts, caps or gloves are not mentioned. The Last Will of Gabriel Bethlen contains 608 entries listing items bequeathed to more than 80 heirs. Almost one third of these entries (183) deal with apparel-related property, primarily clothes.

Methodology I created two databases: the first one is based on the Account Book in order to study the color of fabrics purchased for the princely court. For this reason not all items in the source are included in the database, only textiles. These, however, were used for diverse purposes, not only for clothes but also for drapery and even caparisons. Unless stated otherwise (which is quite often), textiles were assumed to be for clothing and included in the database. Each record of the database contains several fields describing the corresponding item of the Account Book. For the present study, the most important field is the one specifying color. I only recorded data in this field when the original entry gave this information, which was usually the case. There are 683 records in the database and color is given in 78 percent of them. The Account Book not only provides information about the textiles’ colors but also their quality, which I argue can be seen in the units by which they were measured: lesser quality was typically measured by the bolt, higher quality by the ell. The two typical units of length used at the time for the measurement of textiles were ell (rőf or sing) and bolt (vég). Rőf and sing were approximately the same length, both varying between 58.3 and 78.3 centimeters in different areas in Royal Hungary and Transylvania.12 The length of one bolt had even greater variation depending not only on the place of sale but also on the type of textile. Most generally it was approximately 50 ells (37 meters).13 201

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Since the ell was much shorter, it was used for the measurement of the more valuable textiles while the bolt was used for those less expensive. Textiles measured by the ell primarily comprised materials worn by the wealthy, while those measured by the bolt were worn by the lower classes. Some materials were bought both in ells and in bolts. These were usually of medium quality: woolen cloths like kersey (karasia), mid-range or even lower-quality broadcloths from Jihlava (Iglau) and other Bohemian and Moravian cities, as well as from Silezia, most often Wrocław (Boroszló, Breslau). Certain types of cambric were sold by the ell and the bolt also.14 Comparing the average unit prices of the two groups confirms that textiles measured by the ell were indeed of higher quality than those measured by the bolt. Based on this observation I make this distinction in my analysis of colors. I created the second database using the Last Will. The 183 items related to apparel were recorded and the articles of clothing in the Last Will were described in detail. Therefore, besides the field in the database that notes the color of garments’ exteriors, there is an additional field that describes the color of the lining.

Elite Clothing in Transylvania in the Early Modern Period Appearance was an important aspect of Magyar identity. Magyar male attire was colorful and displayed Oriental characteristics, most similar to the clothing of Polish noblemen in the region.15 The main elements of male attire were a short undercoat (dolmány) worn over a shirt and a long overcoat (mente) that reached to the knees. The coats were decorated with large buttons of gold or silver and precious stones; the Magyar-style cap featured an aigrette, a tuft of long upright plumes. Tight-fitting hose accompanied this outfit, worn with slippers or more often with boots.16 While Oriental characteristics were of primary importance in men’s clothing, women’s fashions were closer to their Western models, dominated primarily by the Italian and Spanish styles. Noblewomen wore a tight bodice with a shirt and a bell-shaped skirt with an apron. Their footwear was mainly shoes, sometimes boots or slippers. Their headdresses were richly decorated with embroideries, gems, or pearls. The same textiles were used for clothing both sexes. Silk fabrics were popular among the elite, especially taffeta, velvet, atlas, and damask (the latter two made with a satin weave). The finest broadcloths were gránát and scarlet (both colored with kermes, usually).17 Their price could exceed the price of silks.18 English broadcloths played an especially important role; other broadcloths were imported from Nuremberg, Silesia, and Moravia.19 Materials produced in Transylvania were usually lower-grade textiles. Embroideries with silk yarn and gold or silver threads decorated both women’s and men’s attire. Magyar embroideries were influenced both by Western European and Oriental designs, primarily Italian Renaissance in the first case, and mostly Turkish motifs in the latter.20 The quality of materials and richness of decoration in the garments depended upon the rank of the wearer and the importance of the occasion. Costly fur was another indicator of status, and used most often as lining. Lynx was among the most expensive 202

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animal skins, and various species of marten were also highly valued. Noblemen occasionally wore whole animal skins thrown loosely over one shoulder: most frequently wolf hide. Aristocrats preferred to wear leopard or lynx. Lion skin was primarily used for the decoration of horses. Jewelry was an integral part of one’s visage. Chains, girdles, bracelets, and rings were worn. Pendants (násfa, függő) and rosettes (boglár, rózsa) could have different decorative functions. Besides being made of precious metals, in the case of the upper class most often gold, jewelry was decorated with precious stones (turquoise, rubies, diamonds or emeralds), and pearls and was often enameled. Women wore string necklaces made of pearls.21 Although jewelry and also weapons were important dress items, I exclude them from this study of color, as I am concerned solely with textiles. The nobility preferred colorful clothes in early modern Transylvania. Edward Brown, a seventeenth-century English traveler, recorded in his travelogue: “The Hungarians delight most in Colours, wearing blew, yellow, green and purple Cloth; and it is rare to see any one in black; the Priests themselves being habited in long Purple Garments.”22

Social Status by Color Colorfulness was one of the most important characteristics of the appearance of the elites in medieval Europe, too. From the late fourteenth century on, however, black became the fashion in many parts of Europe. Examples include the courts of Philip the Good of Burgundy (1419–1467),23 and in the period of my study, Philip III (1598– 1621) and Philip IV (1621–1665) of Spain.24 The diversity of terms used for colors is surprisingly great in the Hungarian sources written during the first half of the seventeenth century. In many cases the color denominations are expressive words or phrases, such as the “color of the sea” (tengerszín) and “hair color” (hajszín). It is difficult to select an unambiguous English word in these instances;25 therefore, I usually use a word-for-word translation in this chapter. Color terminology was not exact,26 and it was problematic even for family members to understand the terms fully. Tamás Nádasdy (c. 1498–1562), Palatine of Royal Hungary—like most other noblemen of the early modern period—often bought textiles for his family and court. However, even such an experienced buyer asked for further specification of colors before purchasing some textiles at the request of his wife, Orsolya Kanizsay. In one letter Nádasdy asked if she wanted the lighter or darker shade of carnation color (szekfűszín). In the very same letter he lamented that it was impossible to understand what lion color (oroszlánszín) meant and asked his wife: “Please write it more obviously and send a sample, too.”27 Some names of colors in my sources exist today, unchanged in the Hungarian language, such as two terms for red (vörös, piros),28 blue (kék), green (zöld) or lavender (levendula). A great many terms are no longer used, for example, “hair” or “parrot” color. The terms for shades of red were used in a much greater variety than today.These included crimson (karmazsin), scarlet (skarlát), flame (láng), terracotta (tégla), coral (kláris), “dawn” (auróra), carnation (szegfű), rose (rózsa), “meat” (hús), “body” (test), and “lung” (tüdő) color.29 An interesting example is királyszín (“royal color” in a word-for-word 203

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translation). It was used for the purplish shade of darker red in the early modern period,30 very likely for royal purple; in contemporary Hungarian it is no longer in use. There are very few examples when it is used as royal red (királyvörös, királypiros), but “király” is usually part of the “royal blue” (királykék) compound, as in the English vernacular.31

More and Less Expensive Colors Because of their scarcity and price, the best dyes that produced the most beautiful and colorfast results were used for luxury materials in early modern Europe.32 Both Constantinople and Italy were important centers of textile production, famous for the polychromatic textiles of the period.33 Transylvania’s strong economic ties with these centers in all probability affected the extensive use of colors in Magyar attire. Examining the price regulations ordered by the Transylvanian Diets shows that the price of textiles depended not only on their material composition but also on their color.34 Red fabrics could be more expensive than those of a different color. The best quality of the most expensive scarlet material cost 12 forints/ell in red but only 10 forints/ell when green, or blue. Good-quality plain double velvet from Lucca cost 7 forints/ell in red but only 6 forints/ell in all other colors. The latter was the price of a somewhat worse quality of the same velvet in red as well. The price of good double red velvet was 7 forints/ell; other colors of the same material cost 6 forints/ell in 1626 and in the spring of 1627. A medium-quality broadcloth (fajlandis) cost 3 forints/ell in 1626, and 4 forints/ell in 1627. A new entry appeared in the 1627 second price regulation: the “very good” red fajlandis (4.5 forints/ell). Two entries among the most detailed restrictions ranked the best floral patterned velvets made in Venice according to color. In this case, a price difference was fixed between two larger groups; red was of course listed among the more expensive colors. Body color, red, royal purple, blackberry and sour cherry color were somewhat more expensive (9 forints/ell) than “green, blue, black and all the other colors” (8 forints/ ells).35 Exactly these two categories of colors determined the two price ranges of the satins made in Venice (3.75 and 3 forints/ell, respectively) and the best Venetian canvas (3 and 2.75 forints/ell). All three regulations enlisting imported textiles differentiated between black and non-black velvets with a floral pattern. Black was somewhat less expensive in all cases, although the difference diminished by the second half of 1627. Less expensive textiles were occasionally also differentiated by color. There are two examples in the regulations: broadcloth made in Braşov (Brassó, Kronstadt) and aba cloth. The latter was “a coarse, thick, felted fabric of natural-colored wool,”36 often produced within the country and worn by the lower classes. The price of these fabrics was only given in bolts. The good green or blue broadcloth of Braşov cost 18 forints/ bolt, the others 16 forints/bolt. The best of the red, blue, green, and yellow aba cloth cost 5 forints/bolt and 5.25 forints/bolt in the last two price restrictions, while the lesserquality fabric cost 4.5 and 4.75 forints/bolt. The most inferior quality aba cloth was also 204

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identified by color: it was forbidden to import white aba upon pain of punishment both to the seller and the buyer. Broadcloth produced by Anabaptists settled in Transylvania by Bethlen only appeared in the last restriction. Red, blue, and green were the colors of the best-quality cloths produced by them; the lesser quality was grey. In some cases, when only one price was given for a certain type of material, the legislators made it clear that this was the proper price for “all the colors.”

Color of Textiles Bought for the Court of Prince Bethlen Tables 12.1 and 12.2 show the amount of textiles bought in different colors, according to the Account Book. There are altogether 28,955.831 ells (Table 12.1) and another 1,263.5 bolts of textiles related to clothing (Table 12.2). In a few instances two colors were given for a particular length of textile. Only the total amount was noted without stating separately the quantity of different colored fabrics. In these cases I noted the names of two colors with the conjunction “and,” as for example, in “red and white;” three colors were listed twice for certain quantity of textiles, which were recorded in a similar way, for example “blackberry and green and red.” On one occasion it was not possible to decide if the original description meant “red and yellow” or “reddish yellow.” In this single instance I noted the color as “red-yellow.” Table 12.1 shows the distribution of colors in textiles measured by the ell, listing by name only the most frequent references. The total quantity of textiles purchased is given for each color. Red was the most popular color without any doubt. Row 1 shows that red was listed as the color of 6,640.65 ells of textiles. Moreover, in rows 3 and 4, which contain the combination of two colors, red is one of the paired colors in both cases (red and yellow, red and white). Red is also presented as reddish white in 8th place and red-yellow at 16th. Other shades of red are royal purple (7th), sour cherry (12th) and body color (22nd). Materials for which colors were not specified can be found in row 2: their length is altogether 6,413.78 ells, which is 22.2 percent of the total amount. The color green is number 5 on the list; one of its combinations (green and yellow) is number 17 and the other (with blue and yellow) is 21st. Yellow is number 6; it is also present in “red and yellow” (3rd); and in red-yellow (16th). It is number 13 paired with blue, 17th with green, and 21st with green and blue. White is noted in 9th place, followed directly by black. Blackberry is the only color that represents a shade of purple in the table (number 11). Orange is number 23, peach blossom, a milder shade of orange, is 18th. Grey is present as silver (14th), and in 22nd place as ash color. Blue by itself is surprisingly only number 19, although it appears with yellow in 13th place and at 21st with green and yellow. Row 24 contains the total number of all the colors below 23rd place. Less frequently used color terminology includes lawn green, hair color, carnation color, light blue, gold, sea color, rose, pulsatilla (light lilac), rosemary blossom, multicolored, sky, rosemary, dark silver, greenish black, terracotta, dark green, lavender, violet, scarlet, meat, flame, and so on. Altogether 53 colors or combination of colors are distinguished. 205

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Table 12.1 Distribution of colors in textiles measured by the ell in the Account Book Quantity (ells)

Color 1

red

6,640.65

2

not specified

6,413.78

3

red and yellow

2,610.50

4

red and white

1,400.00

5

green

1,377.50

6

yellow

1,321.33

7

royal purple

1,129.58

8

reddish white

962.50

9

white

884.625

10

black

618.50

11

blackberry

580.872

12

sour cherry

495.08

13

blue and yellow

404.00

14

silver

390.25

15

parrot color

338.00

16

red-yellow

304.00

17

green and yellow

300.00

18

peach blossom

291.83

19

blue

268.25

20

body

198.584

21

green, yellow, and blue

198.00

22

ash

174.00

23

orange

159.00

24

other

1,495.00

Textiles measured by the bolt are strikingly less colorful than the previous group. In this category only 13 colors are distinguished. Their distribution is also different. Blue, which was 18th in the previous table, is first here; more than twice as much blue textile was purchased as red. A possible explanation is that blue textiles were bought in such a large quantity since it was the color of the court infantry’s uniform.37 Altogether the purchases of 663 bolts of blue textiles are recorded in the Account Book. Certain shades of blue were among the less expensive colors, worn in Western European cities already in the thirteenth century and in the countryside as of the fourteenth century.38

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Table 12.2 Distribution of colors in textiles measured by the bolt in the Account Book Quantity

Color

(bolts)

1

blue

663

2

red

265

3

not specified

4

white

34

5

green

22

6

yellow

15

7

blackberry and green and red

11

8

white and red

7

9

orange

6

10

black

2

11

body

1

12

hair

1

13

pulsatilla

1

235.5

Red is in 2nd place; also at the 7th together with blackberry and green; together with white it is 8th. Color is not specified for 18.6 percent of the textiles (row 3). White is in 4th place; combined with red it is 8th. Green is number 5, and combined with red and blackberry it is in the 7th place, too. Yellow is number 6, and blackberry is only enlisted together with green and red at 7th place. Orange is 9th, followed directly by black. Finally, one bolt each of body-tone, hair-tone as well as pulsatilla-colored textiles were bought. The data of Tables 12.1 and 12.2 is also plotted in Plate 33, for which I chose colors that are as close to the original as possible, and which thus gives us an approximate picture of the typical colors worn by the nobility in Bethlen’s court.

Colors Worn by Gabriel Bethlen The abundance of available colors discussed in the previous sections shows that it was possible for members of the elite to choose for their garments the colored fabrics they preferred, as well as the combination of colors they favored. The ample number of combinations that existed suggests that these possibilities were not strictly regulated by fashion or custom. Personal preferences played an important role in determining the colors people wore. Colorful attire in early modern Transylvania meant not only preference for bright colors but also wearing different colors together. The combination of two, and occasionally more colors was typical in the case of a single coat or cloak as well. 207

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The variety of colors observable in Gabriel Bethlen’s upper garments listed in his Last Will corresponds to the pageantry of colors of luxury textiles in the Account Book. My examination of the color combinations used by the Prince in his individual articles of clothing reveals the following: of the 114 gowns listed in Bethlen’s will 44 were lined with furs. These were marten, lynx or black fox. They appear in 20 combinations with 12 outer colors of garments. When his mente or dolmány was lined with fur, the color of the lining was determined by the color of the animals: the brown fur of the pine marten, the tawny pelt of the lynx, and the black fur of the black fox. There are 39 different combinations in those cases where the lining was made of fabric. The color of the outside and the color of the lining of the garments were rarely the same (sour cherry twice; red, silver, peach blossom, black, royal purple and parrot color only once). In most cases the lining and the outer color were different. Sometimes a shade of the same color was used, such as sour cherry with orange, violet with red, and black with ash color. However, what today are considered clashing colors were chosen more frequently: a garment in a vivid shade of red was often lined with blue or yellow and vice versa. Some of the combinations would seem extreme today such as rose with silver or green with orange. In Bethlen’s upper garments, as listed in his Last Will, none of the combinations occur more than twice. Since a considerable number of Bethlen’s garments were lined with fur, these are also included into the following tables. Table 12.3 shows the distribution of colors in Bethlen’s gowns listed in his Last Will. The most visible part of the coats is the outside. The outer colors of the 114 listed gowns are specified with five exceptions. Their distribution is shown in the left panel of the table. The predominance of red is observable here as well: red and its two other shades occupy the first three places of Table 12.3: sour cherry is given 20 times, followed by red and royal purple with 17 occurrences each. Green and blackberry are in the 4th and 5th places, followed by ash and silver. Parrot color (4), violet, olive and white (3), rose and hair-color (2) occur fewer than five times. Colors that occur only once for the outer color and never for lining are listed as “other.” Table 12.3 (right) shows the colors of furs and linings. In 28 cases neither the type of fur nor the color of the lining is given. “Not specified” occupies the first row of the table, and is higher in number than the occurrence of any color. Fur linings are in the second and the third place: marten (25) and lynx (17). In these cases the color is not given explicitly but the color of the animals is known. Pine martens have brown fur with a yellowish throat patch. Lynxes are tawny with brown and black spots. The denser winter fur of the animals was preferred for lining as well as trim. A third type of fur used in the Prince’s coats was black fox, listed together with black textiles in 5th place. When a garment was lined with fabric, its color was most often red. It is listed in 4th place (9); its shades orange (4), sour cherry (2), and kings’ color (2) are also present. Silver and blue (3), and white and yellow (2) are given as colors of lining more than once. Colors mentioned once and only here are labeled as “other.” 208

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Table 12.3 The colors of Gabriel Bethlen’s garments (left) and their linings (right) in his Last Will and Testament Color

Quantity

Color of furs and lining

Quantity

sour cherry

20

not specified

28

red

17

marten fur

25

royal purple

17

lynx fur

17

green

10

red

9

blackberry

9

black or black fox fur

4

ash

6

orange

4

silver

6

silver

3

not specified

5

blue

3

parrot color

4

sour cherry

2

violet

3

royal purple

2

olive

3

white

2

white

3

yellow

2

rose

2

green

1

hair

2

blackberry

1

sea

1

parrot color

1

black

1

rose

1

peach blossom

1

sea

1

other

4

peach blossom

1

straw

1

other

6

By comparing the distribution of color terminology describing Bethlen’s garments with the colors of the more expensive textiles enlisted in the Account Book, it is clear that they are practically the same references; only one new denomination appears in the Last Will: olive. While analysis of the Account Book reveals the strong presence of red and its shades in clothes worn by the Transylvanian court, my examination of Bethlen’s garments shows an even more pronounced preference for this color. In all probability his taste also influenced the clothing habits of his courtiers.

Colors Worn by Catherine of Brandenburg A full inventory of the wardrobe of Catherine of Brandenburg does not exist. The longest known list of her clothes consists of 46 articles of clothing, described in 44 entries in 1631. It is part of a longer inventory of Catherine’s properties that were kept in the castle of Munkachevo.39 Her own clothes were listed within the inventory under the subtitle “Clothes of the Princess.” This way they were separated from the group of 209

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clothes she inherited from her late husband, which were listed under the title “Clothes of the Prince.”40 Several other records list clothes that may have belonged to Catherine.41 However, in the case of these lists, it is not clear which articles were really her clothes and which ones she inherited. Furthermore, several articles of clothing may appear on more than one list. To avoid double counting, only the above-mentioned list is used in the following analysis. This is certainly not a complete list of Catherine of Brandenburg’s clothes but investigating this smaller sample can provide insight into her wardrobe. The various articles of clothing include twenty skirts, eight jankers (shorter coats), seven korczovagys (a kind of bodice), four subas (longer coat), three petticoats, two bodices, a cloak and a cap. Their material and color is given in most cases. All of Catherine’s listed clothes were made of silk-based textiles: atlas, velvet, cloth of gold, cloth of silver, and taffeta. The decoration of the clothes is occasionally given, the color of fur or lining only rarely. Additionally, there are several lists referencing textiles that belonged to the Princess.42 Similar to the case of clothes, some textiles appear on more than one list. Therefore, again to avoid double counting, only the longest list from 1634 is used in the following analysis.43 The list contains 549.75 ells and 17 bolts of cloth referenced in 49 entries. In what follows, I present the distribution of the articles of clothing, their color and material. I also discuss the color of the listed textiles. The listed garments are of various colors. These colors are given in Table 12.4, sorted by their frequency. Black was the most frequent color listed: it appears 12 times. It is followed by white, which was the color of seven garments. Yellow and sour cherry are both given four times for the color of clothes. There are three additional colors that occur more than once: body color (three times), blue and grey twice. According to the list, Catherine had one article of clothing in each of the following colors: sea, carnation, blackberry, parrot, lavender flower, peach blossom, and royal purple. One of her petticoats is described in the list as “green atlas of black color.”44 The distribution of her garments’ colors is depicted in Plate 34 (right). The color of the lining is given only in a few cases. A coat (suba) of cut velvet was lined with black velvet; a floral-patterned ash-color atlas cloak trimmed with gold and silver was lined with sea-color velvet; a shorter coat (kis suba) of cherry-color velvet, embroidered with gold and silver threads, was lined with marten fur. Table 12.5 shows the distribution of colors in the textiles measured by the ell. The data can also be seen in Plate 35. Altogether 137.75 ells of textiles were white, which makes it the most frequent color. This amount is more than twice the length of the yellow materials, ranking second (52.875 ells). Catherine had similar quantities of red(49.125) and blackberry-colored textiles (47.125). These colors are followed by hair, sea, carnation, and peach blossom. Less than 20 ells of material was recorded in each of the remaining colors. It is noteworthy that green appears only among these (11 ells). Blue is the last color listed in Table 12.5. However, its shades (sea and blackberry) are in the top ten. The three pieces of taffeta measured by the bolt were in three colors: nine bolts were white, seven bolts were red, and one bolt was yellow. 210

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Table 12.4

Distribution of colors in Catherine of Brandenburg’s clothes Color

Quantity

1

black

12

2

white

7

3

yellow

4

4

not specified

4

5

sour cherry

4

6

body

3

7

blue

2

8

ash

2

9

sea

1

10

carnation

1

11

blackberry

1

12

parrot

1

13

lavender flower

1

14

royal purple

1

15

black, green

1

16

peach blossom

1

The number of clothes and textiles discussed above that belonged to Catherine is much fewer than that of Bethlen’s, previously examined. Nevertheless, it is worth making a comparison in terms of color. There is a striking difference in the dominant colors used by the two successive rulers and their courts. Plate 34 shows a comparison of the colors of their clothes. The dominant color of Bethlen’s garments was red and its shades (Table 12.3). The three most frequent colors were vivid shades of red: sour cherry, red, and royal purple, in this order. In contrast to her late husband’s color preferences, red and its shades are not even in the top three among the colors of Catherine’s clothes (Table 12.4). The most frequent color in the list of her clothes is black. Her mourning after the death of her husband is a possible explanation. White, the counterpart of black, is in second place in the case of Catherine’s clothes and eighth in the case of Gabriel’s. Looking at the list of the colors of the two rulers’ clothes sorted by their frequency, one can conclude that while Bethlen’s wardrobe shows a preference for bright colors in general, Catherine wore rather pale tones. A similar conclusion can be drawn in comparing the colors of the textiles most probably used for clothing their court attendants. According to the Account Book the colors of the textiles bought for Bethlen’s court were predominantly red and its shades (Table 12.1). In Catherine’s environment red was less dominant, while white, black, and blue were used often (Table 12.5). 211

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Table 12.5

Colors of textiles in the court of Catherine of Brandenburg Color

Quantity (ells)

1

white

137.75

2

yellow

52.875

3

red

49.125

4

blackberry

47.125

5

black

41.5

6

hair

40.5

7

sea

36.5

8

carnation

26.5

9

peach blossom

10

cherry

16.125

11

parrot

15.5

12

green, red, and other

15

13

blackberry, gold

12

20

14

green

15

black, green

10.75

11

16

ash

6.25

17

silver

18

royal purple

19

blue

5 3.25 3

It is remarkable that the above tendencies are also reflected in the preserved clothes of the two rulers. Both garments are made of a velvet material. The colors, however, are different: Catherine’s gown is dark blue (Plate 31), while the mente of Bethlen is vivid red (Plate 32). Both are richly decorated with gold and silver embroidery.

Conclusion Colors were extremely important at court in early modern Transylvania. Indeed, the price of textiles depended not only on their type and quality but also on their color. The upper class could afford to choose from a greater assortment of colors and dressed more colorfully than their subordinates. An abundance of polychromatic clothes was characteristic of Prince Gabriel Bethlen’s court. In fact, the diversity of terms describing color used in the sources shows just how vibrant court attire was in early modern Transylvania. 212

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The great variety of textiles listed in the Account Book of Gabriel Bethlen made it possible for me to study in detail the colors of fabrics that were used to clothe members of the court. I found that the measurement units of different-quality textiles in which the textiles were bought could be used as a basis for classification. Those materials that were measured by the ell were typically better-quality fabrics, intended for wardrobes of the elite, while those measured by the bolt (one bolt is approximately 50 ells) were of lower quality. I therefore treated textiles measured by the ell separately from those measured by the bolt in all of my analyses. My analysis of price regulations shows that color differentiation also affected the price of textiles. Different shades of red were usually more valuable than other colors. The Account Book implies a wider range of colors available in the case of superiorquality textiles than those of lesser quality. In the first case, red and its shades were dominant among the great variety of colors worn, while textiles measured by the bolt, usually reserved for the lesser-grade fabrics, show much less variety, blue being the most frequent color. These lower-quality fabrics, intended for garments of the lower classes, allowed fewer choices in the expression of taste and preference by their proposed owners. My study of the textiles listed in the Account Book not only strengthens this general opinion but also quantifiably demonstrates that red and its various shades were the most widespread colors among the Transylvanian elite. Bethlen’s garments listed in his Last Will show a similar abundance of colors as the above-mentioned higher-quality textiles. The Prince made use of the entire color palette, often displaying two different colors within one coat; the outside color of the garments and the lining were usually different. Some of these color combinations would seem extreme today. The dominance of red and its shades, however, is conspicuous. It can be safely stated that red was most probably Bethlen’s favorite color. The few surviving personal items of the Prince corroborate this statement. His taste was very likely to have influenced the clothing of his subjects and fashion in the princely court. Two short lists containing clothes and textiles that belonged to Catherine of Brandenburg provided data for me to study her use of color in detail. The fabrics from which Catherine’s clothes were made were the same as those of her husband Gabriel. The colors of her garments, however, differed greatly from those typical of her husband’s attire. While Bethlen liked vivid shades of red, Catherine preferred less showy colors, most often black or white.

Notes 1. For the history of Transylvania: Ladislas Makkai, Histoire de Transylvanie (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1946); Peter F. Sugar, “The Principality of Transylvania,” in A History of Hungary, ed. Peter F. Sugar (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 121– 37; Katalin Péter, “The Golden Age of the Principality,” in History of Transylvania, ed. Béla Köpeczi (Boulder CO and New York: Social Science Monographs, 2002), vol. 2, 1–230. 2. On the reign of Bethlen: Barna Mezey, Government of the Transylvanian State in the Seventeenth Century. Princely Power during the Reign of Gábor Bethlen (Budapest: ELTE, Department of Hungarian State and Legal History, 1991), 1–20; Graeme Murdock, “‘Freely Elected in Fear’: Princely Elections

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and Political Power in Early Modern Transylvania,” Journal of Early Modern History 7, 3–4 (2003): 213–44; Péter, “The Golden Age.” 3. For the reign of Catherine of Brandenburg: Judit Bánki, “Brandenburgi Katalin az Erdélyi Fejedelemségben” [Catherine of Brandenburg in the Principality of Transylvania], Történelmi Szemle 36 (1994): 311–26; Éva Deák, “‘Princess non Principissa’: Catherine of Brandenburg, Elected Prince of Transylvania,” in The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe, eds Anne J. Cruz and Mihoko Suzuki (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 80–99; F.R. Krones, “Katharina von Brandenburg-Preussen als Fürstin Siebenbürgens 1626–1631,” Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Geschichte, Kultur-, Literatur- und Kunstgeschichte 1 (1884): 334–58; Róza Novák, Brandenburgi Katalin (Kolozsvár (Rumania): 1903); Ágoston Ötvös, “Brandenburgi Katalin fejedelemsége” [The Rulership of Catherine of Brandenburg], Akadémiai Értesítő 2, 2 (1861): 153–244; Georg Schuster, “Eine brandenburgische Prinzessin auf dem siebenbürgischen Fürstenthrone,” Hohenzollern-Jahrbuch (1901): 121–36. 4. Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). 5. On the court of Gabriel Bethlen: Bethlen Gábor emlékezete [In Memory of Gabriel Bethlen], ed. László Makkai (Budapest: Európa Könyvkiadó, 1980), 437–540; Horst Fassel, “Der Fürstenhof von Weißenburg (Alba Iulia) und seine Bedeutung für Wissenschaft und Kunst in Siebenbürgen zur Zeit Gabriel Bethlens,” in Europäische Hofkultur im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, eds August Buck et al. (Hamburg: Dr Ernst Hauswedell & Co., 1981), vol. 3, 637–45. 6. Béla Radvánszky, ed., Bethlen Gábor fejedelem udvartartása [The Household of Gabriel Bethlen] (Budapest: Athenaeum, 1888). 7. Sándor Szilágyi, ed., Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek. Monumenta comitialia regni Transsylvaniae 1540– 1699, 21 vols (Budapest: MTA, 1875–98), vol. 8, 273–302; 326–54; 378–418; 434–80. 8. Ibid., 350–53. 9. Manuscript Collection of the National Széchényi Library, Fol. Hung. 67; Radvánszky, Bethlen Gábor fejedelem udvartartása, 1–157. 10. József Koncz, ed., Bethlen Gábor fejedelem végrendelete [The Last Will and Testament of Prince Gabriel Bethlen], offprint from Erdélyi Híradó (Marosvásárhely: Református Főtanoda, 1878). 11. József Horváth, “Egy végrendeletkutató tapasztalataiból” [Research Experiences on Last Wills], in Vera (nem csak) a városban. Tanulmányok a 65 éves Bácskai Vera tiszteletére. Rendi társadalom—polgári társadalom. Supplementum [Vera (Not Only) in the City. Essays in Honour of Vera Bácskai at 65], ed. László Á. Varga (Debrecen: Csokonai Kiadó, 1995), 439. 12. István Bogdán, Magyarországi hossz- és földmértékek a 16. század végéig [Measurement Units of Length and Land up to the End of the Sixteenth Century in Hungary] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1978), 114–17; István Bogdán, Magyarországi hossz- és földmértékek 1601–1874 [Measurement Units of Length and Land in Hungary 1601–1874] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1990), 189–90. 13. Ibid., 215–18. 14. Szilágyi, Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 8, 349–53, 379–87, 435–41. 15. Veronica Gervers, The Influence of Ottoman Turkish Textiles and Costume in Eastern Europe, with Particular Reference to Hungary (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1982); Alice Gáborján, “Les éléments orientaux dans le costume hongrois,” in Association pour l’Etude et la Documentation des Textiles d’Asie, Symposium 1985 (Paris: AEDTA, 1986), 40–53; Irena Turnau, History of Dress in Central and Eastern Europe from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century, trans. Izabela Szymanska (Warsaw: Institute of the History of Material Culture, Polish Academy of Sciences, 1991). 16. István György Tóth, “Hungarian Costumes and New Fashions: Men’s and Women’s Clothing,” in A Cultural History of Hungary: From the Beginnings to the Eighteenth Century, ed. László Kósa (Budapest:

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Corvina/Osiris, 1999), 167–77; Anna Ridovics, ed., A szépség dícsérete. 16–17. századi magyar főúri öltözködés és kultúra [The Praise of Beauty. Costumes and Habits of Hungarian Aristocracy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries] (Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum, 2001). 17. Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red (London: Black Swan, 2006), 40–41; Antonina Licatese, “Stoff- und Seidenbezeichnungen im mittelalterlichen Italien,” PhD diss. (Saarbrücken: Universität des Saarlandes, 1989), 297; John H. Munro, “The Medieval Scarlet and the Economics of Sartorial Splendour,” in Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe: Essays in Memory of Professor E.M. Carus-Wilson, eds N.B. Harte and K.G. Ponting (London: Heinemann and The Pasold Research Fund, 1983), vol. 2, 14. 18. Szilágyi, Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 8, 437–38. 19. Walter G. Endrei, “English Kersey in Eastern Europe with Special Reference to Hungary,” Textile History 5 (1974): 91; Zsigmond Pál Pach, “The Shifting of International Trade Routes in the Fifteenth– Seventeenth Centuries,” in Hungary and the European Economy in Early Modern Times (Aldershot: Variorum; Brookfield VT: Ashgate, 1994), 287–319; Zsigmond Pál Pach, “The Role of East-Central Europe in International Trade (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries),” in Pach, Hungary and the European Economy, 217–64; György Székely, “A németalföldi és az angol posztó fajtáinak elterjedése a XIII–XVII. századi Közép-Európában” [The Spread of Netherlandish and English Broadcloth Types in Central Europe in the Thirteenth–Seventeenth Centuries], Századok 102, 1–2 (1968): 3–34. 20. On the patterns of embroideries: Gertrúd Palotay, Oszmán-török elemek a magyar hímzésben. Les elements turcs-ottomans des broderies Hongroises (Budapest: Magyar Történeti Múzeum, 1940); Mária Varjú-Ember, Hungarian Domestic Embroidery (Budapest: Corvina, 1963); Emőke László, Hungarian Renaissance and Baroque Embroideries. Aristocratic Embroideries on Linen (Budapest: Museum of Applied Arts, 2002). 21. On the history of the goldsmith’s trade and jewelry: Angéla Héjjné Détári, Régi magyar ékszerek [Old Hungarian Jewelry] (Budapest, Corvina, 1976); Erika Kiss, Udvari ötvösség a 17. században a Királyi Magyarországon és az Erdélyi Fejedelemségben. Ph.D. értekezés [Goldsmith’s Trade in the Courts of Royal Hungary and the Principality of Transylvania in the Seventeenth Century, PhD diss.] (Budapest: ELTE BTK Művészettörténeti Doktori Iskola, 2001). 22. Edward Brown, A brief account of some travels in Hungaria, Servia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thessaly, Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Friuli (London: T.R. for Benjamin Tooke, 1673), 22. 23. Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 326. 24. Fernand Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, vol. 1, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible (London: Collins/Fontana, 1988), 317–18; Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 365–90; Laura Jogig, Black in Fashion. Mourning to Night (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2008), 14–15; Michel Pastoureau, Black. The History of a Color, trans. Jody Gladding (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), 100–105; Francoise Piponnier and Perrine Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages, trans. Caroline Beamish (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 73. 25. Leslie B. Barratt and Miklós Kontra, “Matching Hungarian and English Color Terms,” International Journal of Lexicography 9, 2 (1996): 102–17. 26. Michel Pastoureau, “Une histoire des couleurs est-elle possible?” Ethnologie française 20, 4 (1990): 368–77. 27. “Szerelmes Orsikám …” A Nádasdyak és Szegedi Kőrös Gáspár levelezése [“My Beloved Orsika …” The Correspondence of the Nádasdy Family and Gáspár Szegedi Kőrös], ed. Tivadar Vida (Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1988), 214. 28. Ágnes De Bie-Kerékjártó, “A vörös színnév használata a magyarban” [The Usage of the Color Word Vörös in Hungarian], in Ünnepi kötet Honti László tiszteletére, eds Marianne Bakró-Nagy and

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Károly Rédei (Budapest: MTA, 2003), 67–79; Mari Uusküla and Urmas Sutrop, “The Puzzle of Two Terms for Red in Hungarian,” in Rara and Rarissima: Documenting the Fringes of Linguistic Diversity, eds Jan Wohlgemuth and Michael Cysouw (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 2010), 359– 76; Robert E. MacLaury et al., “Hungarian Piros and Vörös: Color from Points of View,” Semiotica 114, 1–2 (1997): 67–82. 29. Lilla Tompos, “The Symbolic Meaning of Red in Seventeenth-Century Clothing,” in Conserving Textiles: Studies in Honour of Ágnes Timár-Balázsy, ed. István Éri (Rome: ICCROM, 2009), 173–81; Mária Varjú-Ember, Old Textiles: The Treasures of the Hungarian National Museum, trans. Veronica Garami-Burger (Budapest: Corvina Kiadó, 1980). 30. Attila T. Szabó, ed., Erdélyi magyar szótörténeti tár [Etymological Dictionary of Transylvanian Hungarian] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó; Bukarest: Kriterion, 1993), vol. 6, 950. 31. This statement is based on a simple search statistic by google.com (26 August 2011). 32. Michel Pastoureau, Blue. The History of a Color, trans. Markus I. Cruse (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 63–64; Piponnier and Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages, 16–17; Jane Schneider, “Peacocks and Penguins: Political Economy of Clothing and Colors in Europe,” American Ethnologist 5 (1978): 419–21. 33. Jon Thompson, Silk: Thirteenth to Eighteenth Centuries. Treasures from the Museum of Islamic Art, Quatar (Doha: National Council for Culture, Arts, and Heritage, 2004), 44. 34. Szilágyi, Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 8, 273–302; 326–54; 378–418; 434–80. 35. Ibid., 435. 36. Fairchild’s Dictionary of Textiles, ed. Phyllis G. Tortora (New York: Fairchild, 2005), 1. 37. János B. Szabó and Győző Somogyi, Az erdélyi fejedelemség hadserege [The Army of the Principality of Transylvania] (Budapest: Zrínyi Kiadó, 1996), 36–42. 38. Piponnier and Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages, 17. 39. Radvánszky, Bethlen Gábor fejedelem udvartartása, 252–62. 40. Although 20 kaftans were enlisted amongst the “Clothes of the Princess,” she certainly did not wear them; that is why these were omitted from the following analysis. Although we have numerous inventories of Hungarian and Transylvanian magnates listing Turkish kaftans, the question remains if they were actually worn. See Gervers, The Influence of Ottoman Turkish Textiles, 12–18; Zsuzsa Kakuk, Cultural Words from the Turkish Occupation of Hungary (Budapest: ELTE, 1977), 54. 41. Radvánszky, Bethlen Gábor fejedelem udvartartása, 278–96, 328–32, 332–40, 345–50, 351–54, 356–57, 358–63, 368–72, 372–74, 374–87. 42. Ibid., 268–70, 270–71, 278–96, 298–301, 328–32. 43. Ibid., 270–71. 44. Ibid., 256.

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13 The Evolution of Blackface Cosmetics on the Early Modern Stage Richard Blunt

Historical scholarship reveals a long history of the transformation of white actors into blackened characters, and entertainments from as early as the sixth century continuing through the seventeenth century (mystery plays, miracle plays, morality plays, masques, mummings, pageants, and cycle plays) have a history of black-faced characters.1 Over these eleven centuries, however, the meaning of a blackened face onstage changed. The early black character simply needed a suggestion of otherness, a simple, symbolic storytelling device. During the Renaissance, as Moorish characters became more popular, characterizations became more sophisticated, and more was demanded of the makeup to satisfy the illusion that must be created to tell a story of a black person to an audience. The early black-faced character generally did not represent a person who was a different race, but rather, otherness in the form of the devil, damnation, or folly. Virginia Mason Vaughan explains: The performance practice of “blacking up” thrived in religious pageants of the Middle Ages as a simple way of discriminating evil from good. Cycle and morality plays set up oppositions between black and white, damnation and salvation, evil from good. Until the latter half of the sixteenth century when the cycle plays were repressed, generations of Englishmen and women enjoyed the yearly ritual of watching good angels pitted against bad angels at the feast of Corpus Christi and other festivals.2

The good angels were white, and the bad angels were black, and the black coloring connected to the fires of hell that would burn someone black.3 This type of representation also signified folly or falling from grace. Such a fall from the light of reason left devils and damned individuals black. Until the 1580s, the black character was simply a visual representation of evil. During the late sixteenth century, however, a transformation took place that textually distinguished blackened characters (like Wit and Ignorance) from Moorish characters 217

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(like Othello). One represents damnation or folly and a way of looking at good versus evil, and the second was a representation of a multidimensional person. As Vaughan points out: To be sure, devils sometimes spoke in medieval cycle plays, but their speech acts were limited … In the 1580’s and early 90’s a crucial shift took place from the simple display of blackened devils and Moorish kings to the white actor’s impersonation of black characters who were meant to be imagined as human being from the exotic and dangerous regions of sub-Saharan Africa.4

However, this shift from representative display to speaking characters did not erase the centuries of precedence. Early modern audiences would certainly have recognized the color coding of characters and their implied significance. Another example of the function and meaning of the early blackened character came in the outdoor pageants, when the blackened character was a “grotesque character that rode or walked at the head of the procession to clear a way through the crowd, often with the use of fireworks.”5 This type of representation, dated 1522, was of the “boogeyman,” something to get the audience’s attention. Many times, the black-faced characters in medieval dramas were the characters of Satan, Lucifer, Wit and Ignorance. Sixty years after the “boogeyman” appearances, in 1585, the role of presenter of the pageant had been redefined. Now the blackened character was described as “he that rid before the Pageant, appareled like a Moor.”6 He no longer carried fireworks, but announced the beginning of the pageant. By this time, plays and other entertainments also began to include characters described as Moors, an ambiguous term meaning a person from an exotic place (that is, Africa, Morocco) or a person of color. The most famous theatrical Moor, Othello, is a multidimensional character, not a character that symbolizes damnation, folly, or the devil. Somehow, between 1522 and 1604, when Shakespeare wrote Othello, the meaning and representation of a black-faced character changed. London’s population at the turn of the seventeenth century was around 200,000;7 and, according to Robert Hornback, by Shakespeare’s lifetime there were “probably several thousand black people in London, forming a significant minority of the population.”8 England’s growth allowed playwrights the opportunity to see people from other cultures and introduce Moorish characters to the public stage. Elliot H. Tokson lists 23 plays between 1588 and 1637 where Moors or characters disguised as Moors appear9 (see Appendix 2). As Moorish characters developed, the makeup that represented them on stage became more sophisticated. The first recorded appearance of a black-faced character is a King at the scene of Christ’s birth, showing the birth of Christ as “a gift to ALL nations,”10 but by the medieval period a black face was synonymous with damnation. By the Renaissance, blackened characters often acted as a shorthand for the exotic and/or a foreign race of people. While the long history of blackening actors on the stage warrants its own exploration, this project sets out to understand the theatrical methods of blackening the face that performers used during the Renaissance, and discover if a link exists between the physical representation and the meaning of that representation onstage. Cultural historians have researched Renaissance blackface methods; however, that research has not extensively investigated how and why the medieval blackened 218

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character evolved into the early modern representation of blackened characters nor the physical practices and recipes involved in creating these varied blackface characters. Further, little attention has been paid to the specific staging challenges that occur while wearing makeup. These challenges include the application and removal of makeup on stage during a scene, as well as certain physical requirements such as not transferring makeup onto a costume or a fellow actor. Visual evidence of blackened characters on stage exists in two drawings from the Renaissance. Both are rather famous depictions, but neither reveal what method of Renaissance blackface makeup was used nor what it looked like on stage. The first picture, attributed to Henry Peacham (1595), depicts a scene from Titus Andronicus.11 Peacham, a scholar, was best known for his book The Compleat Gentleman, written in 1622.12 He colors the character of Aaron the Moor in his picture black. The text of the play says Aaron is black. Lines such as “Aaron will have a soul, black like his face”13 and “… we can kill a fly that comes in likeness of a coal-black Moor”14 support the assumptions that the actor playing Aaron wore makeup that colored his skin; however, the drawing gives no indication of what method the company used to blacken Aaron or even if the actor appeared blackened on stage at all.15 Peacham may not have seen a stage production, but only read or heard about the play. Therefore, the picture on its own does not prove the existence of white actors in blackface. The other surviving drawing, a costume rendering by Inigo Jones, depicts the character of the Queen of Niger,16 from a Ben Jonson masque titled “The Masque of Blackness.” Historical records reveal that in 1605, Queen Anne, wife of James I, appeared as the Queen of Niger, and a contemporary review of Jonson’s masque by Sir Dudley Carleton confirms not only the popularity of the masque but also that Queen Anne appeared painted as a Moor.17 Although no one knows what Queen Anne wore as makeup during her appearance, Jones’s drawing gives a possible visual representation of what she might have looked like. Further, Carleton writes: “The Nymphs had a bright blue gown, skirts striped with yellow and gold, a white petticoat, blue stockings, and golden shoes.”18 The image Carleton paints concurs with Jones’s picture and both indicate the Queen was painted black. From the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, actors used many methods to create the illusion of a black character, such as wigs, wooden masks, velvet fabric worn on the face, leggings with hair attached, along with makeup. In some cases, costuming alone could represent a blackened character. In his book The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, Andrew Gurr explains that many clues could inform an audience of the action on the stage. For example, if a character appeared in riding boots, the assumption would be that the character had been riding.19 Actors counted on the audience’s process of association to interpret their characters. In the case of Moors, costume pieces or props could inform an audience that a character was a Moor. For example, the audience associated turbans and exotic weapons such as scimitars with Middle Eastern culture. Contemporary accounts document these methods, and Renaissance authors embed the directions for them within their texts. Stage directions such as: “Enter Orlando with a scarf before his face”20 and “A box of black painting”21 both answer questions about how the illusion was carried out on stage. Wearing something on the face to represent 219

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color instead of makeup solved some of the problems. The use of a fabric to create the illusion could be the simplest transformation for a white actor because discarding the mask would be an easy exit out of the costume. For example, in Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso, Orlando enters disguised as a Moor, but must shed this disguise on stage after a fight with Oger; therefore, “Enter Orlando with a scarfe before his face.”22 Covering one’s face with a scarf hardly creates the most realistic simulation of darkened skin, but, in Orlando Furioso, the expediency of the reveal outweighs an accurate simulation of skin color. Scarves were just one way to simulate the illusion of blackness, and fabric, wooden, or leather masks gained some popularity because they could be form-fit to the face better than a scarf. Two different kinds of masks could represent blackened characters. One way for participants in masques to appear black would be to wear fabric over their faces, which would create a similar type of illusion as the scarf in Greene’s play. The masks were a lightweight fabric, black in color, wrapped on the head and face.23 As early as 1510, records of Henry VIII appearing in masques described by Edward Hall report “the torchebearers were appareyled in Crymosyn satyne and grene, lyke Moreskoes, their faces blacke.”24 Hall goes on to describe that “their heads rouled in plesauntes and typpers lyke the Egipcians, embroidered with gold. Their faces, neckes, armes and handes, covered with fine plesaunce blacke.”25 In his book Othello’s Countrymen, Eldred Jones cites accounts from 1547 and 1559 listing black velvet as one of the standard materials used to blacken actors.26 Along with covering the face, actors used gloves and stockings, usually made of leather, to cover other body parts,27 making these costumes hot to dance in and unconvincing in close proximity.28 The desire for spectacle drove the writing and performing of masques, and, though the elaborate costume design would be hard on the wearer temperature-wise, the advantage would have been the obviousness of the black character. This representation could be what Peacham’s drawing depicts. Another type of mask appears in Italy’s commedia dell’arte tradition. Randle Holme describes the mask as: “convex to cover the Face in all part, with an out-let for the nose, and 2 holes for the eyes, with a slit for the mouth to let the air & breath come in and out. It is generally made of Leather, and covered with black Velvet.”29 Holme continues “this kind of Mask is taken off and put on in a moment of time, being only held in the teeth by means of a round bead fastned on the in-side over against the mouth.”30 The round bead Holme mentions limited an actor’s speech; hence, the actor wearing this type of mask would have to play a non-speaking or a limited speaking role. Black velvet body coverings could also accompany this type of mask. Besides Hall’s accounts, an inventory from the Rose Playhouse offers an instance of the use of velvet coverings— Phillip Henslowe’s inventory of 1598 contains “Mores lymes.”31 Although these masks were popular for a time during the early modern period, a wooden or fabric mask could not have served the period’s more sophisticated blackened characters as well as makeup, because the actor playing the character would have had to work around muffled speech and limited facial expression. The character that would have worn this type of mask, more likely, would have been a two-dimensional, limitedspeaking Moorish role. By the late sixteenth century, playwrights had begun to write 220

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more detailed and developed Moorish characters. This difference in the playwrights’ construction of Moorish characters led to a corresponding change in the execution of those characters by the actors on stage. Black characters during the Middle Ages represented things such as the devil, damnation, or folly. By the sixteenth century, a black character represented a foreign race of people or a human symbol for the exotic, and actors would physically represent these two black characters in different ways. Renaissance playwrights often classify black-faced characters as Moors. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines a Moor as: 1. … In the Middle Ages, and as late as the seventeenth c., the Moors were commonly supposed to be mostly black or very swarthy (though the existence of “white Moors” was recognized), and hence the word was often used for “Negro”… 2. a muslim, esp. a Muslim inhabitant of India.

Though distinction is drawn between a “blackamoor”32 and a “tawnymoor,”33 with both referencing non-European darker-skinned persons, the OED does not further define “white Moor.” Curiously, playwrights do not always draw a distinction between Moors and blackamoors in their play texts, either. Shakespeare, for example, refers to the character Othello the Moor as only a Moor, but describes the Prince of Morocco, in the Merchant of Venice as a tawnymoor.34 Since text does not always call for a specific type of Moor, in unclear cases, actors had to make choices about what type of Moor they would present on stage and what method of blackening they would use. Although each play containing a blackened character had similar challenges, each play had individual demands affecting the method that created the illusion. It seems that the representation of race began playing a role somewhere around the time of Shakespeare’s early plays, although how the audience interpreted a blackened face in medieval drama carried over into the racial representation of Moors on stage. Each play’s individual demands for a character affected which method of disguise or representation actors used and later plays require the use of makeup instead of masks. In Lust’s Dominion (1600), a scene portrays the murder of Zarack and Baltazar, both Moors, by Philip and Hortenzo.35 In order to conceal their identities, Isabel tells them to disguise themselves to look like slain men: “Once rob the dead, put the Moors habits on, and paint your faces with the oil of hell, so waiting on the Tyrant.”36 Oil of hell, clearly, does not refer to a mask. Further, some plays require actors to apply black makeup on stage. In Richard Brome’s The English Moor (1637), one character, Quicksands, must apply makeup to a fellow actor, Millicent, while performing the scene. As Quicksands applies the paint, he gives a monologue describing the substance he uses to paint Millicent’s face: “Take pleasure in the scent first; smell to’t fearlessly, / And taste my care in that, how comfortable / ’Tis to the nostril, and no foe to feature …”37 This suggests that the smell of substances that early modern productions used to create blackface might, in some cases, be unpleasant. Quicksands’ monologue continues with clues about the mixture. … Oh let me kiss ye Before I part with you—now Jewel up Into your Ebon casket. And those eyes,

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Those sparkling eyes, that send forth modest anger To sindge the hand of so unkind a Painter, And make me pull’t away and spoyle my work, They will look streight like Diamonds, set in lead … 38

Quicksands describes how her eyes will look bright behind her new black skin. He calls himself a painter, which indicates that he is using a liquid, rather than a powder. The word “Ebon” suggests precisely the color of the mixture. During the medieval period, performers most commonly used soot to blacken their faces because this “makeup” cost nothing and was readily available. Sebastian Brandt in his book Ship of Fools (1495) mentions soot-faced masquers,39 and Newfoundland mummers performing as recently as the mid-twentieth century record using late medieval makeup techniques including burnt cork and stove-blackening.40 Reports of “smoked faces”41 and descriptive words like “collier”42 and “chimney sweepers black”43 all give the impression of the type of substance (soot and charcoal) that would have blackened actor faces in the medieval period. As in medieval plays, the “Wit” plays did not focus on realism to give the audience the story of the blackened character. The three extant “Wit” plays—John Redford’s Play of Wit and Science (1534), Sebastian Westcott’s The Marriage of Wit and Science (1534), and Francis Merbury’s Renaissance play The Marriage Between Wit and Wisdom (1579)—all contain a blackened character who, like many of the era, represents the personification of an idea. In Redford’s play, the character of Wit is painted black, and while painted, he is mistaken for Ignorance when Science and Experience encounter him in blackface:44 SCIENCE: EXPER.: SCIENCE: EXPER.: SCIENCE: WYT:

Who is this? Ingnorance, or his lykenes. What, the common foole? Yt is much lyke hym By my soothe, his toong servth him now trym! What sayst thow, Ingnorance? Speak again! Nay, ladye, I am not Ingnorance, playne, But I am you owne deere lover, Wytt.45

After Science and Experience exit, Wit looks in his mirror or “glass of reason” and discovers his blackness;46 therefore, the character of Ignorance must have been blackened the entire play to be confused with the black-faced Wit. This scene is an example of a playwright linking blackness with ignorance. In Merbury’s 1579 play, the character of Wantonness paints Wit’s face black47 while he is asleep in her lap and Idleness then steals his money. The character of Good Nature wakes up Wit and tells him he has been made a fool, his fall into folly represented by his newly blackened face. While blackening Wit’s face, Wantonness sings “and now of a scholar / I will make him a collier.” Collier is another word for coal miner, suggesting that Wit looked like he had coal on his face. The jet-black color that soot leaves on the face gives an example of how the early blackened character, representing the devil, damnation, or folly, would have looked. Soot easily smears on and off the skin; for this reason, soot was likely used in the “Wit” plays because only eight lines later Wit washes 222

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his face clean on stage. Soot, however, lack durability and requires any actor wearing it to limit physical interaction because it could smudge easily onto others. At no point during the play does Wit think he has been turned into a Moor, nor does anyone mention the word “Moor.” Medieval texts do not use the word “Moor”; it first appears in the Renaissance. The words used to describe blackened characters and the makeup used to create them change alongside the types of blackened characters being written and performed. While medieval scarves, masks, and soot applications were generally a true black, Renaissance makeup is a more realistic brown. When the text shifted from a black character as an archetype to a representation of a race, the makeup likely shifted from black to include shades of brown. The social changes caused a change in the way playwrights wrote their plays, evident in the more sophisticated representation of a race of people, and the color shift reflects the textual shift caused by the social changes. Generally speaking, Renaissance plays contain more highly developed characters than the emblematic ones seen in medieval plays; and more detailed and specific characters require a higher level of verisimilitude when wearing makeup. Correspondingly, the recipes extant from the Renaissance are more sophisticated than the basic substances used to blacken faces in the medieval period. Two brown-face makeup recipes have survived from the Renaissance. By 1605, Ben Jonson’s “The Masque of Blackness” set a new standard for a natural look for the representation of a Moor on stage.48 This new natural look centered on the use of paint, not masks or soot. Because Queen Anne wanted to dress as a Moor and played the role of the Queen of Niger, many reports of this unusual evening have survived as well. Sir Dudley Carleton reports that instead of Vizzards, their Faces and Arms up to the Elbows, were painted black, which was Disguise sufficient, for they were hard to be known; but it became them nothing so well as their red and white, and you cannot imagine a more ugly Sight, then a Troop of lean-cheek’d Moors.49

While Carleton’s review reflects a cultural stigma attached to the blackface worn by Queen Anne and her attendants, it does reveal that they were painted black for the performance. Carleton also reports that a Spaniard kissed the hand of the blackened Queen, “He took out the Queen, and forgot not to kiss her Hand, though there was a Danger it would have left a Mark on his Lips.”50 Carleton observes the kiss and acknowledges a risk. He thought the makeup on the Queen’s hand could potentially smudge onto the Spaniard’s lips and his concern suggests the audience’s curiosity over the makeup’s durability. If the makeup had smudged, it could have interrupted the masque and created an embarrassing moment for the Spaniard. The makeup likely did not smudge, since Carleton’s report only includes the possibility, and this reveals the durability of blackface makeup by the early seventeenth century. Although no one knows what recipe was used for that masque, Jonson includes a recipe in an epilogue of another masque called “The Gypsy Metamorphosed” (1612). In this masque the gypsies were painted. The complete recipe reads: “To change your complexion / With the noble confection, / Of walnuts and hogs grease / Better than dogs grease.”51 Jonson’s recipe, however, is not the only surviving recipe from the Renaissance 223

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for painting the face. The second comes from a book written by Johann Jacob Wecker titled Cosmeticks or, the Beautifying Part of Physick. Wecker’s book is published in 1660, although he died in 1586. Wecker’s book contains over five hundred recipes, one of which reads: With chymical Instruments extract a most clear water, from green Walnut-shells and Gaules; with which if you wet the face or hands, they grow black by degrees, like to an Ethiopian; which if afterwards you would restore their former whiteness, you must distill vinegar, juice of lemons and colophonia, and washings with that will take off the blackeness.52

The OED defines “Gaules” as “An excrescence produced on trees, especially the oak, by the action of insects, chiefly of the genus cynips. Oak-galls are largely used in the manufacture of ink and tannin, as well as in dyeing and in medicine.” Colophonia, used for taking off this concoction, is defined as “a dark or amber-coloured resin obtained by distilling turpentine with water.” Another listing for 1694 reads: “In the shops colophony is the rezine of the fir-tree boiled.” The recipe suggests that the walnut will stain the skin and only wash off with the properly concocted serum. A walnut stain would solve all staging problems because actors would not have to worry about smearing or smudging. In Jonson’s recipe the hog’s grease would prevent the staining of the skin. Both of these recipes use walnut for the pigment, which appears brown on an actor’s skin. The color of the walnut pigmentation, therefore, marks a change in the representation between the medieval black character and the brown Renaissance character. In order to make a paste of walnut juice from Jonson and Wecker’s recipes, break open four walnuts (not directly from the tree, but ones that have fallen off and are turning black on the outside) and place the husk and walnut shell into a pan of water. The black juice inside the walnut husk will turn the water black. Boil the mixture to remove as much water as possible, leaving a chunky black liquid. Strain this mixture using cheesecloth or a cotton T-shirt, and place the strained black liquid into an uncovered container for a day, letting the remaining water evaporate out to leave a black paste. When applied, the black paste dries to the skin and appears brown. This process creates a makeup of better color and durability than soot, and one which is less susceptible to rubbing off while remaining water-soluble. This recipe makes the skin appear brown on stage, and also increases the number of shades of brown possible. It can be applied heavily to appear darker brown, or applied lighter to show a tanned or tawny look. Application was not the only challenge: makeup had to either wash off easily or not wash off at all. Sir William Berkley’s play The Lost Lady (1638) has a scene in which the paint is taken off on the stage. Acanthe, disguised as a Moor throughout the play, faints, and has to be revived with water. During this process, the paint washes off, and reveals her identity: ACANTHE [disguised]: I feel Death entering me; IRENE: Help, help, she dies. LYSICLES: If it be possible, call life into her for some minutes, For full confession will obsolve my justice. IRENE: Bring some water here, she does but swoon:

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HERMIONE:

Enter PHILLIDA with a towel So chafe her Temples, –– Oh Heavens! What prodigy Is here! Her blackness falls away: My Lord, look on This miracle, doth not Heaven instruct in pity Of her wrongs, that hid her purer form. Heaven hath some further end in this Than we can pierce: More water, she returns to life, And all the blackness of her face is gone.53

Because the text indicates that the color washes off, the walnut paste becomes the perfect option for the illusion because it is water-soluble. As the character of the Moor developed, the evolution of color shades contributed to the illusion carried out on stage. The following scene from The English Moor focuses on representing the otherness of a darker-skinned person. The appearance of the actor with makeup does not reveal a metaphorical loss of reason, but the representation of a Moor. The representation differs from earlier plays because of the textual recognition of race and breaks from the binary code used in medieval dramas by using brown pigment. In this scene, the character of Quicksands disguises his betrothed wife, Millicent, to hide her from other suitors. MILLICENT:

Come to the point. What’s the disguise, I pray you. That of a Moor? The blackamore you spake of ? Would you make An Negro of me. QUICKSANDS: You have past your word, You’ll wear what shape I please. Now this shall both Kill vain attempts in me, and guard your honor. After this tincture’s laid upon thy face, ’Twil cool their kidneys and allay their heats. MILLICENT: Bless me! You fright me, Sir. Would you blot out Heaven’s workmanship? QUICKSANDS: Why think’st thou, fearful Beauty, Has heaven no part in Egypt? Pray thee tell me, Is not an Ethiopes face his workmanship As well as the fair’st Ladies.54

Quicksands’ questions recognize Moors as God-made creatures, but Brome represents Moors as lower status. Further, when Millicent speaks while disguised, she adds A’s to the ends of some words signifying that Moors do not speak the language well (for example, “Oh no, I darea notta”55 or “Oh no de fine white Zentilmanna Cannot a love a black a thing a”56). Richard Brome’s The English Moor, published in 1637, sharply contrasts Merbury’s 1579 scene, even though in both scenes an actor is painted on stage during the play. This play, performed fifty years later, demonstrates the difference between the early coalblack-faced figure and the Renaissance acknowledgment of racial otherness. By the time this scene was performed in 1637, changes had occurred, specifically with pigment of the makeup being used and textually with the use of the word “Moor.” The changes of color and recognition of race reflects playwrights living in a more multicultural England. Playwrights do not always represent Moors as lower status; Othello as a prime example of the high-status Moor. Although onstage representation was not always 225

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positive, there was a shift to recognize that black color does not equal damnation, cursedness, or stupidity. Othello is one of the examples of a shift in the way Moors were represented on the stage. As characters became more sophisticated, the makeup needed more durability. In The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, Andrew Gurr states that Jonson’s method used in his masque could have been borrowed from the popular theater of the time where a more natural look “would have been required.”57 However, the makeup demands for each play differed greatly. Othello, and characters like him, demand more from the makeup. Othello also becomes the most difficult challenge for the makeup, because of how much time he spends onstage, and the stage action he must perform in Act 5 during Desdemona’s death scene. Othello has to kiss and smother Desdemona, after two hours of acting in makeup. At this time, the makeup will be at its most vulnerable because of sweat and physical wear. Durability becomes the big concern; it is imperative that Othello’s makeup does not rub off onto Desdemona or the bed. What type of makeup will hold up for two hours and still not smear? Egg whites were one of the ingredients often used for white makeup during the Renaissance. Unfortunately, egg whites create a latex-type film over the skin, but the substance is not quite thick enough to hold up against rubbing. Egg yolk is thicker and creates the same type of film on the skin but significant cracking can cause sections of up to an inch (25 millimeters) to flake off. Fourteenth-century painters used tempera, egg white and egg yolk mixed with pigment, to make paint. Tempera can be thinned with water, and this type of mixture allows for various shades. Unlike the other makeups, the egg base suffers only minor cracks when on the skin. Although it may sometimes flake off, it does not smear color onto costumes or other actors, or crack off in large flakes like plain egg yolk. Many scholars believe that during Act 5, scene 2, Othello’s arms and hands would have been covered with sleeves and gloves. 58 This belief may have sprung from the idea that Othello could not have smothered Desdemona without transferring makeup onto her costume and the props. The tempera egg-base works on Othello’s face and hands. Othello could have worn tempera the whole play and painted his arms to the elbows like Queen Anne did in the “Masque of Blackness” without risking flaking or transference.59 Any sweating done by the actor actually helps to keep the mixture’s elasticity. Interestingly, an actor playing a black character did not always need to use makeup or paint to change the color of their skin. One other method of blackening a character is use of costume, as shown in The Merchant of Venice. A stage direction introduces the Prince of Morocco in both Folio and Quarto texts: “Enter Morochus a tawnie Moore all in white, and three or foure followers accordingly, with Portia, Nerrissa, and their traine.”60 In the case of Morocco, he appears all in white and his first line is “Mislike me not for my complexion.”61 Both actors on stage with him at that time are female characters, Portia and Nerissa. If the female characters were wearing white-face makeup, which was the fashion at the time, and the character of Morocco was not wearing makeup at all, he would look tanned. Costuming alone might be able to tell a convincing story of a tawnymoor, especially if Morocco were wearing a scimitar. An exotic weapon from the Middle East would signify to the audience that this was a foreign character. Actors could use makeup, but doing so in this particular play, especially with “three or four followers,” might possibly create a crowded backstage area if everyone had to apply 226

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and remove makeup at the same time. Actors had to decide for each play what method would work the best. Evidence of white actors undergoing a transformation in order to represent black characters exists in play texts, as well as contemporary accounts and drawings, but just because the actors had the ability to use makeup does not mean that it was always the best choice to use it. In some plays, actors needed makeup that washed off onstage; in others, like Othello and Titus Andronicus, they needed blackening that would not smudge the other characters. These varied demands lead to the conclusion that actors had different methods available and used them. Each one of the blackening methods carries its own uses and difficulties. Makeup can became a problem for scenes which include kissing, hugging, stage combat, or other physical contact with other actors on stage; however, costuming may have been too subtle for roles of certain lengths, such as Othello and Aaron, who need to hold an audience’s attention for an entire play rather than just a few scenes. The evolution of these methods developed because of a demand from playwrights who were writing sophisticated Moorish characters. The substance of soot and wooden masks did not provide a level of verisimilitude realistic enough to meet the demands of the Elizabethan audience. Changes occurred in the way playwrights constructed blackened characters as shown by the differences between Merbury’s 1579 scene and Brome’s from 1637. In turn, the methods of executing the illusion of those black characters improved as well, as demonstrated by Berkeley and Shakespeare. This investigation not only shows that the Renaissance actors had the capability to create many different types of illusions that met the varying challenges of Renaissance plays, but it also debunks the myth that Othello, and all other blackened characters in the Renaissance drama, looked like the vaudevillian blackface character. Execution of the extant makeup recipes show that a more natural brown-faced character appeared on the Renaissance stage.

Appendix 1: The Recipes and Instructions SOOT Preparation time: 20 minutes if the wood is already charred. What you need: 1. Mortar and pestle. 2. Charred wood. Procedure: After burning a piece of wood about the size of an adult forearm, break the wood up into nuggets of ash. The easiest size to grind up will be about an inch (25 mm) thick. If there are bigger pieces remaining, break them up so that the pieces you are grinding are small and manageable. 227

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1. Take one of the nuggets and place it into the mortar. 2. Grind with the pestle for about 3–6 minutes or until the wood is a fine soft powder. Remember this powder will be rubbed onto your skin, so the finer the better. Try to make a substance the texture of flour. 3. Remove the powder and place in a separate container. 4. Repeat this process until you have the desired amount of powder. 5. Rub powder directly onto the face. The size of the nuggets of charred wood will dictate how many times you will need to repeat this process. For one adult face you will not need to do this more than five times, making preparation time for this makeup about 20 minutes. Assessment: Make sure the powder does not still have unground pieces of wood in it. If you do not grind the powder fine enough, it could cause small cuts or scratches on the face. In his book A Treatise on the Art of Limning, Nicholas Hilliard gives a detailed description of how the talented painter made his colors. Hilliard would use burnt cherry stones, burnt peach stones, and burnt ivory. Ivory was most likely too expensive for theater companies to use for makeup. Hilliard describes charring these items in a crucible more than once and grinding them after each insertion in the fire. I tried charring cherry and peach stones, but I was never able to create a powder from the grindings. My grindings only yielded a hard, jagged sand, unsuitable to rub directly onto the face. I also experimented with burnt cork, which was a common nineteenth-century blackface makeup. Burnt cork burns fine, which means that it does not need to be ground up like the charred wood. Burnt cork looks like soot, but is a little greasier. Both substances lack durability and will smear off at the smallest amount of physical contact. Burnt cork takes more time to wash off than soot. These two substances are basically interchangeable, in terms of visual effect. Soot takes a little longer to prepare and cork takes a little longer to remove from the face. RENAISSANCE WALNUT RECIPES Makeup is made up of a base and a pigment. The pigment provides the color and the base’s job is to stick to the skin. Johann Jacob Wecker and Ben Jonson both recorded recipes that list walnut or walnut juice providing a pigment for a makeup. This is significant because walnut provides a brown pigment, not black. Jonson’s description reads: “To change your complexion / With the noble confection, / Of walnuts and hogs grease / Better than dogs grease.” Wecker’s description reads: With chymical Instruments extract a most clear water, from green Walnut-shells and Gaules; with which if you wet the face or hands, they grow black by degrees, like to an Ethiopian; which if afterwards you would restore their former whiteness, you must distill vinegar, juice of lemons and colophonia, and washings with that will take off the blackeness.

Both of these recipes are difficult to reproduce. Jonson’s recipe does not include the procedure to create the makeup. The recipe leaves the reader in the dark about many 228

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things, for example how to use the hog’s grease. Wecker’s recipe implies that the mixture will stain the face and can only be removed with the properly concocted serum. My attempts at recreating Wecker’s recipe never yielded a stain. The recipes did provide me with enough information and ingredients to create a recipe using walnuts. HOW TO EXTRACT WALNUT JUICE TO BE USED AS MAKEUP Preparation time: 24–36 hours. What you need: 1. Four walnuts (wait one day before using if you pick the walnuts from the tree, otherwise use any walnut that has fallen to the ground and is turning black). 2. Two cups of water. 3. A piece of cloth to be used as a strainer (a cloth strainer prevents a chunky makeup; I used a cotton T-shirt). 4. A bowl to catch the strained liquid. 5. A saucepan. 6. A rubber band big enough to place over the mouth of the bowl. Procedure: 1. Place the cloth over the mouth of the bowl and use the rubber band to hold the cloth in place at the top of the bowl. 2. Break open the walnuts and place walnut husk and core into saucepan. 3. Add two cups of water. 4. Bring to a boil. 5. The water will begin to evaporate from the pan because of the heat. 6. When about ½ cup of water is left in the pan, turn off heat, strain the contents of the pan through the cloth, and catch the liquid in the bowl. 7. Remove the walnut cores and larger pieces of husk from the cloth strainer, leaving the remaining soft black tissue in the cloth. 8. Keep the soft tissue in the cloth and use the rubber band to tie up the soft tissue in the cloth. 9. The cloth with the soft black contents can be used as an applicator. 10. Take the remaining black liquid and the tissue-filled cloth and place in the sun to help evaporate enough liquid to leave a paste. 11. Apply the remaining paste with the cloth by dipping the damp tissue into the paste and rubbing directly onto the skin. This amount will cover 4–5 faces. A microwave can help speed evaporation, but be careful not to evaporate too much water from the liquid. If the mixture does completely dry, you can mix it with water again, but you will need to boil it again in order to avoid a sandy texture. 229

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Assessment: I did not exactly recreate these recipes because there were elements in both that I could not recreate. The best example is Jonson’s hog’s grease although he omitted how to use it. My original assumption was that the hog’s grease would in some way keep the walnut juice from staining the skin. However, the grease stayed wet on the skin. Because it stayed wet, every recipe with grease turned out to be unusable because it smeared so easily. This problem inspired many attempts to create a base for the makeup from pork fat, but these attempts were ultimately unsuccessful. Attempts to mix the water-based pigment from the walnut with the grease, including cooking the fat and trying to mix the liquid fat with the liquid pigment, never succeeded. Application techniques also differed. I tried applying the hog’s grease first and then adding a layer of pigment over the grease. One other attempt used the pork fat as a foundation and a blackened powder like soot to set the makeup. The powder failed to set the makeup, and so this type of mixture lacked the necessary durability. These difficulties with the recipes cause deeper exploration of what types of methods were out there. Although not a lot of Renaissance black-faced recipes exist, many whitefaced recipes do. Renaissance white-faced makeup was sometimes made of poisonous material. One common natural ingredient in white-face makeup was egg white, which functioned as the base, the substance that helped a pigment stick to the face. Exploration of egg white and egg yolk bases each provided less than satisfactory results but eventually led to the most practical form of Renaissance black makeup created during this project. Fourteenth-century painters used tempera, an egg white and egg yolk mixture with a pigment added, for their paintings. This thicker stickier substance helped create a makeup with better durability. HOW TO MAKE TEMPERA WITH WALNUT PIGMENT Preparation time: 60 minutes. What you need: 1. One egg. 2. Four walnuts (wait one day before using if you pick the walnuts from the tree, otherwise use any walnut that has fallen to the ground and is turning black). 3. Two cups of water. 4. A piece of cloth to be used as a strainer (a cloth strainer prevents a chunky makeup; I used a cotton T-shirt). 5. A bowl to catch the strained liquid. 6. A saucepan. 7. A rubber band big enough to place over the mouth of the bowl. 8. A whisk. Procedure: 1. Place the cloth over the mouth of the bowl and use the rubber band to hold the cloth in place at the top of the bowl. 230

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Break open the walnuts and place the walnut husk and core into the saucepan. Add two cups of water. Bring to a boil. The water will begin to evaporate from the pan because of the heat. When about ½ cup of water is left in the pan, turn off the heat, strain the contents of the pan through the cloth, and catch the liquid in the bowl. 7. Crack open the egg and separate the egg white from the egg yolk. 8. Whip egg whites with the whisk almost into a meringue consistency. Your objective is to create the egg whites into a smoother consistency than you get directly from the egg. 9. Mix a tablespoon of whipped egg whites with a teaspoon of egg yolk and a tablespoon of the black liquid caught in the bowl. 10. The mixture yields a substance that looks like thick chocolate milk. Color can be adjusted by adding more walnut water, or more egg white. 11. This mixture can be applied to the face but will need time to dry on the skin. Assessment: The tempera mixture creates the best possible recipe for a character like Othello because of the way it dries on the skin. A word of warning: do not use too much egg yolk in this mixture because it compromises the integrity of the makeup causing possible cracking and flaking. It is always better to err on the side of too little egg yolk at first and than add more if the mixture is too watery.

Appendix 2: A Chronological List of Plays containing Black Characters or Characters Disguised as Black62 DATE

PLAY

PLAYWRIGHT

1588–9 1592 1596 1596 1598 1599 1599 1600–1603 1604 1605 1606 1610–14? 1611 1613 1614

The Battle of Alcazar Titus Andronicus Captain Thomas Stukley The Merchant of Venice The Blind Beggar of Alexandria Lust’s Dominion The Thracian Wonder The Fair Maid of the West, Part I Othello The Masque of Blackness Wonder of Women, Sophonisba Monsieur Thomas The White Devil The Triumph of Truth Masque at Whitehall

Peele Shakespeare Anonymous Shakespeare Chapman Dekker Author uncertain Heywood Shakespeare Jonson Marston Fletcher Webster Middleton Campion

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1616 1619 1619? 1622 1624 1630 1637 1637 1659 1672 1675 1677 1686 1687

The Knight of Malta All’s Lost by Lust The Island Princess The Prophetesse The Parliament of Love The Fair Maid of the West, Part II The English Moor The Lost Lady The History of Sir Francis Drake The Gentleman Dancing-Master Calisto The Moor’s Revenge Titus Andronicus The Empress of Morocco

Fletcher Rowley Fletcher Fletcher and Massinger Massinger Heywood Brome Berkeley D’Avenant Wycherly Crowne Behn Ravenscroft Settle

Notes 1. Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 25. 2. Ibid., 2. 3. Robert Hornback, “The Folly of Racism: Enslaving Blackface and the ‘Natural’ Fool Tradition,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007): 46–84, esp. 5. 4. Vaughan, Performing, 35. 5. Ibid., 30. 6. Eldred D. Jones, “The Physical Representation of African Characters on the English Stage during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Theatre Notebook 17 (1962): 17. 7. Alan Gordon Rae Smith, The Emergence of a Nation State: The Commonwealth of England, 1529–1660 (London and New York: Longman, 1984), 166. 8. Hornback, “Folly of Racism,” 23. 9. Elliot H. Tokson, The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550–1688 (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982), appendix 1. 10. Ibid. 11. Alan R. Young, Henry Peacham (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 20; or Russ McDonald, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, 2nd edn (Boston: Bedford Books of St Martin’s Press, 2001), 128. 12. Young, Henry Peacham, 27. 13. William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephan Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997), 406. Titus Andronicus 3.1, line 204. 14. Shakespeare, Norton Shakespeare, 410. Titus Andronicus 3.2, line 77. 15. Russ McDonald discusses this picture in his book The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare and concludes that this drawing is not from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, but another version of the play. McDonald comes to this conclusion by investigating the position of the characters on the stage.

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16. Ben Jonson, The Complete Works of Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford et al., 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), vol. 10, 448. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 450. 19. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 198. 20. Robert Greene, The Historie of Orlando Furioso: One of the twelue pieres of France (London: Iohn Danter for Cuthbert Burbie, 1594), Early English Books Online, H. 21. Richard Brome, The English Moor … (London, 1658), Early English Books Online, Bodleian Library, 37. 22. Greene, Orlando Furioso. 23. Eldred D. Jones, Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 120. 24. Ibid., 28. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 120. 27. Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 199; Jones, Othello’s Countrymen, 120. 28. Jones, Othello’s Countrymen, 120. 29. Vaughan, Performing, 10; Randle Holme, Academy of Armory (London: Randle Holme, 1688), Early English Books Online. V, 64, and III, 87. 30. Holme, Academy of Armory. 31. “Lymes” = limbs. Carol Chillington Rutter, ed., Documents of the Rose Playhouse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 135. 32. The OED defines blackamoor as: “Black Moor, a form actually used down to middle of 18th c. Blackamoor is found 1581 … 1. A black-skinned African, an Ethiopian, a Negro; any very dark-skinned person … 2. A devil…” 33. The OED defines tawnymoor as: “A name given to the tawny or brown-skinned natives of foreign lands; prob. originally to natives of northern Africa.” 34. Both Folio and Quarto texts describe Morocco as Tawny. See William Shakespeare (1564–1616), The First Folio of Shakespeare, 1623, facs. edn prepared by Doug Moston (New York: Applause, 1995), 167, lines 514–517; also William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto: A Facsimile Edition of Copies primarily from the Henry E. Huntington Library, ed., with intro. and notes, by Michael J.B. Allen and Kenneth Muir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 457. 35. Jones, “Physical Representation,” 19. 36. Ibid. 37. Brome, The English Moor, 37. 38. Ibid. 39. Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter, eds, Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 76.

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40. Ibid., 84 and 86. 41. Ibid., 86. 42. Trevor N.S. Lennam, The Marriage Between Wit and Wisdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 19. Francis Merbury, The Marriage Between Wit and Wisdom, scene 2, line 438. 43. This reference is from Love’s Labors Lost 4.3, line 262. All references to color in this play are interesting because of a folio stage direction in 5.2, line 158, that reads “Enter black moores with musicke.” See Shakespeare, The First Folio, 134 and 138. 44. John Redford’s Play of Wit and Science, lines 668–673. I obtained this information from personal correspondence with Robert Hornback on 9 November 2005. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Lennam, The Marriage, 19. Merbury, The Marriage Between Wit and Wisdom, scene 2, line 410–450. 48. Jones, Othello’s Countrymen, 121. 49. Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 200. 50. Ibid. 51. Jonson, Complete Works, vol. 7, 615. 52. Johann Jacob Wecker, Cosmeticks or, The Beautifying Part of Physick (London: Tho. Johnson, 1660), Early English Books Online, 35. 53. Sir William Berkeley, The Lost Lady (London: 1638), Early English Books Online, 43, Act 5, scene 1. 54. Brome, The English Moor, 37–38, Act 3, scene 1. 55. Ibid., 61, Act 4, scene 4. 56. Ibid. 57. Jones, Othello’s Countrymen, 121. 58. According to Virginia Mason Vaughan, personal correspondence on 30 October 2005. 59. If the physical wear and tear did cause imperfections in the paint, Othello has a 130-line break between Act 4 and Act 5 to reapply or to touch up any of his makeup. 60. Shakespeare, The First Folio, 167, lines 514–517. Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto, 457. 61. Shakespeare, The First Folio, 167, Act 2, scene 1, line 518. 62. Tokson, The Popular Image of the Black Man, appendix 2.

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14 Crafts of Color: Tupi TAPIRAGE in Early Colonial Brazil Amy Buono

And that is why the Indians of the land are accustomed to pluck the feathers [of the corícos parrot] while young, and to dye the birds with the blood of a certain toad to which they add certain other ingredients: and when the feathers grow out once more they are exactly the color of the real ones [of another species]. Thus it happens that the Indians deceive people by selling them for the true species. Pero Magalhães de Gândavo, 15761

Introduction Tyrian purple. Lamp black. Lead white. Cadmium yellow. Ultramarine blue. The materiality of color, as it is often discussed, has a fixed quality. Pigments and dyes derived from many natural substances––minerals, earths, plants, and animals––have stable optic qualities. Lapis lazuli can be reliably counted upon to be blue. Dyes made from cochineal consistently fall within a certain range at the red end of the spectrum. Similarly, we might expect that the green feathers of a bird such as the Festive Parrot (Amazona festiva), after molting, would be replaced by equally green plumes. As the excerpt above suggests, from a letter written in Brazil by the Portuguese humanist Gândavo, this need not always be the case. In this chapter, I will discuss the cultural and conceptual ramifications of the feather alteration practices of the Tupi “nations” of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century coastal Brazil, one of the most sophisticated featherworking cultures of the Americas.2 The color modification process called tapirage (or tapiragem) in modern literature, or contrafeito (counterfeiting) in early modern literature, causes birds to grow feathers in a different color than they were genetically programmed to do.3 According to many ornithologists in Brazil today, tapirage is one of the most intriguing ethnozoological “problems” in indigenous South American artistic and ritual practice.4 It has been documented in archeological objects from Ancient Peru and continues to be practiced 235

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in indigenous communities in Lowland South America today.5 This gives some sense of the historical depth and geographic breadth of the practice. Through tapirage, human intervention ontologically transforms the colors of nature, turning the coloration of living feathers into a cultural, rather than a natural, phenomenon. Color, of course, has social, symbolic, and ritual meanings that vary widely among cultures.6 The greenness of jade, or the blueness of lapis, does not signify the same things to everyone. So, too, is the act of transforming color susceptible to different readings by those who effect the changes and those who observe the results. As a result of tapirage, color may be interpreted as intention, rather than as a purely physical quality. This has significance for understanding both color production (how and why are feather colors changed?) and reception (what did an early colonial viewer or buyer of Tupi featherwork make of its altered color?).

Tapirage: Practice and Process To begin, what are the physical processes and variables involved in tapirage? The term originated in French Guiana, where the creole root tapiré describes both the process of changing the color of feathers and its outcome.7 The French explorer and geographer Charles-Marie de la Condamine (1701–74) first reported that the verb tapirer was used in the Carib language to denote the act of changing the colors of living feathers, based on observations made and reports received while he resided in the Guianese community of Cayenne.8 In the 1920s, Swiss anthropologist Alfred Métraux suggested that tapirage was pan-South American in nature, occurring in many Native American communities from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries and across a broad geographic range, most heavily in the forested areas north of the Amazon River but extending as far south as the latitudinal border of the Tropic of Capricorn.9 This geographic and chronological range includes the Tupi peoples inhabiting coastal Brazil at the time of European contact. The colonial textual sources concerning tapirage and Tupi featherwork in general include such materials as missionary letters, natural history surveys, administrative treatises, and images from Portuguese, German, French, and Dutch travelers, naturalists, missionaries and merchants. Most importantly, the feathered capes themselves, produced as they were within colonial Brazil, are our most informative primary sources, giving us different kinds of information––material, technical, and cultural. What is worth noting is that the European reception of the featherwork spanned Northern and Southern Europe, and included Italy, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark. For the purposes of this discussion, we will focus primarily on the cultural understanding of tapirage by the Portuguese and the Tupi. At a biological level, the process of tapirage, as described in the ethnozoological literature, most significantly in the work of ornithologist Dante Martins Teixeira, involves the creation of an imbalance between the pigment-based and structural causes of feather coloration.10 For parrots and macaws, the birds most frequently associated with tapirage, the primary sources of pigmentation are psittacofulvins and melanins. 236

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In combination, these pigments produce a range of colors from red to black. The structural source of coloration refers to the “coherent scattering” of light by the physical structure of the feather’s surface to produce colors ranging from white and light blue, to dark blues and greens, depending on the absence or presence of feather pigmentation.11 These two sources of coloration work in concert to produce the various colors found on all species of parrot. Feather coloration in other birds is created by the same means, though the pigments involved may differ. Tapirage suppresses or eliminates the melanins in the feather, which generally results in feathers that are yellow to ruddy in color, depending on the presence of other pigments and on structural characteristics. Tapirage is performed through the external and/or internal application of plant- and/ or animal-derived substances to particular species of bird. According to the sources compiled by Teixeira, these substances fall into three groups: plant dyes; blood and/or skin secretions from toads and frogs; and fats from fish, from pink river dolphins, from turtle, chicken or crocodilian eggs, or from plants, such as dendé oil.12 The application itself takes two principal forms. The first, an external application, involves plucking feathers from the living bird and rubbing the exposed, traumatized follicles with an unguent of one or more of these substances. In time, the feathers to grow back in a new color, almost always partially or fully yellow.13 As Teixeira notes, this method is predicated upon the domestication of birds, given the lengthy period required between the plucking of plumes in the first place and the harvesting of the altered feathers.14 The other method is internal, based upon feeding the birds diets extremely rich in the animal and plant fats mentioned above. The most common source for the fats appears to be river fish, such as the pirara catfish, or other animals, such as the pink river dolphin; eggs; or plant substances such as dendé oil.15 Here, too, the process speaks to domestication, since the bird must be fed these fats over an extended period in order to create the desired effect. The efficacy of all of these techniques is thrown into question by the fact that a tapirage-like effect appears in wild birds. Some birds in nature display “partial albinism,” where the loss of local melanin causes some of the birds’ plumes to appear white, or (where other pigments such as the psittacofulvins remain present) to have yellow or ruddy hues.16 Tapirage and naturally occurring partial albinism thus result in an equivalent color effect; put another way, tapirage as a process imitates whatever dietary or traumatic stress causes partial albinism. As Teixeira rightly points out, this makes it nearly impossible to determine whether the altered color of a particular feather was humanly induced or not. Teixeira goes on to note that in two informal experiments, feather color change appeared to be solely the result of trauma to the follicle through plucking, rather than the application of unguents or dietary changes.17 On this basis, he questions whether any of the tapiré produced in indigenous cultures is the result of anything more than the repeated harvesting of feathers of captive birds: in essence, the repeated localized traumatization of the follicle. If the simple plucking of feathers results in the observed color change, are the various unguents either effective or necessary? As an ornithologist Teixeira appears to dismiss the early modern chroniclers’ interpretations of the tapirage process as having a “mysterious” or “magical” significance.18 He suggests that if the effect occurs without human intervention, or as an accidental byproduct of the simple harvesting of feathers, then it ceases to have any ritual and religious overtones. 237

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But is this necessarily the case? Regardless of its physical efficacy, early colonial sources clearly reveal that tapirage was practiced in Tupi communities. As an activity closely associated with ritual (both indigenous and Christian), we cannot so easily dismiss its cultural significance. Above all, it is the transformative nature of tapirage that is a cultural signifier, perhaps more than the color that is produced as a result.

Transformative Contexts The Tupi of coastal Brazil, distributed in communal “nations” along four thousand miles of the eastern seaboard during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were the first practitioners of featherwork encountered by Europeans on mainland South America.19 The Tupi were a semi-nomadic society who practiced small-scale agriculture and were best known in early modern Europe as both anthropophagic and adorned with feathers (Fig. 14.1). Most estimates put the population at about 625,000 at the moment of contact in 1500.20 Tupi culture was largely ephemeral, centering on ceremonial traditions that involved dance, sound, movement, and adornment. It is for this ritual context that they produced much of their featherwork, including capes, headdresses, and large ornaments for the buttocks called enduaps. To our knowledge, there is no surviving Tupi featherwork in Brazil today, although other kinds of artifacts such as ceramics have been recovered through archeological excavations of Tupi sites along the Atlantic coast. Only 11 feathered capes remain, all remnants of early-modern European collections21 (see Plate 36). An old Tupi term for the capes, guará-abucu [long cape of feathers], refers to the predominant use of scarlet ibis, or guará, feathers in their manufacture.22 As my research has shown, all but one of these plumed capes was produced after the arrival of the Portuguese on Brazil’s shore in 1500.23 Thus the capes belong within the context of the diverse cultural tapestry of colonial Brazil, comprised of a remarkably wide range of indigenous, European and African peoples. The Tupi placed greater value on certain colors of feathers, with red and especially yellow being the most coveted.24 In consultation with ornithologists, I have identified yellow-colored feathers from a scarlet ibis, which must have been modified either through tapirage or another etiology of partial albinism.25 To return to the specifics of the tapirage process, green or blue feathers are plucked from young parrots, or scarlet ones from an ibis (Plate 37), after which the open follicles are pasted with a concoction made from the skin secretions of the Dendrobates tinctorius, or the “dyeing poison frog.”26 In the mid-nineteenth century, the British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace provided further details of the process, describing in detail how a tree frog is pricked repeatedly with thorns to release blood and then placed in a pot with ground red pepper, which causes the frog to produce enzyme-containing skin secretions. These enzymes, when mixed with urucu powder (Bixa orellana, a shrub that produces the yellow-orange pigment annatto and the spice anchiote), yield a paste that is smeared on the parrot’s follicles.27 The feathers that grow back are brilliant yellow or orange in hue, with no 238

14.1 Hans Staden, frontispiece to Warhaftige Historia vnd Beschreibung eyner Landtschafft der wilden, nacketen, grimmigen Menschfresser Leuthen, in der Newenwelt America [The True History of his Captivity …] Gedruckt zu Marpurg: Im Kleeblatt, bei Andres Kolben, Im Jar M.D.LVII [1557], woodcut. © John Carter Brown Library, Providence RI

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trace of the original scarlet. After this procedure, the bird supposedly continues to produce yellow feathers for the rest of its life, a point that Teixeira calls into question throughout his article.

Mimesis and Ritual The modifications used in the featherworking techniques of Tupi plumists indicate a considerable interest in mimesis. The ibis feathers with which they work are frequently trimmed, and occasionally dyed and, as just discussed, possibly altered in color through tapirage. In addition, several methods are used to secure the feathers to the underlying fiber matrix. The latter binding techniques enable the featherworker to imitate the natural contours of a bird’s body and to reproduce, for example, the physical and textural appearance of either an adult bird or a chick. By choosing and updating the appropriate feathers to use on each part of the cape, and binding them using a repertoire of techniques to create a “natural” appearance, Tupi plumists created a diverse range of highly specific mimetic effects. To give an example, a yellow Tupi bonnet in Copenhagen’s Nationalmuseet Etnografisk Samling is made from bird down (the fine feathers underneath the tougher exterior ones), in contrast to the mature feathers used on the extant capes28 (Plate 38). By binding several pieces of down to a wooden core, and then attaching this assemblage perpendicularly to the pineapple-fiber and cotton-mesh matrix of the bonnet, the featherworker has compellingly captured the fluffy appearance of a baby bird. In the extant capes, by contrast, only contour feathers from the body and wings of the adult bird were used, attached directly to and lying flat against the matrix, thus imitating the sleek body profile of an adult scarlet ibis. The Tupi cape that contains color-altered ibis feathers, possibly by tapirage, is housed in the Ambrosiana Library in Milan and was once a central object in the famed seventeenth-century Milanese collection of the cleric Manfredo Settala (1600–80).29 This cape is a critical object for the study of the ethnozoological practice of tapirage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and an excellent example of why the detailed physical examination of these capes is so important. Now faded and worn, this cape is made predominantly with feathers from the scarlet ibis, with the addition of plumes from the scarlet macaw, military macaw, and oropendola blackbird.30 Teixeira identified the coastal indigenous populations of Brazil, as well as those of the Amazon basin (in distinction to indigenous populations of Central Brazil and the Chaco region) as practising the “blood or skin secretions” version of tapirage, using bodily fluids from tree frogs to create the unguent applied to the feather follicles.31 The fact that partial albinism of birds occurs in nature raises very interesting questions about the mimetic effects of both the production of Tupi capes and their use in transformative rituals. One manner in which the Tupi may have acquired feathers altered to yellow is through hunting and trapping. Considering the rarity with which partial albinism occurs in nature, this strongly suggests that these particular birds were selectively targeted and therefore that a higher value was placed on these aberrations. 240

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Further, the deliberate choice to practice tapirage should likely be seen as something other than simply a means of acquiring yellow feathers, especially given the extensive time and intensive labor involved. With the mimetic qualities of Tupi featherwork discussed in mind, tapirage may well have been similarly directed toward mimicking partial albinism as witnessed in nature, thus selecting an anomaly to imitate rather than the norm. In terms of their ritual use, if the act of wearing these mimetic capes was itself transformative, turning its wearer into a bird or a divine entity in avian form, as Terence Turner has shown to be the case in contemporary Kayapo ritual, then those capes utilizing tapiré sought specifically to imitate the appearance of these extremely rare color variants. Thus the dancer wearing a tapiré cape transforms into a bird entity that is itself already transformed. If we return this discussion to the contact sites in colonial Brazil where these cloaks were worn and performed, this notion of transformation becomes still more complex. One of the first Jesuits to arrival in Brazil, Father José de Anchieta (1534–97), wrote of the Tupi regard for the guará: There is also another form of maritime sparrow, going by the name of guarâ, similar to the mergo [generic word for sea-bird], but with longer shinbones, also with an elongated neck and a lengthened and curved beak; it feeds on crabs and is highly ravenous. It experiences a constant metamorphosis: in young age it is covered with white feathers, which later turn to ash-color; later they whiten again, however to a lesser whiteness than before, ultimately they are decorated by a purple and most beautiful color; these [birds] are highly valued by the Brazilians since they use them to ornament their hair and arms in their festivities.32

Anchieta’s letter touches on the ibis’s color change as it matures, the “metamorphosis,” as he calls it. He also explains at least one of the reasons why the Tupi held them in such high esteem, when he writes of the guará as the source of the feathers they use to “ornament their hair and arms in festivities.” The feathered mantles were worn in a wide range of ritual circumstances, serving as signs of social prestige during local assemblies and as markers of ceremonial role during captive–captor ceremonies and post-battle celebrations. Tupi featherworking techniques suggest that an important ritual aspect of the feathered capes and bonnets in religious ritual was the visual and tactile imitation of living birds. The textural contrast between the Tupi feathered bonnet and the full-length cape, between new-born and adult birds, exemplifies how Tupi featherworking techniques may have contributed to a ritual avian identification.

Reception in the Marketplace European authors expressed great fascination with the feathered objects of the Tupi, which was often cast in terms of, and later actually within, commercial exchange. For example, the German Hans Staden (1525–79) remarked that the most important possessions of the Tupi were their bird feathers: “Their treasures are the feathers of birds. He that has many feathers is rich.”33 241

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The account by the Portuguese humanist and traveler Pero Magalhães de Gândavo (1540–80), used as an epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, confirms the presence of Tupi tapirage within the newly founded colonial market. In 1576, when discussing a sale of feathers and featherwork in the market that he witnessed, he comments that: “the Indians deceive people by selling [the altered feathers] for [those of ] the true species.”34 For Gândavo, tapirage carried no associations with ritual use but instead was used deliberately and fraudulently as a scheme for illicit financial gain by hawking counterfeit exotic naturalia. He thus saw the Tupi as skillfully manipulating the marketplace, a colonial site of social and material exchange introduced by the Europeans. Where were the capes made that were sold in the market and sent to Europe? Jesuits not only observed and possibly encouraged the production of feathered capes but they also utilized them as vestments within the Christianized space of their aldeias or mission settlements. In 1557, the Spanish Jesuit priest Antonio Blázquez wrote to his superiors as to how his colleague, Father Navarro, baptized the Brazilians a day before the scheduled execution of a prisoner: When the morning dawned the Indians came with a great thunder and bravura, with their backs painted and full of parrot feathers, the same ones they use to construct their capes for these ceremonies. And putting them in a circle Father Navarro taught them to comprehend the baptism and the forgiveness of their sins. Afterwards, he baptized them.35

The men and women of this Bahian aldeia were baptized while wearing their own culture’s feathered adornments. That the Jesuits permitted the use of Tupi ritual ornament in a baptismal ritual shows that they recognized their value in solemnizing a particularly significant—and again transformative—ceremony. The Jesuits may well have equated the cultural significance of Tupi featherwork, as a component in the performance of indigenous, spiritually transformative rituals, with Christian sacramental rites. This was not the only occasion on which Tupi featherwork was ritually performed. In the same letter to Loyola, Blázquez also describes an extraordinary event he had witnessed among the Tupi. His letter recounts the events leading up to the ritual execution of a captive enemy. He related one particular scene in some detail: Six nude women came by the public square, singing in their customary way, and making such gestures and shaking movements that they really did seem like demons. From head to feet they were covered with red feathers. On their heads they wore caps [in the style of “Inquisition” caps] of yellow feathers. On their backs they wore an armful of feathers that appeared like a horse’s mane, and to animate the celebration they played flutes made from the shinbones of their slain enemies. With this attire they walked around barking like dogs and faking speech with so many mimes that I do not know with what I could compare them. All of these acts took place six or eight days before the killing.36

The yellow-feathered vestments of the “demonic” women may well have been tapiraged scarlet ibis cloaks. It is impossible to know what non-human sounds Blázquez refers to as “barking like dogs,” but it clearly struck him as in some way mimetic of animal noises. One of the most interesting aspects of Blázquez’s description of the women is his use of the word “imitate” to describe the sounds emanating from their mouths: “walking around barking like dogs and imitating speech with so many mimes.” The Portuguese term he uses is contrafazer, which is also the term Gândavo employs for tapirage. 242

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The linguistic comparability between the “imitation” of the color of a bird’s feather and the “imitation” of speech highlights some of the dynamics of the colonial marketplace. In the first instance, it indicates a perception that Tupi featherworkers had used technical processes equivalent to European illusionistic art techniques. Taken together, both the Gândavo and Blázquez anecdotes signal the existence of a broader insecurity with the perception of Tupi intentionality underlying these acts of mimesis. If we recall Gândavo’s comments about tapirage, that “the Indians deceive people by selling [the altered feathers] for [those of ] the true species,” we encounter another connotation of the word contrafazer that is much closer to our modern definition of counterfeiting, substituting a fake for an object of value.37 This is very different perception of the intention underlying tapirage as a transformative process; translated into European terms, apparently the most obvious motive was profit.

Conclusion As Marshall Sahlins, Michael Taussig, and Dante Martins Teixeira have noted, the symbolic or cultural meaning ascribed to any particular color is open-ended; each culture ascribes its own system of meaning and value.38 This chapter, though, has been less concerned with a particular color than with a process of color transformation: tapirage. Within the Tupi world, tapirage may well have represented a doubling of ritual metamorphosis: ritual and spiritual transfiguration of human into a bird that itself had undergone a color transformed in color. The cultural import of such a color transformation, just like the significance of a color, will vary from group to group. For early European witnesses such as Souza, Blázquez and Gândavo, tapirage clearly had very different meanings, some connected to deceptive marketplace practices, others to puzzling and disturbing religious rituals, and yet others to the transformative sacraments of Christianity. Color production in sixteenth-century Brazil was thus encompassed by more than the felling, exportation, and commercial pulping of Brazilwood trees (Caesalpinia echinata) to feed the burgeoning red-dye trade in Northern Europe; it was also imbricated into the complex social interactions and cultural collisions of colonial Brazil. As we have seen, tapirage demands that the color of bird feathers be seen as a cultural as well as a natural phenomenon. Exploring the technical as well as the symbolic aspects of color as a form of intention will provide important new insights into the study of colonial Brazil, and the cultural coding of color in various cultural systems. Much work remains to be done. Further understanding of the cultural significance of tapirage will require the collaboration of ornithologists, ethnozoologists, anthropologists, cultural and art historians, as well as living featherwork practitioners.

Notes Many thanks are due to the extraordinary staff and fellows at the John Carter Brown Library, with whom I had the pleasure of working with during a Summer 2010 New World Comparative Studies Fellowship. For their helpful insights, I am indebted to Professor Dante Martins Teixeira of the

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Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, and Dr Carla J. Dove and assistant Marcy Heacker-Skeans of the Smithsonian’s Division of Birds. In Italy, the Rev. Mons. Ravasi and Padre Navonni of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, and Professor Laura Laurencich-Minelli of the Università di Bologna enabled my access to the Ambrosiana cape. Special thanks to Professor Beth Fowkes Tobin for editorial assistance. 1. Pero Magalhães de Gândavo, The Histories of Brazil, trans. John Batterson Stetson (Boston: Longwood, 1978), 69. 2. Berta G. Ribeiro, “Bases para uma classificação dos adornos plumários dos índios do Brasil,” Arquivos do Museu Nacional (RJ) 43 (1957): 59–72; Berta G. Ribeiro, Arte índígena, linguagem visual, Coleção Reconquista do Brasil, 3rd ser., special issue, vol. 9 (Belo Horizonte; São Paulo: Editora Itatiaia; Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1989). 3. The most comprehensive and fascinating study to date on the ethnozoological history of tapiragem is that of Prof. Dante Martins Texeira of the Museu Nacional/UFRJ in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Dante Martins Teixeira, “Perspectivas da etno-ornithologia no Brasil: O exemplo de um estudo sobre a tapiragem,” Boletim Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi 8, 1 (1992): 113–21. Much of the discussion is a continuation of that of Swiss anthropologist Alfred Métraux’s 1928 writings. Métraux’s study was the first modern scholarly attempt to compile primary source descriptions of South American feather modification from the last 400-plus years. See Alfred Métraux, “La décoloration artificielle des plumes sur les oiseaux vivants,” Journal de la Société des américanistes de Paris 20 (1928): 181–92.This article was amplified and published in English as Alfred Métraux, “Tapirage: A Biological Discovery of South American Indians,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 34, 8 (1944): 252–55. The early modern term “contrafazer” (or counterfeiting) for tapirage is found as early as 1587 in Gabriel Soares de Sousa and Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, eds, Tratado descritivo do Brasil em 1587, Série Descobrimentos 9 (Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, Editora Massangana, 2000). It is a term still employed by indigenous groups today. 4. Teixeira, “Perspectivas.” 5. For the Peruvian discussion of tapirage, see Ann P. Rowe and John Patton O’Neill, Costumes and Featherwork of the Lords of Chimor: Textiles from Peru’s North Coast (Washington DC: Textile Museum, 1984). For a contemporary discussion of tapirage see Teixeira, “Perspectivas,” 118; he cites personal communications with anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (Museum Nacional/UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), and his documentation of tapiraged parrots among the Arauetê of southern Pará. Interestingly, this particular community does not recognize the resulting color change as tapirage, even though the domesticated parrots exhibit the altered coloration. 6. Marshall Sahlins, “Colors and Cultures,” Semiotica 26, 1 (1976): 1–22; Umberto Eco, “How Culture Conditions the Colors we See,” in On Signs, ed. M. Blonsky (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 157–75. 7. Métraux, “La décoloration,” 186. 8. The earliest etymologic reference was as follows: “Les Indiens des bords de l’Oyapoc ont l’adresse de procurer artificiellement aux perroquets des couleurs naturelles, différentes de celles qu’ils ont reçues de la nature, en leur tirant les plumes et en les frottant avec du sang de certaines grenouilles; c’est là ce qu’on appelle à Cayenne ‘tapirer un perroquet.’” See Charles Marie de la Condamine, Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’interieur de l’amérique méridionale. depuis la côte de la mer du sud, jusqu’aux côtes du brésil & de la guiane, en descendant la riviere des amazons (Paris: Veuve Pissot, 1745), 173–74. 9. Métraux, “La décoloration,” 183–84. 10. Teixeira, “Perspectivas,” 113. 11. J. Dyck, “Structure and Spectral Reflectance of Green and Blue Feathers of the Rose-Faced Lovebird (Agapornis Roseicollis),” Biologiske Skrifter 18: 5–65; R.O. Prum et al., “Coherent Light Scattering by Blue Feather Barbs,” Nature 396: 28–29.

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12. Teixeira, “Perspectivas,” 116. He states that animal substances were used by the indigenous cultures of Amazonia, as well as the coastal Tupi, while groups in Central Brazil and the Chaco region employed vegetable-based substances. 13. Ibid., 114. 14. Ibid., 117. 15. Ibid., 116. 16. Ibid., 117. 17. Ibid., 117. 18. Ibid., 119. 19. For a discussion of the culture designations of coastal Brazil, see John M. Monteiro, “The Crisis and Transformations of Invaded Societies: Coastal Brazil in the Sixteenth Century,” in The Cambridge History of Native Peoples of the Americas, eds Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 973–1024; and Carlos Fausto, “Fragmentos de história e cultura Tupinambá: Da cronologia como instrumento crítico de conhecimento etno-histórico,” in História dos índios no Brasil, ed. Manuela Carneira da Cunha (São Paulo: Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo; Companhia das Letras, 1992), 381–96; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 20. There are various debates on the population figures. For one study, see William M. Denevan, “Native American Population in 1492: Recent Research and Revised Hemispheric Estimate,” in The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, ed. William M. Denevan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), xvii–xxxviii. See also Monteiro, “The Crisis,” 979. 21. Tupi feathered capes are located as follows: one in Basel, Museum der Kulturen; one in Brussels, Musées Royale d’Art et d’Histoire; five in Copenhagen, Nationalmuseet Etnografisk Samling; two in Florence, Museo di Storia Naturale, Universitá degli Studi di Firenze; one in Milan, Museum Septalianum, Biblioteca Ambrosiana; and one in Paris, Musée du quai Branly. For further discussion see Amy Buono, “Feathered Identities and Plumed Performances: Tupinambá Interculture in Early Modern Brazil and Europe,” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2007. 22. In the Old Tupi dictionary we find assojaba (“cloak or garland of feathers”) and guaráabucu (“long cloak of feathers”). See Luiz Caldas Tibiriçá, ed., Dicionário Tupi-Português: Com esboço de gramática de Tupi Antigo (São Paulo: Traço Editora, 1984), 69, 103. 23. Amy J. Buono, “Tupi Featherwork and the Dynamics of Intercultural Exchange in Early Modern Brazil,” in Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, Convergence, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009). 24. The Tupi preference for yellow feathers is consistently documented throughout many primary sources. For two of the most compelling, see Pedro Vaz de Caminha, “Letter of Pedro Vaz de Caminha, Written in Porto-Seguro of Vera Cruz on the First Day of May in the Year 1500,” in Portuguese Voyages, 1498–1663, ed. Charles David Ley (London: Phoenix, 2000), 41–59; Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 25. I would like to thank Dr Carla J. Dove and assistant Marcy Heacker-Skeans of the Smithsonian’s Division of Birds, for their kind assistance on 23 October 2006. Additionally, I extend my thanks to Dr Barbara Wattanabe, Museum Specialist of South American Ethnology at the Smithsonian, for further discussion of their comparative material. 26. Brice P. Noonan and Kenneth P. Wray, “Neotropical Diversification: The Effects of a Complex History on Diversity within the Poison Frog Genus Dendrobates,” Journal of Biogeography 33 (2006): 1007–20.

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27. Alfred Russell Wallace, A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, with an Account of the Native Tribes, and Observations on the Climate, Geology, and Natural History of the Amazon Valley (London: Reeve & Co., 1853), 202. 28. The Nationalmuseet object number is EH5932. Unlike the other feathered Tupi objects from the Copenhagen collection, this headpiece has never been cleaned due to the fragility of the down feathers. Though it appears to us today as a dark, army green, it was likely a brilliant yellow-green when first produced. 29. For a discussion of Settala’s collection, see Antonio Aimi et al., eds, Septalianum Musæum: Una collezione scientifica nella milano del seicento (Florence: Giunti Marzocco, 1984). 30. The best study of birds in Brazil remains Helmut Sick, ed., Birds in Brazil: A Natural History, trans. William Belton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 31. Teixeira, “Perspectivas,” 116. 32. Trans. mine. “Est et alius passer marinus, guara nomine, mergo aequalis, sed tibiis longioribus, collo itidem producto, protento et adunco rostro; cancris pascitur, voracissimus est. Hic perpetuam quandam in se metamorphosim experitur: in prima enim aetate pinnis albis induitur, quae deinde in cinericium colorem mutantur, post aliquod tempus albescunt iterum, minore tamen, quam in prima aetate, candore, purpureo demum ac pulcherrimo colore decorantur; quae apud Brasilles in magno sunt pretio, illis enim ad capillos ornandos et brachia in suis utuntur solennitatibus.” José de Anchieta, “[Do Ir. Jose de Anchieta ao P. Diego Laynes, Roma],” in Monumenta Brasiliae, vol. 3: 1558–1563, ed. Serafim Leite, SJ (Rome: MHSI, 1958), 230. 33. Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Harbsmeier, eds and trans., Hans Staden’s True Story: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 123. 34. Gândavo, The Histories, 69. 35. Trans. mine. “Como bem amanheceo vierão os Indios com grande terremoto e brafundaria com suas espadas pintadas e cheos de penas de papagayos, de que elles fazem capas pera estas festas, e levando-os ao corro fazia-lhes o P. Navarro huma pratica onde lhe encarecia o bautismo e o arrependimento de seus peccados, e após isto os bautizava.” António Blázquez, “[Do Ir. António Blázquez por comissão do P. Manuel da Nóbrega ao P. Inácio de Loyola, Roma, 1557],” in Monumenta Brasiliae, vol. 2: 1553–1558, ed. Serafim Leite, SJ (Rome: MHSI, 1957), 387–88. 36. Trans. mine. “Vinhão seis molheres nuas polo terreiro cantando a seu modo e fazendo tais gestos e meneos que parecião os mesmos diabos: dos pees até a cabeça estavão cheas de penas vermelhas; em suas cabeças trazião humas como carochas de pena amarela; em suas espaldas levavão hum braçado de penas que parcia coma de cavalo, e por alegrar a festa tangião humas frautas que tem feitas das canellas dos contrarios pera quando os hão de matar. Com estes trajos andavão ladrando como cães e contrafazendo a fala com tantos momos que não sey a que os possa comparar; todas estas invenções fazem seite ou oito dias antes de hos matar.” Blázquez, “[Do Ir. António Blázquez…],” 386. 37. Peter Parshall, “Imago Contrafacta: Images and Facts in the Northern Renaissance,” Art History 16, 4 (December 1993): 554–79. 38. Michael Taussig, What Color is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

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15 Colors and Techniques of EighteenthCentury Chinese Wallpaper: Blair House as Case Study Elaine M. Gibbs

The sketch gives things their form, the colour life. Colour is the divine spirit that breathes life into everything … Diderot1

From earliest times interior walls have been colorfully adorned. Crude drawings of animals and stick figures in soot black and clay red covered ancient caves. Villas, houses, and gardens surrounding the Bay of Naples in the first century BC were enclosed by walls lavishly frescoed inside with polychrome birds, flora, and mythological scenes. Embellished wood and leather panels and elaborate scenic tapestries woven of richly dyed fibers hung on rough-hewn European castle walls to provide warmth and visual appeal. Until 700 CE the Chinese created pictorial tapestries depicting “climbing plants, flowers, birds and animals,”2 precursors of their colorful naturalistic wallpapers to come. Wallpaper was introduced to the world directly from China by Spanish and Dutch traders in 1550, the same year that smalt—a blue pigment made of pulverized silica glass, potash, and cobalt oxide—was first used to color paper, the latter also a Chinese invention. The English became acquainted with Chinese paper hangings during the coregency of William and Mary beginning in 1689.3 By the eighteenth century, vividly colored hand painted wallpapers displaying the natural beauty of exotic birds, flowers, and other themes, often referred to as “Fancy,” emerged from China to artfully dress fashionable Western home interiors and inspire a new taste called chinoiserie. Initially only given as gifts to secure a contract or mark the conclusion of a sale, fancy wallpapers began as byproducts of the China trade. Known as “Pekin” and “India” papers in Europe, they were not at first considered by the Chinese to be of value equal to their other exports. But as the papers’ popularity abroad grew, Chinese artists took advantage of a lucrative opportunity to expand and diversify production to meet the demand. 247

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Increasing variety and quality of execution, the length of time to create a set—from one to two years—and the equally long trans-oceanic shipping made them rare and valuable commodities to consumers. Custom orders requesting specific patterns and colorways added to their expense.4 Imported in quantity by the higher socio-economic classes of Europe and America, fancy wallpapers eventually joined China’s more valued art exports that changed Western perceptions of Chinese culture and influenced architecture, interior design, and decorative arts abroad in ways that endure today. The fancy wallpaper decorating the Lee Drawing Room of Blair House,5 the official guesthouse of the President of the United States, was made circa 1760 in or near the principal trading hub of Canton, now modern Guangzhou, in South China. Purchased at auction in 1953 by Charles Gracie & Sons, Inc., New York, from the sale of Ashburnham Place (Fig. 15.1) in Sussex (UK), and later sold to and installed in Blair House (Fig. 15.2) in 1964, it is a rare survival of the naturalistic “bird and flower” type. Its intricate design, exquisitely rendered in striking colors, is approximately 80–90 percent intact today and represents the highest technical perfection achieved by Chinese artists in fancy wallpaper production (see Plates 39–44).

15.1 Prior to its installation in the Lee Drawing Room of Blair House, this elegant and lively hand painted eighteenth-century Chinese wallpaper dressed the boudoir walls above the dado in Ashburnham Place, Sussex (UK). Ashburnham Place was demolished in the 1950s. Country Life 39, January–June (1916)

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15.2

Blair House as it appeared c. 1960. Courtesy of Blair House, US Department of State

Fancy wallpapers developed from a convergence of two existing products in China— “painted silk hangings used as wall decorations and plain paper stuck to the wall”6— reinvented via foreign influences. The Chinese viewed the making of fancy painted wallpaper as a craft rather than a fine art and did not intend the product for local consumption. English architect William Chambers explained in his Design of Chinese Buildings (1757) that most Chinese homes of the time did not “use painted papers 249

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of this kind … plain papers—usually white, crimson or gold—were preferred as wall coverings.” Chambers also noted the Chinese practice of pasting “paper over the windows, and in Macao and Canton, both centers of the export trade, such papers were often painted with pictorial decorations.”7 The Blair House wallpaper, with its polychrome bird, insect, and flower motifs, represents one of three pattern types produced for the European market that became the decorating “rage”: fanciful scenes of avian, insect, horticultural, and geological elements. Another class, which arrived earlier in Europe, depicted [figural] scenes of daily life and industry in China in a variety of landscape settings. These scenic renderings hung in a hunting lodge at Stupinigi, Piedmont [near Turin, Italy] (c. 1730), in a bedroom at Milton, North Hamptonshire, probably ca. 1754–5; in the Chinese bedroom at Blickling Hall, Norfolk, in the 1760s, and in the board room of Coutts bank in the Strand, London, sometime after 1794.8

Colors, at first subdued but increasingly vibrant, were a main part of fancy wallpapers’ popular appeal. Background colors, typically tans and whites in the earliest exports, later gave way to greens and blues, and even bright pink and yellow, as Western tastes impacted Chinese artists’ production.9 In the Blair House example, green and blue pigments—the most popular hues—were mixed to achieve its cool deep turquoise background. That unusual color, comingled with the warmer naturally colored avian and botanical elements, gives the paper both a strikingly real and fantastical presence. Recent scholarship on the late Ming and early Qing period notes that Political weakness at court and rapid economic and commercial expansion in the south brought social change and artistic innovation … a highly literate artistic community produced works to meet the demand of wealthy officials and upwardly mobile merchants, shaping consumer taste and fostering the rise of regional cultural centers.10

Like those in premodern Europe, early Chinese artists’ studios were located within their homes where family members as well as servants, and sometimes apprentices and assistants, were also employed. James Cahill has observed that artists’ work could be recognized by a unique “trademark style or specialty passed from one generation to the next.” He further states, “Studio workshops outside the household probably existed also,” and were most likely occupied by artists producing lower-level craftlike works.11 By the eighteenth century, when fancy wallpaper production peaked, the migration of studios from homes to outside workshops was probably well established. “Artisan workshops located in cities and suburban areas” evolved into the new painting studioworkshops such as those located in Canton’s New China Street.12 Manufactured in the new workshops, fancy wallpapers were executed by skilled artisans on long worktables in an assembly line setup.13 Usually made in sets of 24 or 40 panels, each panel averaged 40 inches (102 cm) wide and 12–20 feet (3.66–6.10 meters) long to accommodate the spacious, high-ceiling rooms of the grand residences where they would be installed. Early papers had to be trimmed to fit, but by the late eighteenth century, Chinese artists learned not to decorate the tops of panels so paperhangers abroad could avoid awkward cutting of beautifully rendered motifs as they worked 250

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with varied wall heights and around doors, windows, and chimneypieces. Panels were individually crafted to be non-repeating and related serially. Numbers painted on each panel, on the bottom front or on back, ensured they would be correctly hung in sequence to create a continuous design around an entire room. Such sets, recognized today as unique handmade works of art, would have required approximately 2,000 hours of physical labor to paint.14 Wallpaper artists used the same materials as fine art painters. The paper, brushes, ink, and color pigments required were made in-house or acquired from other specialized workshops. Production began with paper, said to have originated in China in 105 CE, the year news of its invention was relayed to the Emperor by an official of the Eastern Han Imperial Court.15 Creation of the mold, enabling the execution of either a wove or laid pattern, was the key to crafting the handmade paper that would later be painted for fancy wall hangings. According to paper historian Dard Hunter, molds served as the precursors of modern papermaking machines. The earliest mould was most likely a square of rough cloth held by a bamboo and horsehair frame. Molds have also been described as sieves or screen-like frames of soft wood that enabled surplus water and fibers to drain after a dipping or pouring process. Dipping the mold into a vat of a water and fiber mixture and lifting it to remove the fiber mass resulted in an even sheet of “paper” which was then “couched” (removed from the mold), laid out and later hung on a wall to dry in the sun. The laid transfer mold permitted the removal of sheets once formed; with a wove mold or pouring process, newly formed sheets of paper were required to dry on the surface of the mold. The wove mold left marks known as “laid-lines” made by the bamboo; the less prominent marks of stitches were called “chain-lines.”16 The change from silk to paper as backing for scroll paintings probably also influenced the creation of fancy wallpapers. Pauline Webber, Senior Conservator of the Paper Section at the Victoria & Albert Museum, has noted that “the size of Chinese papers increased during the Ming period (1368–1644). It was with the increased dimensions of the hanging scroll that there was a greater tendency to use paper rather than silk as a painting support.”17 Based on a fragment examination by conservators Xiangmei Gu and Emily Jacobson, The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, the Blair House wallpaper is composed of three layers. The original handmade best-quality paper used for the painted top layer is most likely a laid pattern xuan, a tree bark paper from the bast fiber of the tan tree, applied to a muslin backing. Traditionally, a glue-like sizing, typically rosin mixed with alum or a starch-based compound, would have been carefully applied between the layers and on the back to hold them together and allow the paper to relax, become more flexible, and adhere firmly and evenly to the wall. Applied as a ground on the surface layer to preserve the design, the sizing prevented the pigment and ink from soaking the paper and spreading. The panels were then backed with canvas or hessian (burlap) and stretched on wooden battens at each end to allow for easier transport and re-mounting from room to room or house to house, a frequent practice in the 1700s due to the papers’ great value.18 Traditionally, Chinese artists’ brushes were made in a variety of sizes and animal hairs—horse, rabbit, goat, sheep, deer, fox, camel, pig—and their bamboo handles contained a reservoir where ink or watercolors collected. The steady supply of fluid 251

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pigment by this unique construction allowed artists “to complete an extended linear movement or several shorter movements before having to dip the brush once again,”19 a valuable feature for scroll and wallpaper artists painting tall trees on the very long panels. Rendering of various design elements was influenced by how the brush was held and individual artists’ preferences and styles, vertically for outlining and modeling, slanted for strokes or dotting, etc. A vital material in East Asian culture, black cylinder-shaped ink—another Chinese invention used in fancy painted wallpapers—ranks as one of the four treasures of the scholar’s studio, together with paper, brush, and ink stone. Its use in calligraphy and painting on silk, paper and other materials was omnipresent in Chinese culture. In contrast, European-trained artists primarily used ink with pen for writing and drawing but eventually employed it with brush for painting like their Chinese colleagues. Found in Hubei province in the third century BCE, it was mixed with binders like animal glue or gums, carbon, and other matter. The end product offered a range of tone, coloration, brilliancy, and delicacy. John Winter describes this valuable commodity as sold “in little sticks which are rubbed with water on stone blocks or shallow mortars which contribute to the fragile character of the ink. It is sieved through a silk cloth to remove detritus.”20 Catherine Lynn observes, “The Chinese used simple carbon inks to outline the many elements included in [wallpaper] designs, and colored them with washes, often reserving areas of uncolored paper to add highlights.”21 In her article “Chinese Botanical Paintings for the Export Market,” Karina Corrigan of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, concurs that “outlining in ink is a traditional Chinese technique even though Westerners introduced the use of silver point for outlines on textiles, wallpapers and gouaches produced for the export market.”22 One consequence of the dominance of ink in Chinese art is a dearth of historical information about Chinese artists’ use of colored pigments. Among the early manuals on the fundamentals of painting, first appearing in the late Ming dynasty, the influential Mustard Seed Garden Manual (1679–1701) teaches the ancient cultural doctrine “yu pi yu mo,” “to have brush, to have ink.”23 Still, early painters used pure unmixed mineral and plant pigments simultaneously with ink, and later painters continued to do so. In the fifth century “combined mineral and plant pigments, in addition to the chemically manufactured lead white and red lead of antiquity” and imported colors became widespread. By the early fourteenth century, “scholar” painters had coined the term “academic style” to describe “the type of painting that employed mineral pigments such as azurite, malachite, and cinnabar” as “not sufficiently refined” and not of “equal status with ink-wash painting.”24 Such blue, green, and red pigments were used by fancy wallpaper painters of the Qing period after Manchu Emperor Qianlong’s expansion of the arts opened Chinese painting to influences from missionary painters like Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766). At this time colorist William Reeves found that mixing honey with gum Arabic prevented pigment cakes from drying up and allowed them to be molded into regular shapes. Prior to this discovery, pigments mixed with water-soluble gum—watercolors—were sold in dry lumps and then grated. In 1766 Reeves established Reeves & Son in London and supplied the British army and the East India Company with the first watercolor paint boxes,25 reinforcing the cross-cultural exchange of color mediums via the China trade. 252

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The Qing dynasty Blair House wallpaper conforms to the production methodology previously described: probably originally a 24-panel composition about 80 running feet (24.4 meters) in length, produced in or near Canton and hand painted using mineralbased watercolor paints and horsehair brushes. Pigments would most likely have been prepared by pounding or grinding with hand pestle and mortar.26 True to their training, the artists employed traditional watercolor painting techniques that stipulated the use of pure transparent colors directly on the starch-sized paper and no mixing of pigments with opaque whites or blacks. Once applied, colors could not be easily reworked. Variations were achieved by building up thin layers of paint, each allowed to dry between applications for the desired effect. Shadows painted in deeper shades of the same underlying hue or an analogous one, and highlights in complementary colors, helped give the birds and plants a very natural appearance. The blue foliage is veined in orange-brown and outlined in darker blue, not black. Shimmering variegated bird feathers are composed of hairline strokes of alternating hues and only the most sparing use of white accents. This traditional technique, called “threading,” produced a highly realistic effect, the result of Chinese artists’ direct observation of living species rather than the use of preserved and mounted specimens, as was the custom of Europeantrained artists.27 The accomplished use of color in the decorative arts of the Middle East and Asia has been acknowledged through the ages.28 Prior to the advent of chemical dyes, painters used natural dyes mainly derived from minerals, plants, insects, and seashells. Several were indigenous to those regions: plant-based indigo (India); mineral-based ultramarine (Afghanistan); scarlet from snail shells (Phoenicia); and papyrus from reeds in the Egyptian delta, also used by Arabs until replaced by vellum. Other important dyes were cochineal (see Chapter 6), cinnabar and lac (a purplish-red colored pigment).29 The Blair House wallpaper colors are primarily derived from minerals30 with possibly some plant or chemical dye pigments intermixed. The paper’s fanciful foliage is most likely of indigo blue mixed with a green. Before the advent of aniline dyes in the midnineteenth century, blue dyes were produced from the leaves of the indigo plant31 (see Chapters 8 and 9). One species, Indigofera tinctoria, traveled from India to Persia around the sixth century and China first imported it during the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE). Later trade expansion allowed its export to Europe and America.32 Treasured for its brilliancy, its use as a textile dye and painting pigment has been extolled for centuries. The early indigo-making process was complex, with many alternating and repeated steps: layering, wetting, fermenting, and drying. The processed indigo was then ground with a mortar and pestle, mixed with liquid glue and left to settle; the tincture that floated to the top was skimmed off, stored in jars and shipped to China in the form of mud, that is, liquid indigo—a pigment more luminous than Prussian blue and highly valued commercially.33 Ultramarine blue, a natural pigment extracted from lapis lazuli and thus long considered the most costly pigment, was likely imported by the Chinese from Afghanistan, where its mineral source is found in abundance.34 The extensive use of deep blue pigment in the Blair House paper reinforces its source as likely the more economical indigo, while the expensive ultramarine may have been used for accents only, as on the peacocks’ feathers, if at all. 253

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In A Tint Book of Historical Colours Suitable for Decorative Work, first published in 1934, paint purveyors Thos. Parsons & Sons Ltd of London describe the shades of green most popular in Asia: Greens were much loved by the orientals, Apple Green especially. It was used in light colour, particularly on Persian Pottery; a darker shade being more common in China. A bluer and darker green was known as Cucumber Green. A brilliant Emerald Green is also seen on many pieces of Famille Verte Chinese ware.35

The Blair House wallpaper’s dramatic blue-green background owes its impact to a mixture much like cucumber green in a lighter wash, also similar to verdigris— “a collective term for copper acetates of different chemical composition, which range in color from green … to blue …”. The Chinese made a deep green material by “painting sheets of ‘yellow copper’ (brass?) with vinegar and covering them with chaff, the produce being scraped off each day” and made into a verdigris-like mineral pigment.36 Greeks called verdigris “copper flowers” or “fur-tongue,” referring to the appearance of verdigris deposit on copper plate. In France, the paint was a byproduct of the vineyards achieved by inserting copper plates in marc, the vinegary solid residue left after wine fermentation, and English verdigris was made with apple cider vinegar—both processes comparable to the Chinese method.37 Other blues and greens in the Blair House paper are likely azurite and malachite, both basic copper carbonates sharing similar preparatory stages: pulverizing, sieving, decanting. Chinese alchemical literature from the late fourth to early fifth centuries references these pigments, the most widely used in East Asian paintings and thought to have been introduced from China around the seventh century.38 Author Yu Feian advises modern Chinese artists working in the traditional style to follow the master nature painters’ technique for exploiting these colors’ relative opacity: Azurite and malachite should both be used in painting peacocks, parrots, and other birds … put down an ink ground of varied shades and depth … use azurite and malachite as covering washes on top … when the covering washes of blue and green are sufficient and after applying alum, wipe the surface with a cloth and then apply layered washes of indigo or grass green. Last of all, “thread” the feathers—“threading” is a technical term that means to paint in fine lines.39

Prussian blue, a non-mineral pigment made around 1704 in Berlin (see Chapter 10), could also figure in the Blair House paper. “There is good evidence that the imported material was first used in East Asian art and both Dutch and Chinese traders participated in this trade.”40 Cinnabar, the red form of mercuric sulfide, has long held global prominence as a painting pigment.41 It appears throughout the Blair House example as an accent color in birds’ feathers and tree and other plant blossoms (see Plate 43). A limestone derivative of crystalline structure, it is also known as “Chensha” cinnabar after a production site in Chenzhou, Hunan Province.42 John Winter comments on China’s “unusually rich deposits of cinnabar, located especially in the Southern provinces of Guizhou and Hunan,” where it was extracted by “hand picking large crystals and panning the crushed 254

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ore in water” to yield clean cinnabar.43 Noting the numerous mines throughout China, especially in the south where Canton is located, a case can be made that the cinnabar mixed to make the red paint in the Blair House paper was probably mined locally. Vermillion, another possible red in this wallpaper, is an artificial chemical equivalent of cinnabar manufactured in a dry or wet process. “Since about the fifth or sixth century, when cinnabar/vermillion was found in cave murals of Tiantishan and Mogao, it has been heralded as a standard red pigment for most kinds of painting in China.”44 The use of yellow in the Blair House paper ranges from earthy yellow ochre in the rocky landscape and flowers along the bottom of the panels to bright yellow-gold on the sun-lit breasts of finches and beaks of thrushes. A dull brownish yellow also identified as iron oxide yellow, yellow ochre is a natural earthy pigment known in Chinese as tu huang. The literature on this color is slight. Its use as a pigment in Japan is well documented, less so in China, although evidence of it has been found on murals in the Mogao Caves, on a painted sculpture and silk painting from Turfan in the Tang period, on wall paintings from the Yuan period, and on central Chinese wall paintings of the Ming period. It lacks the quality of brightness of the related golden yellows such as orpiment or gamboges described on the birds above.45 Neutral shades dominate the landscape features and are sparingly used for flora and fauna. Rocks, tree roots, and ground are mostly shades of brown and grey, probably combinations of ochre and iron oxide paints. The rooster and hen, many white-breasted birds, and blooming white flowers are most likely painted in chalk white from the provinces of Shanxi, Anhui, and Henan, or lead white, also called “foreign” or Mandarin white46 (see Plate 44). Blacks appear to be the traditional mixture of soot with animal glue or ink with egg white and, in some cases, mixtures of dark blue and brown pigments.47 Although fancy wallpapers were made primarily as commercial exports with European, particularly British, tastes in mind, Chinese artists did not sacrifice their indigenous training in creating these products. The influence of their own culture shows in their interpretations, as in the natural realism of the birds painted from life previously noted. Among the six key principles defining Chinese painting, established by fifthcentury writer, art historian, and critic Xie He, “Spirit Resonance,” the vitality or overall energy of an artwork, was foremost.48 The Blair House wallpaper’s lush panorama of “living” nature—a plethora of colorful animated birds and insects interacting within a bountiful garden—embodies this crucial aesthetic quality. Herons, cranes, parrots, peacocks, eagles, magpies, pheasants, thrushes, and others—all faithfully rendered native Asian species—are realistically captured in their many characteristic attitudes: mid-flight, perching or hanging upside down from branches, splashing in water, gazing about, and picking their way along the ground. The Mustard Seed Garden Manual divides birds into two classes, mountain birds and water birds—both featured in the Blair House paper—and details the hierarchy of painting them: the beak first, then eyes strategically placed above the upper beak; the head and feathers drawn around the lower face and top shoulders using large and small brushstrokes in half circles or long and short tapering strokes; wing tips carefully drawn, followed by feathers along and under the tail and spine; breast and stomach and finally legs. Chinese artists also customarily painted birds in pairs, often male and female together, as in the Blair House paper.49 255

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Golden pheasant couples perch on rocks and bask in imagined sunlight, in keeping with their iconography in Chinese lore as emblems of beauty, good fortune, and Imperial authority. Pairs of blue herons and laughing thrushes shelter together beneath shrubs and tree branches, while mandarin ducks—symbolic of felicity and conjugal fidelity— sport together in a silvery-colored pond centering this wallpaper Garden of Eden. As interior walls of European and American city and manor homes were graced with intricate and colorfully rendered garden-theme papers, their actual gardens were ornamented with numerous horticultural plantings of Asian origins. “Chinese plants were first brought to Europe in the late seventeenth century, but access to new varieties of Asian species was not feasible until the last years of the eighteenth century.”50 Like other exports/imports, such plantings were transported via the East India Company, many of whose officers are reputed to have been amateur botanists collecting and sharing knowledge of specimens and botanical paintings. Ernest Henry “Chinese” Wilson (1876–1930), a noted botanist and plant collector who became director of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University, remarked that central and western China had “beyond question the richest temperate flora in the world … [China was] simply a botanical paradise.”51 The Blair House paper “garden” is captured in full leaf and bloom as on a sunny day. Nearly all the flowering plants, certainly the peonies, hydrangeas, chrysanthemums, lilies, and hibiscus, represent species collected in Asia and introduced to Western gardens. Like its birds painted true-to-nature in a variety of specific poses to showcase the artists’ talents in observing and portraying nature, its many species of flowers are correspondingly painted in various stages of bloom consistent with principles detailed in the Mustard Seed Manual: “dew-laden or bending in the wind,” their leaves “fan yeh (a leaf that is turned over), che yeh (folded leaf ), or yen yeh (half-concealed leaf ).”52 The command of outlining, applying washes, and tinting required to paint specimens accurately in their entirety—blossom, calyx, stem, leaf, and base—is also visible throughout. Chrysanthemums, symbolic of long life, endurance, and joviality, are rendered here with blossoms facing upwards and painted shades of yellow, purple and pale green, as the Manual describes53 (see Plate 40 for a comparable example). Many varieties of peonies are known to have existed in China, where it is known as the “King of Flowers.” Pink, purple, and white types of peonies dominate this wallpaper. Pink and white blooming Asian magnolia and plum trees, rising from the baseboard and alternating around the room, reflect the changing seasons from spring to winter. Here the magnolias are entwined with passionflower and other vines; plum trees, identified with winter and long life—when their buds bloom their leaves fall—are rendered with branches bare but often juxtaposed with other flowering plants (see Plate 41). Garden-theme wallpapers like the Blair House example were especially popular choices for decorating the bedrooms and boudoirs of well-to-do English gentlewomen such as Elizabeth Crowley, Countess Ashburnham (1727–1781), the presumed original owner of this paper. A masterpiece of Chinese wallpaper art, it represents a garden for all seasons where all creatures coexist in harmony. The Chinese artists who created it, albeit a consumer product, nonetheless applied all their skills to render this example in the most accomplished and appealing way—staying true to their training in the 256

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natural depiction of birds and plant life but setting them against a purely decorative background color, the latter most likely chosen to appeal to a foreign buyer’s fancy, if not of that consumer’s own choosing.

Fancy Wallpaper Revival The trend for Chinese fancy wallpapers began to fade in the early nineteenth century. The influence of Neoclassicism and advent of novel French-made scenic panorama papers, as well as technical strides in printing resulting in better-quality domestically made papers, contributed to the imports’ decline. By 1844 the Art Union reported, “The Indian or Chinese papers are now chiefly in use for screens, or for very dark rooms, and are not likely to be again very popular …,”54 a prediction that primarily reflected European tastes. As global trade expanded, Asian cultures became more familiar to Europeans and Americans who began to see them as less strange and “exotic.” Although Union blockades of waterways during the Civil War restricted the American market for imports at mid-century, Chinese fancy wallpapers remained popular here through the nineteenth century and would enjoy even later revivals. They have consistently retained their appeal for well-to-do American homeowners with traditional tastes, love of history and antiques, and preference for period-appropriate décor for their collections. Growing interest in restoring old historic buildings in the US in the second quarter of the twentieth century brought renewed attention and value to these attractive antique papers as wall, screen, and other decorative coverings. As designers, collectors, and enthusiasts sought them, vendors emerged to fill the need. Charles R. Gracie’s family-run business, established in 1898 in New York City as a source for custom lamps made from vases and other exotic accessories, expanded in the 1920s to include Asian antiques and specialized in Chinese and Japanese furniture, screens, and porcelains. Intrigued by a roll of hand painted wallpaper discovered in Beijing in the 1930s by a textile trader friend, Gracie knew he could market such a product and established what would become a long-standing relationship with the Chinese studio that created it.55 Meanwhile, the last Earl of Ashburnham died in 1924 and the last Ashburnham family member, Lady Catherine, died in 1952. The elegant boudoir wallpaper was removed and auctioned with the contents of Ashburnham Place by Sotheby’s, London, in June and July 1953 to settle the estate. Charles R. Gracie & Sons purchased it through the London-based antique wallpaper agent Sylvia Brothers. The paper was shipped to Gracie’s New York studio and stored there until 1959, when it was sent to Hong Kong for remounting, a complex year-long process. It returned to New York in 1960 for artistic touchup by Italian decorative painter Lucillo Grassi, a Gracie employee who spent nearly 100 hours skillfully restoring the paper’s beautiful birds and blooms to new life. Four more years passed before it finally found a permanent home at Blair House.56 Jacqueline Kennedy’s White House restoration in the early 1960s, a milestone in American historic preservation, strongly influenced interior design nationally and re-introduced historic wallpapers as a decorating feature to a new generation. To help 257

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shape her vision of the President’s House to express its complex role as home to our first families, venue for affairs of state, and cultural heritage symbol, Mrs. Kennedy brought together the era’s leading experts as advisors and designers to realize her goal of stately interiors based on historic documents. The project approached the White House rooms holistically and included historic wallpapers in their new design schemes along with period-appropriate window treatments and compatible antique furnishings. The idea of using donated, restored mid-nineteenth century French wallpapers in the family dining room and the Diplomatic Reception Room, among other “international” elements of the restoration, came from the first lady’s French advisor Stephane Boudin, president and lead designer of the Paris firm Maison Jansen. Former White House curator Betty Monkman describes Boudin’s “background of working in grand European houses” as appealing to “Mrs. Kennedy who thought that he provided a sense of state and grandeur to the White House.” Boudin helped plan “dramatic window and wall treatments in the state rooms, where his aesthetic sense resulted in a strong visual impact … He advised Jacqueline Kennedy on paint colors, fabrics, and drapery treatments and arrangements of furniture, lighting fixtures, and paintings.” With co-advisors Henry Francis DuPont, owner/creator of Winterthur, and society decorator Sister Parish, Mrs. Kennedy’s project imbued the White House with a uniquely American mix of private family comfort, museum historicity, and international state ceremony.57 Widely reported in the media, notably in the First Lady’s February 1962 CBS News televised tour seen by nearly one third of the nation,58 the results were copied in public and private residences across the country. A comparable refurbishment of Blair House began later that year (Fig. 15.3). Mrs. Kennedy encouraged her friend Robin Chandler Duke, wife of incoming chief of protocol Angier Biddle Duke, to form an independent, nongovernment organization to raise private funds for restoring Blair House like the Fine Arts Committee for the White House. The Blair House Fine Arts Committee (BHFAC) came together in April 1963 with Jacqueline Kennedy as Honorary Chairman, Lady Bird Johnson as Honorary Co-Chairman, and Robin Duke as Chairman. Writing to Duke, Mrs. Kennedy expressed her vision for a renewed Blair House: Of course everything doesn’t have to be American—English—Queen Anne & Chippendale— which Harry DuPont decided were too early for W.H. could go there and soon, at least by this Fall when I hope to be quite organized and have everything catalogued. I will have lots of good furniture for you which you might want, that we haven’t been able to place—even four poster beds—if you want them. NOTHING like the bathroom-scale stuff in the warehouse you saw—I promise!59

The tragic events ending the Kennedy administration that fall delayed but did not derail this promising beginning. Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Duke continued to see things through. The prominent double drawing rooms of the Lee House part of the complex were among several areas still to be done. Donors emerged to support the project, including C. Douglas Dillon, then Secretary of the Treasury and a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Ardent antiquarians and philanthropists, he and his wife Phyllis Ellsworth Dillon had built a significant collection of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury art, underwrote the decoration of the Blue and Red Rooms, and gave the latter’s American Empire furniture to the Kennedy White House restoration project. 258

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15.3 Lee Drawing Room, c. 1962, before the installation of the Chinese wallpaper. Courtesy of Blair House, Office of the Curator, US Department of State

In May 1964 Washington Post society columnist Maxine Cheshire publicly announced the Dillons’ gift of “an 18th-Century Chinese Chippendale drawing room … one of six scheduled for restoration in the summer.” From the couple’s initial contribution of $50,000, Phyllis Dillon purchased the Ashburnham Place Chinese wallpaper from Charles R. Gracie & Sons, Inc., on 26 June 1964, for $12,500. The couple gifted it to Blair House for the Lee Drawing Room. An invoice of 14 October 1964 from McMillan, Inc., New York, the interior design firm then headed by Eleanor S. Brown, consultant to the project, states “Walls prepared, hung with muslin and lining paper, antique Chinese wallpaper panels mounted. Woodwork painted and sections of wallpaper added to bottom (Per P. Guertler Invoice) $1800.00.”60 Brown also assisted Mrs Dillon’s selection of additional eighteenth-century furnishings to augment existing period pieces and complement the wallpaper, among them an English circa-1770 matched pair of mahogany “Chinese Chippendale” sofas, a circa-1775 English mahogany settee, a pair of circa-1790 English mahogany demi-lune tables, a Regency black japanned and gilt chinoiserie chest, and a variety of Chinese export porcelains from Kang Xi, Ming, and Qing dynasties. The January 1965 House and Garden magazine published the results: an eclectic stylistic mix of American, English, and Asian pieces, dominated by the Chinese wallpaper and reflecting Mrs. Dillon’s and her designer’s midtwentieth-century concept of an eighteenth-century English chinoiserie drawing room decorated as a stage befitting official diplomatic events.61 259

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Blair House required another major renovation early in the Reagan administration when, among other issues, plumbing failures had caused water damage to the Lee Drawing Room. Led by chief of protocol Selwa “Lucky” Roosevelt, a comprehensive $15 million upgrade was accomplished between 1982 and 1988 that included redecoration of all rooms by noted designers Mark Hampton and Mario Buatta. The Lee Drawing Room received a face-lift with new fabrics and furnishing arrangements coordinated by Buatta. C. Douglas Dillon again generously contributed funds enabling Charles R. Gracie & Sons, Inc., to remove and again restore the Chinese wallpaper. The same Hong Kong studio that first restored the paper for Gracie in the 1950s assisted, and the paper was re-installed by Gerhard Franze, who had also installed it in 1964. Originally affixed above a chair rail molding in Ashburnham Place, the paper had been mounted at Blair House with its bottom edge along the baseboard and cropped at the ceiling cornice to fit the Lee Drawing Room’s 12-foot-high (3.66 meter) walls, the latter prepared with oil base paint for good adhesion of the muslin-backed panels. Because fluctuating interior climate conditions could cause movement of the paper resulting in tears and flaking paint, the muslin-backed panels were not attached to frames for wall-mounting as in the eighteenth century. Instead they were directly applied to the prepared walls. A black light examination has revealed no evidence of any identifying maker or sequencing marks, although the panels could be numbered on the reverse on the muslin lining. Internal correspondence and sequentially lettered snapshots taken of the panels before removal in the 1980s indicate the series was installed in 1964 beginning with the first panel on the east wall, the northeast corner of the rear drawing room. The uppermost and lowest parts of the walls, about a foot (30 cm) each, were hand painted in traditional watercolors to blend with the paper’s design; areas of loss along seams and some scattered spots throughout were touched up with paint and collaged with cut-out birds and flowers from the original wallpaper—as was done in eighteenth-century installations—to complete the project.62 Through ongoing conservation, the wallpaper continues to inspire discussion and delight among international and domestic visitors who enter the Lee Drawing Room, where it remains a vibrant and engaging backdrop for the official ceremonies welcoming important guests. It is fitting that this unique and colorful fancy wallpaper—a product of the meeting of different cultures—should adorn our nation’s official guest house, where people from around the globe come together in mutual respect to accomplish common goals, as did officials in eighteenth-century Canton where this remarkable work of art was born.

Notes 1. Verner Panton, Lidt om Farver: Notes on Colour (Copenhagen: Danish Design Center, Udgivet af, 1997), 22. 2. Barty Phillips, Tapestry (London: Phaidon, 1994), 24. 3. Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943), 324. Margaret Jourdain and R. Soame Jenyns, Chinese Export Art in the Eighteenth Century (London: Spring, 1967), 25.

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4. Gill Saunders, Wallpaper in Interior Decorations (London: V&A Publications, 2002), 70. 5. For more information on Blair House, see Candace Shireman, “To Be Preserved For All Time”: The Major and The President Save Blair House (Washington: The White House Historical Association, 2009). 6. David Beevers, ed., Chinese Whispers: Chinoiserie in Britain 1650–1930, exh. cat. (Brighton: Royal Pavilion & Museums, 2008), 130. 7. Saunders, Wallpaper, 2002, 63–64, paraphrasing William Chambers, Design of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines and Utensils (London, 1757). For Chambers’ full description of Chinese house interiors and their wall treatments, see the republication of his 1757 book (New York: Benjamin Bloom, Inc., 1968), 7–8, plate 10. 8. Gill Saunders, “The China Trade: Oriental Painted Panels,” in The Papered Wall: History, Pattern, Technique, ed., Lesley Hoskins (New York: Abrams, 1994), 42, 48; Saunders, Wallpaper, 68. 9. Elaine Gibbs and Candace Shireman, “Flights of Fancy at Blair House,” Washington Antiques Show Catalogue (2010), 57. 10. Arts of the Ming Dynasty: China’s Age of Brilliance (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009), at http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event. 11. James Cahill, The Painter’s Practice: How Artists Lived and Worked in Traditional China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 102–03. 12. Ibid., 103, 105. Pauline Webber, “A Souvenir From Guangzhou,” Conservation Journal 48, Autumn (2004): 1. 13. Pauline Webber, “Chinese Wallpapers in the British Galleries,” Conservation Journal 39, Autumn (2001): 1. 14. Brian Gracie of Gracie, Inc., oral interview with author, 30 April 2009. Saunders, Wallpaper, 70; Saunders, “The China Trade,” 42. In the latter, at p. 45, Saunders mentions 25 or 40 panel sets usually 12 feet (3.66 meters) long and 3 to 4 feet (0.9 to 1.22 meters) wide. Gibbs and Shireman, “Flights of Fancy,” 50–51. 15. Hunter, Papermaking, 24. 16. Ibid., 51–52, 56–58, 63. 17. Pauline Webber, “Exchange Visit to the National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan,” Conservation Journal 5, October (1992): 3–4. 18. Gibbs and Shireman, “Flights of Fancy,” 55–57. John Winter describes “xuan paper [as] the timehonored favorite of painters and calligraphers. Xuan derives from the manufacturing location of Xuanzhou (present-day Xuancheng) in Anhui province. Xuan paper is mentioned in Tang period documents.” See John Winter, East Asian Paintings: Materials, Structures and Deterioration Mechanisms (London: Archetype, 2008), 68. 19. Jerome Silbergeld, Chinese Painting Style: Media, Methods, and Principles of Form (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1982), 5. 20. Winter, East Asian Paintings, 46. 21. Catherine Lynn, Wallpaper in America from the Seventeenth Century to World War I (New York: Norton, 1980), 99. 22. Karina H. Corrigan, “Chinese Botanical Paintings for the Export Market,” The Magazine Antiques, June 2004, 99. 23. Winter, East Asian Paintings, 9.

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24. Yu Feian, Chinese Painting Colors: Studies of Their Preparation and Application in Traditional and Modern Times, trans. Jerome Silbergeld and Amy McNair (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press; and Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1988), 21, 29. 25. Victoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette (New York: Random House, 2002), 17–18. 26. Winter, East Asian Paintings, 95. 27. Feian, Chinese Painting Colors, 79; Gibbs and Shireman, “Flights of Fancy,” 57–58. 28. A Tint Book of Historical Colours Suitable for Decorative Work (London: Thos. Parsons & Sons Ltd., 1934; 5th edn 1954), 16. 29. Phillips, Tapestry, 22–24; A Tint Book, 29; Brain Gracie of Gracie, Inc., oral interview with author, 30 April 2009. Winter, East Asian Paintings, 19; Feian, Chinese Painting Colors, 21. 30. Brian Gracie, oral interview with author, 30 April 2009. Since its discovery in 1953, the Blair House wallpaper has undergone three restorations by a Chinese wallpaper studio that has worked with Gracie, Inc., for almost 60 years. Knowledge of the origins of the paper’s colors and other physical aspects comes from those expert restorations. 31. Winter, East Asian Paintings, 29. Isatis tinctoris, known in Europe as woad, was the plant source for blue color in the West and probably was introduced to China around the sixteenth century. 32. Maria Serena I. Diokno and Ramon N. Villegas, Kasaysayan: The Story of the Filipino People: Life in the Colony (Hong Kong: Asia Publishing, 1998), 61. 33. Feian, Chinese Painting Colors, 14–15. Diokno and Villegas, Kasaysayan, 61. 34. Winter, East Asian Paintings, 30–31. 35. A Tint Book, 17. 36. Winter, East Asian Paintings, 27, referencing Y.-H. Sung, T’ien-kung K’ai-wu: Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century, trans. E.-T.Z. Sun and S.-C. Sun (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966) 287; Y.-H. Sung and Tien-kung Kai-wu, Exploitation of the Work of Nature, Chinese Agriculture and Technology in the Seventeenth Century, Chinese Culture Series 2–3 (Taipei: China Academy, English trans., 1980), 419. 37. Finlay, Color, 269. 38. Winter, East Asian Paintings, 26, 28–29. 39. Feian, Chinese Painting Colors, 79. 40. Winter, East Asian Paintings 32–33. 41. Ibid., 14. 42. Feian, Chinese Painting Colors, 4. 43. Winter, East Asian Paintings 14. 44. Ibid., 14–16. A detailed description of the dry/wet manufacturing technique may be found at 15–16. 45. Ibid., 22–23. 46. Feian, Chinese Painting Colors, 9. 47. Lynn, Wallpaper in America, 43, 46, 99. 48. See http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Chinese_painting#Color.

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49. Chieh Tzu Yuan Hua Chuan, 1679–1701, The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, facs. of 1887– 88 Shanghai edn, trans. and ed. Mai-Mai Sze (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 535–36, 564–65. 50. Corrigan, “Chinese Botanical Paintings,” 92. 51. Ibid., 94. 52. Chuan, Mustard Seed Garden Manual, 473. 53. Ibid., 435–37. 54. Lynn, Wallpaper in America, 106. 55. See Gracie, Inc., website at http://www.graciestudio.com. Gracie’s relationship with the Chinese wallpaper studio continued until the 1949 revolution, when the studio relocated to Taiwan. Decades later it returned to mainland China and “Gracie’s studios in the orient have been managed by the same Chinese family for fifty years.” Today hand painted wallpapers—old and new—remain Gracie’s signature product line. 56. Rosoman to Gibbs, 25 March 2009; Gracie to Gibbs, April and May 2009. 57. Betty C. Monkman, The White House: Its Historic Furnishings and First Families (Washington DC and New York: White House Historical Association and Abbeville Press, 2000), 239–41. Elaine Rice Bachmann, “Circa 1961: The Kennedy White House Interiors,” White House History 14, Winter (2004): 19. 58. Perry Wolff, A Tour of the White House with Mrs John F. Kennedy (New York: Doubleday, 1962), 9. 59. Jacqueline Kennedy to Robin Duke, 7 April and 1 October 1963, copy and original letters respectively; Robin Duke to BHFAC members, 18 July 1963, “Transcript of Proceedings, The Blair House Fine Arts Committee,” 16 April 1963. All in BHFAC Records 1961–69, the letters in Committee Members Files, folders “Mrs Angier Biddle Duke” and “Mrs John F. Kennedy” respectively, Office of the Curator, Blair House. 60. Maxine Cheshire, “Blair House Rooms Scheduled For Face Lifting During Summer,” Washington Post (Wednesday, 20 May 1964, Section B: City Life in Greater Washington), B1; McMillan, Inc., invoice 14 October 1964, file copy stamped “Protocol Office K. Laird-Dillon Acct.”; Clippings File and Object File #BH-1964.0148, respectively, Office of the Curator, Blair House. 61. “Department of State For The Press,” press release no. 458, 19 October 1964; Mrs Angier Biddle Duke, “Only in America: Blair House,” House and Garden ( January 1965): 90–91, BHFAC Records and Publications File respectively, Office of the Curator, Blair House. For an intriguing look at mid-eighteenth-century chinoiserie interiors as similar “stages” for personal and social interactions, see Stacey Sloboda, “Fashioning Bluestocking Conversation: Elizabeth Montagu’s Chinese Room,” Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors (Farnham and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2010). 62. Selwa “Lucky” Roosevelt, Keeper of the Gate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 83. Sarah Booth Conroy, “Chronicles: Blair-Lee’s Renew Deal,” The Washington Post (Sunday, 22 September 1987): G1, 6.

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16 Butterflies, Spiders, and Shells: Coloring Natural History Illustrations in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain Beth Fowkes Tobin

The publication of the natural history book in the eighteenth century was not a simple process. As Wilfrid Blunt and William Stearn attest, the large format, illustrated natural history books of the second half of the eighteenth century were among Britain’s greatest contributions to the Enlightenment, but they were also projects that were fraught with much anxiety for those who ventured into this arena.1 Publishing an illustrated natural history book was a collaborative process, requiring complex interactions and the coordination of efforts between authors and several other people, including natural history collectors, artists, engravers, printers, colorists, and booksellers.2 Producing the illustrations for natural history books, if they were to be of scientific value, depended on access to specimens, with artists as well as colorists needing to see actual specimens so that their images worked as guides to a particular field of natural history study whether it be botany, ornithology, malacology, or entomology. Blending art with science, these illustrated books were crucial in enabling naturalists to identify and classify their specimens of plants, birds, shells, and insects. For this reason, accuracy in depiction of specimens was a much sought-after quality in the natural history book, something that naturalists cared about passionately and the authors of these books worked hard to achieve. Accuracy in the depiction of natural history specimens may seem to us today a quaint concern, one that does not recognize what we now know, thanks to poststructuralism, as the semiotic impossibility of a one-to-one correspondence between the image and the object the image represents. From our post-postmodern vantage the concern for accuracy of depiction may seem naïve, but for these earnest amateur naturalists, illustrations were key to the process of naming their specimens and bringing order to their collections. This desire for accuracy is conveyed with much force in the preface to Dru Drury’s three volumes of Illustrations of Exotic Insects (1770–82) and in his letters to Moses Harris, the artist he hired to draw and color the illustrations for his book. 265

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He announced in the preface that his “plan of giving just and accurate figures” had been carried out in these volumes: the utmost care and nicety has been observed, both in the outlines, and engraving. Nothing has been strained, or carried beyond the bounds nature has set; and whoever will compare the engravings with the originals, I flatter myself will allow, that nothing is borrowed from fancy; or any colour given to an insect that does not really exist in the subject intended to be represented.3

Before the age of lithography and the widespread adoption of the mechanical reproduction of color in printed materials, the engraved illustration was colored by hand. This chapter asks: by whose hand? There are multiple answers to this question. Though it is common knowledge that women and children were hired to color in these engraved images, little sustained research has been done on answering questions about these people.4 Under what conditions did these colorists work, what materials did they use, and how were they remunerated? Answering these questions is not easy since these artworkers generally existed below the level of notice in the textual records of publishers’, authors’, and artists’ correspondence. However, extant are a few sources that invite our investigation and make possible the recovery of the some of processes by which natural history illustrations were colored. Among these sources are the letters of a small group of amateur naturalists who corresponded with each other during the 1770s and 1780s about their twin passions of collecting natural history specimens and producing artwork depicting their specimens. The amateur naturalists who corresponded with each other are Dru Drury, a successful London jeweler, amateur entomologist, and author of Exotic Insects; Moses Harris, a passionate amateur entomologist, professional artist, and very successful engraver, who authored and illustrated several lovely books on butterflies and bugs as well as the treatise The Natural System of Colours (1766); Thomas Martyn, a natural history dealer, who was also himself a collector and illustrator of natural history specimens, and author of The Universal Conchologist (1784, 1789) among other natural history books; and Henry Seymer, a wealthy country gentleman, a natural history collector, and gifted amateur artist. In this discussion, I will examine what emerges from their correspondence about the three different ways that color was applied to engraved illustrations: 1) the author would hire artists and colorists to color the engraved illustrations; 2) the author who was also an artist would color his own work; and 3) the owner of the book would color in the engraved illustrations, using his own specimens as a guide. I will examine these different methods of coloring, giving an example of each, as I try to recover the materiality of the practice of producing colored illustrations for natural history books, a subject overlooked in book history.

Drury’s Exotic Insects To understand the desire to have accurately drawn and colored illustrations and the kinds of production problems that satisfying this need involved, I turn to Dru Drury, who discussed these issues with frankness in the preface to his book and in his unpublished letters. Drury’s concern with reproduction of “just and accurate figures” 266

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can be explained, in part, as the result of his being an entomologist. Of all the branches of natural history, in entomology, the study of insects, the specimen’s color was central to the classification process. Plants were identified using the Linnaean system that focused on the structure of the flower, specifically the pistils and stamens; color was incidental, a product of variation within species, and not an identifier of the species itself. Linnaeus did not want what few illustrations he had to be colored as he thought color would distract botanists from paying attention to the flower’s anatomy, which was central to its classification.5 Likewise, the color of shells, which could certainly be very beautiful, was not crucial in the identification of mollusks as they could be identified through attention to their shapes, patterns, and formal features. To identify insects, collectors and naturalists needed to take color into account. However, one also suspects that color was important for other reasons, having to do with an aesthetic appreciation of the variety of hues and tones that insect bodies and wings displayed.6 In short, the color of insects was an integral part of the experience of collecting insects, an aspect of collecting that gave collectors a great deal of pleasure, and as a result, the coloring of illustrations was an issue that provoked great concern among entomologists. One of Drury’s goals with his book, Exotic Insects, was to preserve his specimens, especially moths and butterflies, from “oblivion, by thus delineating them on paper.” Because moths and butterflies are “of such tender and delicate natures,” sunlight destroys “their colours” and air will “totally consume every part of them, leaving nothing behind but a little dust.” Drury explained: “however pleasing and agreeable they may be to our sight, they are not easily preserved in all their gay and striking plumage” (1: xiii). Drury saw his task as the author and publisher of these volumes filled with illustrations of the insects he had collected as engaged in battling the forces of time and decay. Concerned with the preservation of his insects through the medium of the book, he agonized about the inadequacy of words to communicate to readers the colors and shapes that he was attempting to describe. He complained in his preface that there are no standard names for the variety of colors that exist: “I laboured under no little trouble from a want of knowing what names to give to many colours found on the wings of some of the farinaceous tribe. The want of a Series, or standard for names to colours, is a matter much to be lamented in this kingdom.” Drury attests to the difficulty of writing descriptions, complaining that “the great variety of tints to be found on the insects, the harshness of some, the softness of others, together with their manner of running into one another … renders descriptions a matter of such labor that nothing but the strongest resolution and perseverance could overcome” (1: xiv). Although he lamented the inadequacy of the English language to convey color, an example of his writing demonstrates, at least to my mind, that his written descriptions of his insects convey the complexity of pattern and color in specimens. Of one figure on Plate V of Volume I, he writes: Upperside. The Antennae, are brown, outwardly, and white underneath; the ends being yellow.—The Head, Thorax, Abdomen and Bases of the wings are tawny orange.—The Superior Wings, are dentated; the Tips, and external edges, are dark brown, nearly black; on which five white spots near the tips, the largest being round. The remainder of the wings is a fine orange brown, with several black marks thereon, near the anterior edges (1: 10).

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Drury’s anxiety about accuracy of color in the illustrations was somewhat mitigated by the detailed descriptions he wrote; he saw his descriptions as a check on the colorists’ propensity for error and the tendency to paint engraved insect illustrations in colors that did not match the specimens or his descriptions. Drury suggested that one way to deal with possible coloring errors was to compare his written descriptions against the images in the various volumes of Exotic Insects; if the written description said the butterfly’s wings were tawny orange, but the corresponding illustration showed the wings to be brown, then the reader knew the illustration was faulty. Drury encouraged those who purchased his book to report to him any errors in coloring so that he might see to their correction in future volumes. Drury also took heart that if any of his volumes circulated after his death, when he could no longer check the colored illustrations against the original subjects and pull them from circulation, that colorists would be able to gather enough information about the proper colors from his descriptions of insects to do an adequate job of coloring. If this work should fall into the hands of a bookseller, after my decease, the public would not probably be pestered with copies so execrably coloured, as is generally the case with books of this sort, after the author’s death; the descriptions will be such a guide for colouring the prints, that capital errors will not be able to find admittance; the grossness of colouring a part yellow that should be red, or green that ought to be blue, would immediately be detected; and the publisher, for his own sake, would undoubtedly be careful to have the prints justly and accurately done (1: xvi).

The proliferation of “execrably” colored plates that he saw as plaguing most natural history publications would be halted, he hoped, by his descriptions and a publisher who was willing to police this process. Drury located the problem of inaccurately colored illustrations in the dynamics between the publisher and the artists responsible for coloring the illustrations. He believed that if the publisher were not vigilant in examining the colored illustrations and demanding that they be properly colored, then the colorists would get away with poor work. Drury announced to his audience: “if the reader should chance to meet with any part among them [his verbal descriptions], that does not entirely correspond with the colour given in the print, he will impute it to its proper cause, the painter” (1: xiv). Painters, in this case an artist or colorists hired to color in the illustrations, were to blame, according to Drury, for the inaccurate depiction of his beloved insects. Artists were always being blamed for the poor quality of natural history illustrations, and specifically for failing to draw and color the specimens accurately. Dru Drury thought he had figured a way around this problem by employing Moses Harris as his illustrator and colorist. Harris was himself an amateur entomologist and had in the previous decade published a fabulous book on butterflies and moths, The Aurelian: a Natural History of English Moths and Butterflies (1766), as well as a short treatise on color theory, The Natural System of Colours (1766). Remarkably, Harris drew, engraved, and colored all the illustrations himself for his Aurelian, doing the same for his book An Exposition of English Insects (1776), the title page of which announces: “the whole illustrated with copper plates, drawn, engraved and coloured by the author, MOSES HARRIS.” In this way he avoided the conflict that inevitably arose between author and 268

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artist as well as between artist and engraver, managing to produce a lovely book that became a classic in entomological circles and was a much sought-after item for natural history buffs well into the nineteenth century. Today, it continues to be a valued book by lepidopterists, entomologists, amateur naturalists, and collectors of illustrated natural history books (see Plate 45). Harris shared Drury’s obsession with the coloring process for illustrations and in his attempts to standardize the use and mixing of colors, he produced what some consider the first color wheel to take into account the results of mixing colors, what Drury called “that innumerable train of colours that is to be done from only a yellow, a red, and a blue” (1: xiv). Harris’s wheel has four concentric circles, moving outward from the inner circle, that contains a total of 18 colors, which are made up of what he called the three prismatic colors (our primary colors) placed on the circle at the noon, four, and eight o’clock positions on an analog clockface, accompanied by those colors which were produced by mixing primary colors—orange, green, and purple (he called them compound colors), and those colors which were the product of mixing primary with compound colors, such as red-orange or yellow-orange. As he explains, The colour or teint [tint (Harris uses “teinture” in French version)] in each compartment of the inner circle, is composed or partakes of the joint powers of those situated on each side: thus between the red and yellow, is orange; between the yellow and blue, is green; and between the blue and read is the purple. The intermediate which makes up the rest of the circle partakes most of that colour to which it is nearest. Each of the teints which compose the two inner circles are made of only two of the prime colours, but those of the outer ones of all the three.7

What drove Harris to produce this color circle was not so much an interest in the theory of color (though he is often referred to as a color theorist) as his needs as an artist, and specifically as a natural history illustrator, as well as an author and publisher of illustrated natural history books. Motivated by what he referred to as “materially, or by the painters art,” he included this color wheel, first published in his treatise The Natural System of Colours, in another publication, An Exposition of English Insects with the publication date of 1776 on its title page, but which was really published in 1780 and reprinted three times in the 1780s.8 In the preface to English Insects, he explains that he included the color wheel in this book because, like Drury, he was worried that readers would not understand the terms that painters used to describe colors: In the descriptions [of the insects], I have made use of such terms with respect to colours and teints as may best serve to convey a proper idea of the colours in the insects described: but as these terms are little known by to painters, I have given, in a small scheme annexed, a kind of system, containing a variety of seventy-two different colours, which are placed in such a manner, as demonstrate at first sight, the dependance colours in general have on each other. Each teint is numbered, and the figure refers to a Catalogue which serves as an index to shew the name appropriate to each. I am far from proposing this scheme as a complete system, nor does it contain all the teints which decorate the subjects comprised in this work, one being as impossible as the other … The intention of this scheme then, is merely to assist the conception of the reader, and to give some idea of each meant by the terms in the Catalogue.9

Harris provided his readers with lists of names of colors that were portrayed on his color wheel, beginning with the inner circle with red, orange-red, red-orange, orange, 269

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yellow-orange, orange-yellow, yellow, and so forth. The names of colors become more complex as his lists of colors move outward from the center of the color wheel. Circle III contains these colors: red brown, copper brown, nut brown, brown, olive brown, brownish olive, yellow olive, green olive, greenish olive, olive, bluish olive, blue olive, grey, slate color, red slate, purple slate, purple brown, cinnamon. With his charts and lists, Harris displayed a deep concern for the role of color in identifying insects and the necessity of accuracy in painting natural history illustrations of insects. Drury thought that employing Harris as his illustrator and colorist, a man whose abilities and talents that had produced the meticulous and beautiful illustrations for his own volume on butterflies and moths, would help ensure that Drury’s Exotic Insects would be of the same caliber in terms of art production. Alas, as Drury discovered, things were not that simple.10 Drury’s correspondence with Harris reveals a level of frustration with Harris’s work that borders on outright anger, though they seem to have remained friends throughout this long process. Drury sold three versions of his volumes: with uncolored plates, with colored plates done in “a common manner,” and with color plates that had been painted in a “superior” fashion. He advertised that his first volume with handcolored prints was to be sold at the price of £2 12s 6d, but he also told select buyers that “there are some copies which I have done for my friends being coloured in a superior manner ye price of which is 5.5.0,” which was double the publicly advertised volume. Harris had begun working on the plates as early as 1766, or at least that is when Drury gave Harris his first payment. In 1770, Drury complained about how slowly Harris was working, and was especially upset that Harris was simply not producing enough “superior” colored plates to meet the demands of his friends. Judge then if I have not ye utmost reason to be alarmed least ye [the] work should be impeded in its publication by your delay[.] I aprise you I am so vexed at this matter that I cannot help writing to you in ye subject in ye angry manner I now do.11

Drury was worried about his reputation: “If I advertise ye work & not mention the best prints it will be using some persons ill as they will with reason think & if I mention them without having a proper stock I shall appear in a most ridiculous light.”12 After receiving some colored plates from Harris, Drury checked them for errors before allowing them to go out into the world. On one occasion, Drury wrote to Harris complaining that Figure 1 on Plate 12 was improperly colored. His outrage is palpable: Those 3 sets you did last you have made ye [the] spots in each of ye underwings or rather ye patches that are a beautiful saxon green in ye fly in ye plates are a mazarine blue & that part that runs over ye scarlet eyes on ye abdominal edges, you have made a pea green … Likewise in 2 other setts, this figure is colod. blue in one wing & green in ye other … I fancy you did them by candle light or you could not have erred so much.13

Drury wrote a few weeks later, saying “I fully expected they would have been finished by this time but I am sorry to say I cannot depend on you … Your neglect will prove very injurious to me.”14 Although Drury was frustrated with Harris’s pace and was annoyed at times by what he thought were errors in coloring, Drury was ultimately successful in this collaboration with Harris, for Exotic Insects was considered to be a “noble and 270

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very magnificent” work, an endeavor that earned Drury the respect of his peers and admiration of fellow entomologists.15

Book Owners as Colorists Henry Seymer, a natural history buff and a very talented amateur artist, collected insects, shells, birds, and plants. He reckoned that he owned more butterflies and moths than the Duchess of Portland, who was a friend of his and one of the preeminent natural history collectors of her time. He proudly boasted in a diary entry in 1776 that “the Duchess of Portland has now 530 species of English Lepidoptera … In mine I find 696 species (more or less), for tis impossible to be quite exact.”16 As a devoted collector and amateur entomologist and a man of some means, Seymer bought all three volumes of Dru Drury’s Exotic Insects. However, with the first volume he chose not to purchase Moses Harris’s handcolored volume and instead colored the illustrations himself. In 1770 he wrote to his friend Richard Pulteney, a fellow naturalist and collector, that he was very busy: “what little [daylight] there is, I must employ as yet in an affair of more consequence viz. the colouring of Drury’s Insects, which cannot be done by candle.”17 The Linnean Society has in its possession some of Seymer’s books, several of which are annotated with comments and little drawings, and some, like Drury’s first volume of Exotic Insects, are marked with the statement by Seymer asserting that the illustrations were colored by him. Written on the back of the frontispiece of Volume I is the statement: “All the Subjects in this Volume, from Plate 29, as well as the other proceeding, a very few only excepted, were colourd, mostly from ye natural subjects, by Hen. Seymer. A.D. 1772. &c.”18 (see Plate 46). While it may seem safe to assume that Seymer purchased Drury’s volumes on insects because he needed them as a guide to his extensive collection of exotic insects, the truth of the matter is a bit more complex. After having purchased Drury’s second volume of Exotic Insects, also uncolored, Seymer wrote to Drury asking whether Drury had any “duplicates” of the insects that are pictured in this volume. Drury responded with a negative, saying that he had one specimen only of each represented in his book, but that he would be happy to be on the lookout for Seymer should specimens that corresponded to those in his second volume come on the market. What is amazing about this exchange between Seymer and Drury is that it becomes clear that Seymer was not necessarily buying Drury’s books as a guide for classifying his own specimens; rather, the opposite seems to be true: he collected some insects because he needed them as models to guide his coloring of the engraved illustrations that depicted them. The prospect of coloring the uncolored illustrations became for Seymer as, or even more, important than their use as a tool to aid in classifying specimens. Coloring the illustrations seems to be the primary reason for buying these books and even collecting these particular specimens. However, Seymer must have given up his plan to acquire the very rare specimens pictured in Volume II so that he could paint them with accuracy. The plates in Seymer’s copy of Drury’s second volume were painted by Moses Harris. Seymer wrote in the second volume: “All in this second Volume are colour’d by Harris: ’tho a few of them 271

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are alter’d & amended, by Hen. Seymer. AD. 1774. &c.” Perhaps Seymer was not able to acquire enough of Volume II’s specimens to color in the illustrations himself. In a comparison between Harris’s and Seymer’s coloring techniques, Seymer’s colorwork is much more subtle and sophisticated than Harris’s, whose coloring of butterflies, for instance, is flat and uniform. Seymer captures the luminosity of the wings and the variation in their shade by applying the colors with a light touch, allowing the paper beneath the watercolor to show through. Of course, Harris and Seymer were working under very different conditions, Seymer with all the time in the world and Harris under pressure to produce as quickly as possible. Seymer’s activities as a natural history collector were deeply intertwined with his art practices. In another exchange with Drury, Seymer asked Drury’s permission to illustrate the insects that he has received from Drury as gifts and purchases. Seymer promised that he would not publish any of his drawings of insects that Drury had put into the volumes of his Exotic Insects, assuring him that he did not intend to compete with Drury as a book maker.19 Though Seymer never published his artwork, creating images of natural history specimens occupied a central place in his private life as evidenced by the beautiful butterfly pictures that he drew and painted. His friend and relation Aylmer Lambert wrote a brief biography of Seymer for the Linnean Society, saying “Both Mr Seymer and his son Henry often occupied themselves in drawing subjects of Natural History at which they were excelled by very few; and many of their highly finished drawings of Birds, Shells, and Insects are now distributed among the different branches of the family.”20 As a landed gentlemen, Seymer had the luxury of leisure and could pursue art as an amateur, and though his drawings were of a very high caliber, he chose not publish his natural history illustrations and contented himself with coloring those drawn and published by others such as Harris and Drury.

Martyn’s Universal Conchologist Drury’s complaints about Harris’s slowness pale in comparison to the kinds of critiques that were lodged against artists, engravers, and colorists by other publishers and authors of illustrated natural history books. Sir Joseph Banks, who became President of the Royal Society, took to task Pierre Brown, a young natural history illustrator newly arrived from Denmark, for his drawings of birds, which Banks had said “consisted of little else than copies from [illegible] Drawings, which are horid [sic] bad, and drawing by a fellow … that knew nothing of Natural History.” To be accused of making poor copies of badly executed illustrations must have discouraged Brown, but he knew he must “behave with the Greatest Civility” to Banks as it was his “duty and Business,” especially if he wanted Banks’s recommendation in the future.21 Fortunately for Brown, his work was admired by the Duchess of Portland, and he was, as a result, employed by Thomas Pennant to draw shell specimens for the fourth volume of his British Zoology (1768–76). Of the problems associated with the production of illustrated natural history books, those involving artists’ lack of fidelity to the color, shape, and form of the natural history subject were dealt with in different ways. Drury’s choice of an experienced artist who 272

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was an engraver as well and an entomologist did result in beautifully executed illustrated volumes, though produced more slowly than he would have liked. A completely different approach to the problem of illustrating natural history books and particularly those problems that were associated with managing artists was Thomas Martyn’s solution, which involved training young boys to draw and paint natural history specimens. In the 1780s, Thomas Martyn, a natural history dealer, artist, printer, and bookseller, took up the challenge of producing an illustrated shell book. He succeeded in producing a magnificent publication that in the words of Peter Dance was Martyn’s “magnum opus and lasting memorial.”22 Part of Martyn’s success was that he had the well-defined goal of picturing shells from the south Pacific, specifically “shells (most of them rare and nondescript) that have been collected by the several officers of the ships under the command of Captains Byron, Wallace, Cook, and others, in the different voyages made to the South Seas.” Martyn did not slow his production down by bothering with description or references or taxonomic quandaries, as he said these concerns would take care of themselves over time: The long descriptions and details of the generation and properties of Shells, given by most writers on conchology, are wholly omitted here; and the utmost care has been taken that each figure, by being an exact and faithful transcript from nature, shall be sufficiently explanatory of the subject which it represents.

Martyn’s focused exclusively on the visual aspect of the shells; what was important to him was making beautiful and, more importantly, accurate illustrations of these shells so that collectors could compare their shells with those pictured and learn what was available and what to turn their attention to as collectors23 (see Plate 47). With this goal in mind, he needed to deal with two potential problems, one, of course, was finding proper artists, engravers, and colorists to illustrate his book, and the second problem was acquiring the actual shells that were going to be the subject of his book. As a natural history dealer, he had been a buyer of shells from various Pacific voyages, and he could use his own shell collection for some of the illustrations, but his collection was too small for his purposes. Unlike Drury, who used his own specimens from his extensive collection as the subjects for his Exotic Insects, Martyn had to borrow shells from other collectors for them to be depicted. Fortunately, Martyn was well situated as a dealer, and he knew who had bought Pacific shells and who possessed the best shells from Cook’s voyages. He asked collectors such as the Duchess of Portland and Dr George Fordyce to loan him shells to portray in his volume and thus augment his collection of purchases from newly docked ships.24 Martyn’s Universal Conchologist laid out in an impressive table (Fig. 16.1) the location in the southern hemisphere that the shell originally came from (New Caledonia, Otahiti, etc.) and the shell’s current location in Britain, namely, the collection in which it was housed.25 Part of the pleasure this sumptuous publication gave its owners was this connoisseurial knowledge concerning provenance and the current whereabouts of these beautiful and rare shells. Because those who owned the pictured shells would also be eager to purchase the volumes in which they were portrayed, Martyn had assured himself of having a built-in market for his volumes. 273

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16.1 “Explanatory Table,” showing shells and their collectors, from Thomas Martyn, The Universal Conchologist (London, 1784), 37.g.8 (2). © The British Library Board

Well aware of the enormous expense and other difficulties that could plague the production of shell books, Martyn explained in the 1789 introduction to the expanded twovolume version of The Universal Conchologist why there were no conchology books of merit: This in part may be ascribed to the employment of draughtsmen, painters, engravers and colourists, ill qualified for this business; or who, however adequate to such an attempt, have nevertheless neglected to give that minute attention to the execution of their respective departments which the exigence of the subject required.26

To achieve his goal of printing a shell book filled with beautifully drawn, engraved, and colored pictures, Martyn established what he called a “seminary” for boys, who were responsible for producing the illustrations for this and other illustrated natural history books. This seminary mingled workshop conditions with aspects of an art academy and the social codes of a charity school for the poor. Eager to “acquaint the public with the nature and principles of a private establishment which he has formed for the instruction of youth, in the art of illustrating and painting subjects of natural history,” Martyn explained in his preface that this establishment functioned much like a seminary, training up boys who came from humble homes as artworkers.27 Laying out the rules 274

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on which his seminary was run, Martyn described the rules of conduct expected of his “scholars”: To yield an implicit obedience to the Master, and to apply themselves to their several occupations with assiduity, and in silence; To maintain a strict cordiality among themselves; To be more ready to amend their own failings than to expose those of their fellows; To avoid with scrupulous attention all indecent words and dishonourable actions; To cultivate a love of truth, and entertain a modest opinion of their own merits; and to respect those of others. In short, this little seminary is governed by the dictates of religion and virtue; and the several duties both towards God and man are here strongly enforces; since the founder and conductor of it would feel it a nobler boast to have educated one good citizen, than any number of artists however ingenious.28

Martyn’s little “academy” of poor boys enabled him to avoid the expense and trouble of dealing with artists, who, according to Martyn, were notoriously difficult to work with on natural history illustration. Some were too proud to demean themselves by drawing natural history subjects, and others would not or could not copy the specimen faithfully, leaving Martyn believing that there were “few artists (we may indeed say none) who particularly devote the application of their talents to this particular branch of the art.” Martyn believed that to employ artists capable of “executing the work according to the author’s ideas, would eventually have been attended with an expense so great, as in its necessary consequences would more than have trebled the present price of each volume.” Martyn, surprisingly frank about the economics of his academy-cumworkshop, writes: “the labor of boys … is always cheaper than that of men.” Martyn’s establishment depended on being able to spot talented boys who would be grateful for the instruction and the work; he notes that “he had to find for the execution of his purpose such hands as, possessing abilities adequate to the end, could not, from their situations in life, be more profitably employed in other occupations,” meaning these boys would not walk away from their job as his illustrators to search for more lucrative employment.29 Martyn’s “academy” employed up to ten boys who over the course of three and a half years produced 6,000 paintings.30 Martyn’s commitment to producing beautiful and accurate illustrations of shells led him to make an unusual decision concerning the quality of his academy’s work. He realized that as the boys worked on their tasks of coloring the engraved illustrations, they improved over the course of a year “in their style of painting the various objects; and every day afforded new lights for the better understanding of the principles of the art itself, and for the more perfect execution of its several branches.” Seeing that “very great progress had been made towards that degree of preeminence which the author had continually wished to attain,” Martyn decided to reject the earlier work as inferior, and to reject the whole of the copies, the plates from which they were worked, and even the paintings form which those plates were engraved: consequently the whole was again begun to be purseued anew through all its parts in that improved style of execution, which was ultimately to determine the fate and reputation of the work.31

This decision to throw out a year’s work by his colorists as unworthy of his high standards was costly, a sacrifice as he says, but one that secured his reputation as a producer of the finest natural history illustrations. 275

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Martyn had plans for multiple volumes of the Universal Conchologist, publishing one volume of 40 plates in 1784, and an expanded two-volume version in 1789, and with plans for publishing another volume with shells from Cook’s third voyage. But once the third voyage was completed, he realized that sailors and officers alike had brought home too few new shells to be worth his while. He complained to Henry Seymer, who also collected shells, about the dearth of new molluscan specimens: It is a little extraordinary so few new species should have been collected, considering the many different Islands in the S. Seas the two ships visited & so many persons employed to gather them, & I may venture to affirm that I have purchased, amounting to 400 guineas, more than 2 thirds of the whole brought home. Nevertheless I do not abound either in variety of the new or many duplicates of the known ones that are valuable.32

Martyn’s plan to publish multiple volumes that figured “every known shell” from the South Seas was abandoned, but, according to Dance, “in the attempt he produced a work which, for beauty, has seldom been surpassed in the history of conchological iconography.”33 Martyn’s unusual solution to the problems associated with illustrating natural history books reveals the complexity of the process, the numbers of people involved in the production of these books, including draftsmen, etchers, printers, and colorists.34 These artworkers produced lovely illustrations, such as the one depicting the Duchess of Portland’s shell, a checkered Mitre, and The Universal Conchologist won awards from European dignitaries. However, Martyn was not immune to the problems that plagued the production of illustrated books. Even with his little academy of industrious boys, he was unable to cover the costs of production. Of The Universal Conchologist, “one of the most beautiful and costly conchological works this country has ever seen,” Maton and Rackett wrote in their overview of “Testaceological Writers”: [B]efore this ingenious artist had completed his two volumes of South Sea shells, he discovered the impossibility of procuring purchasers sufficient to compensate him for his labour and expense,–– a misfortune generally experienced by private individuals who embark in such extensive and sumptuous undertakings. He, therefore, did not proceed beyond 160 plates; which, however, as they include all the species then known to the southern navigators, may be considered as constituting a complete work, so far as it goes, and it was all that Mr. Martyn had absolutely engaged himself to execute.35

Though Martyn had to stop production after the edition of 1789 because of expense and lack of new specimens, he continued to produce in the 1790s elegant and accurately illustrated natural history books by shifting his subject matter to insects. In 1793 he published a book that was a combination of two previously published books on spiders, Charles Clerck’s treatise on Swedish spiders and Eleazar Albin’s book on English spiders. Martyn’s edition, “Revised, Enlarged, and Designed a new,” contained new illustrations, some based on Albin’s original drawings, was produced by “his Academy for Illustrating and Painting Natural History” (see Plate 48). In the previous year, Martyn’s academy also produced a book on English beetles, The English Entomologist, containing nearly 500 different species, “the figures of which have never before been given to the Public, the Whole accurately drawn and painted after 276

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Nature.” Martyn boasted in the preface that “no labour or cost has been spared to render this Publication as correct and beautiful, as the subject is interesting.” Martyn explained, reminding those familiar with his conchology book, that his little academy was made up of “Youths, whose principal requisite for their introduction is the possessing a natural Genius for Drawing and Painting,” which under his direction was carefully cultivated and exerted in the production of “faithful and elegant representations” of shells, and with this new venture, insects. Working with Martyn’s own collection of English insects, his academy of illustrators produced images that were rich in color and accurate in execution. Accuracy was such a concern that he decided to have the insects drawn to life-size, a decision he knew would be controversial, but he insisted: “real lovers of this science, will applaud the sacrifice here made of show, to the more essential requisites due to accuracy, to truth, and to nature.”36

Conclusion Martyn, Seymer, Harris, and Drury were all natural history collectors; Seymer, Harris, and Martyn were talented natural history artists as well. Social rank and profession determined to some extent their different relationships to the production of natural history illustrations. Seymer, as a private gentleman residing quietly on his country estate in Dorset, contented himself with drawing and coloring his own illustrations and coloring engraved illustrations drawn by other artists. Seymer disdained the hurly-burly world of book publishing and the tribulations associated with publishing illustrated natural history books, a world that Drury, Harris, and Martyn plunged into with verve. Talented like Seymer, Harris turned his artistic skills and hobby as a lepidopterist into his trade, making his own illustrated natural history books as well as being employed by others such as Dru Drury to draw, engrave, and color illustrations of insects. Martyn, an artist in addition to being a natural history dealer, brought to the production of his illustrated natural history books his artistic skills, his collecting practices, and his entrepreneurial instincts. His clients became the market for these illustrated volumes. He knew that every shell collector would want his Universal Conchologist, and that the book’s beauty would help build his client base, encouraging men and women of the world of polite science to collect Pacific specimens, purchasing these shells from him. The Universal Conchologist, The English Entomologist, and Aranei were extensions of his business practices, though the illustrations of the entomological books were taken from his own insect collections. Drury, also a man of business, brought his commercial skills of collaboration, negotiation, and teamwork to bear on making a set of illustrated books, which grew out of his hobby as a natural history collector. Dru Drury thought his Exotic Insects volumes would take a couple of years to produce, but it took over 14 years working with Moses Harris, cajoling him and pleading with him to finish these volumes. In the end, Drury was pleased with the final product, and these volumes satisfied his need to bring permanence to the fragile beauty of butterflies and moths and to stabilize the transient colors that he admired in the insects he collected. 277

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Natural history illustrations brought together the twin concerns of art and science, placing huge constraints on artists and colorists to make “accurate” depictions of natural history specimens. This demand for accuracy in drawing and coloring ultimately made the production of illustrated natural history books a lengthy process that proved to be quite expensive. The role of color in the production of the illustrated natural history book is intriguing, as the need for accurately colored illustrations turned one artist into a color theorist, pushing Moses Harris to develop a system to describe colors based on what happened when they were mixed together. The need for accuracy in color made Henry Seymer want to have complete control over the process by coloring the engraved illustrations himself while Martyn built a workshop where poor boys with artistic talent drew and colored thousands of natural history illustrations. It is rather remarkable that these acts, involving significant expenditures of time, money, labor, and energy, were motivated by the desire to better understand and to admire and preserve the beauty of some of the smallest and least significant creatures in the natural world: spiders, moths, and mollusks.

Notes I am grateful to the University of Chicago’s Special Collections for their collegiality and assistance with this project. 1. Wilfrid Blunt and William T. Stearn, The Art of Botanical Illustration (London: Collins, 1950; repr. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 1995). One of the reasons that English illustrated books were such an achievement is the quality of paper that was used. It was porous enough to accept the watercolor or gouache but stiff and thick enough for the color not to bleed through. Thomas Martyn quotes in his conchology book a letter from a dignitary, Baron Born, from the Court of the Emperor of Germany, praising the quality of English paper and disparaging the paper that was available to bookmakers and illustrators in central Europe. “We have none of that beautiful paper, which contributes so much to give a more brilliant effect to paintings … But we want artists, who are at the same time connoisseurs in natural history, to execute the whole with proper precision; and besides, our paper is so exceedingly bad that it is hardly possible to make use of it.” See Thomas Martyn, The Universal Conchologist, 2nd edn (London, 1789), 36. 2. For the collaborative nature of book illustration, see Elisabeth Fraser, “Books, Prints, and Travel: Reading in the Gaps of the Orientalist Archive,” Art History 31 (2008): 342–67. 3. Dru Drury, Illustrations of Natural History; wherein are exhibited upwards of two hundred and forty Figures of Exotic Insects, according to their different Genera, 3 vols (London, 1770–82), 2: iv. References to these volumes will be placed in parentheses following the quotations. 4. Two notable exceptions are Uglow’s and Johns’ work. For a detailed description of an engraver’s workshop and the apprenticeship system, see Jenny Uglow, Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Bewick’s illustrations were not colored. For the kinds of battles that could occur in the process of publication, see Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 5. Linnaeus rejected color, taste, and smell as ways to identify a plant’s genera, relying on “number, shape, situation, and proportion” only; “these four attributes, together with those twenty-six letters distinguish the genera so certainly from each other, that nothing more is wanted,” the 26 letters referring to what he saw as the superiority of words over images. He was quite dismissive of illustrations: “I do not recommend drawings for determining genera—in fact, I absolutely reject them, although I confess that

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they are of great importance to boys, and to those who have more brain-pan than brain. I confess that they convey something to the unlearned.” See Stefan Müller-Wille and Karen Reeds, “A Translation of Carl Linnaeus’s Introduction to Genera Plantarum (1737),” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38 (2007): 563–72, 568–9. For Linnaeus’s thoughts on colored illustrations, see also M.D. Eddy, “Tools for Reordering: Commonplacing and the Space of Words in Linnaeus’s Philosophia Botanica,” Intellectual History Review 20,2 (2010): 227–52, 247. 6. The remarkable variety of colors that insect bodies display captivated Eleazar Albin, an artist and art teacher, who produced an illustrated book, A Natural History of English Insects (1724), which he drew and colored himself, explaining in the preface his reasons for doing so: “Teaching to Draw, and Paint in Water-Colours being my Profession, first led me to the observing of Flowers and Insects, with whose various Forms and beautiful Colours I was very much delighted, especially of the latter several of which I painted after the Life, for my own Pleasure” See Eleazar Albin, A natural history of English insects. Illustrated with a hundred copper plates, curiously Engraven from the Life: and (for those who desire it) exactly coloured by the author Eleazar Albin, Painter. To which are added, large notes, and many Curious observations. By W. Derham, Fellow of the Royal Society (London [1724]), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Gale: Arizona State University AULC), accessed 12 December 2010. 7. Moses Harris, An exposition of English insects including the several classes of Neuroptera, Hymenoptera, & Diptera, or bees, flies, & libelullae Exhibiting on 51 copper plates near 500 figures, accurately drawn, & highly finished in colour, (London, 1776), v. 8. Robert Mays, “Harris, Moses (1730–c.1788),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), at http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/view/article/12413, accessed 19 November 2010. See also Faber Birren’s facsimile of Harris’s Natural System of Colours (1963) (under Harris in the bibliography). 9. Harris, English Insects, iv–v. 10. For the complicated process of publishing one’s own book, see William Noblett, “Publishing by the Author: A Case Study of Dru Drury’s ‘Illustrations of Natural History’ (1770–1782),” Publishing History 23 (1988): 67–94. 11. Dru Drury to Moses Harris, Letter-book, 19 January 1770, fol. 186, MS SB.q.D.2.a. Zoology Library, Natural History Museum, London. I am grateful to the Natural History Museum for allowing me to consult Drury’s manuscripts. 12. Drury to Harris, 5 April 1770, Letter-book, fol. 196. 13. Drury to Harris, 15 March 1770, Letter-book, fol. 193. 14. Drury to Harris, 5 April 1770, Letter-book, fol. 196. 15. Quoted by Noblett, “Publishing by the Author,” 68. 16. R.I. Vane-Wright and H.W.D. Hughes, The Seymer Legacy: Henry Seymer and Henry Seymer Jnr of Dorset and their Entomological Paintings (Tresaith (Wales): Forrest Text, 2006), 272. 17. Seymer to Pulteney, quoted in ibid., 289. 18. I am grateful to the Linnean Society for allowing me to examine these books and to reproduce images from them. 19. Drury to Seymer, London, 23 November 1772, Letter-book, fol. 256. 20. Aylmer Bourke Lambert, “Anecdotes of the Late Henry Seymer,” read 5 February 1811, Linnean Society Paper, 400: 663. 21. Brown to Pennant, Warwickshire CRO CR 2017/TP 186/1 – no date. Apparently the duchess liked Brown’s work enough to keep his drawings in her own collection. Lot 2656 of the Portland Museum

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318

Index

Bold page locators indicate figures. animals, as color source, 2, 31, 41n9, 47, 48, 69–70, 72, 101–2, 171, 175, 235, 237, 240, 245n12, 253, Plate 16; see also cochineal; feathers Anne, Queen, 219, 223, 226 Antonius of Florence, 124 Antwerp blue, 168 Apache, 127 apple green, 254 apple red, 4 Arabian peninsula, 7, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195n9 Ariosto, Ludivico, 125 Armenian cochineal, 42n23 ash, 50, 62–3n63, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 241, Plates 33–5 Ashburnham Place, 248, 248, 257, 259, 260 Asia, 31, 142; see also Central Asia; East Asia; South Asia; Southeast Asia asphalt, 52 Assyrians, 6 Augustine, St, 123 Austín, Alfredo López, 53, 62n53 autumnal leaves, see fall leaves Ayala, Mariano, 110 Aztecs, 47–9, 57, 60n24 cochineal, 31, 103 see also Mexica-Aztec religion

Academy of Sciences at Stockholm, 176 Afghanistan, 253 Africa, 187, 188, 195n9 Africans, 155–63 African-Americans, 145, 155–63 Albers, Josef, 21–2 Alberti, Leon Battista, 124 Albin, Eleazar, 276, 279n6, Plate 48 Algonquian, 7, 121, 127 alizarin, 31 Allsen, Thomas T., 192 Alvarez, Don Joaquin, 103 Alzate y Ramirez, José Antonio, 112n2 Ambrose, St, 123 American Indians body and face painting, 119, 120–23, 126–8, 130, 131, 131, 134n24, 135n50 cochineal, 31, Plate 16 color models, 4 featherwork, 235–40, 239, 240–43, 243n3, 243n5, 245n12, Plates 36–8 indigo, 145, 155–63 ochre, 119, 120–23, 130 vermilion, 119, 128–30, 131, 136n68 see also Aztecs Anchieta, José de, 241 Anglicus, Gilbertus, 124 añil, 56 319

the materiality of color

azure, 20, 82 azurite, 169, 252, 254

significances, 21, 41n4, 41n5, 46, 49, 50, 51, 52–6, 54, 58, 77, 120, 122, 192, 211 see also black ink; blackface Black Christ, 55–6 black ink, 5 application/use, 252, 255 production, 68–71 significances, 5, 66–7, 72, 74–6, 77 blackberry, 204, 205, 206, 207, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, Plates 33–5 blackface, 5, 217–27 recipes, 227–31 significances, 217–18, 221, 222, 226 Blair House, 248–57, 248, 249, 257–60, 259, 262n30, Plate 39, Plates 43–4 Blanc, Charles, 5 Blázquez, Antonio, 242, 243 Bleichmar, Daniela, 6 blood, 40, 46, 48, 52, 56, 62n56, 72, 75–6, 120–21, 133n12, 235, 240 bloodroot, 120 Bloy, Colin, H., 68, 70, 71 blue, 2, 3, 4, 7, 21, 23, 25n23, 36, 41n16, 120, 203, 204, 235, 238, 269, 270 application/use – Aztec/American Indian sacred art and bodypainting, 53, 59n4, Plate 8, Plate 11 – Chinese decorative objects and chinoiserie, 83, 86, 87, 88, 92, 93, 250, 252, 253, 254, Plate 39 – churches/monasteries, 64n81, Plate 10 – clothing/textiles, 193, 203, 204, 205, 206, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 211, 212, 212, 213, 219, Plate 27, Plates 33–5 – embroidery, 36 – glass bracelets, 187, 188, 189, 190, 197n32 – gravestones, 13, 17, Plate 1, Plate 3 – natural history illustration, 268, 270 circulation, 131, 150, 187, 188, 197n32 production, 71, 149, 150, 237, 247, 252, 253 significances, 2, 52, 53, 192, 193, 204, 236

Baeyer, Adolph Von, 149 Balfour, Edward, 145, 147 Ball, Philip, 8 Banks, Joseph, 272 Bantam lacquer ware, 82–3, 89–90 Bargellini, Clara, 57 Bassett, Molly, 34, 62n53 Baumé, Antoine, 173 Behn, Aphra, 232 Belchier, John, 88 Bell, Andrew, 37 Benes, Peter, 16 Beothuks, 122 Bergman, Torbern, 176 Berkley, William, 224–5, 227, 232 Berlin, Paul, 120 Berlin Academy, 169 Bethlen, Gabriel, 199, 200, 201, 202, 204, 205–9, 206, 207, 209, 211–13, Plate 32–4 bice, 169 bird feathers, see feathers bitumen, 52, 55 black, 21, 29, 31, 45, 48, 62n53, 68, 78n7, 120, 172, 235 application/use – Aztec/American Indian sacred art and bodypainting, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52–6, 54, 57, 58, 59n4, 62n56, 62n61, 62–3n63, 119, 122, Plate 8 – Chinese decorative objects and chinoiserie, 82, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 93, 95, 252, 253, 255 – churches/monasteries, 34, 50, 50, 55, 57, 61n31, Plate 9 – clothing/textiles, 142, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 211, 212, 213, Plates 33–5 – glass bracelets, 188 – natural history illustration, 267 circulation, 131, 188 production, 52, 53, 54, 60n16, 128, 141, 237, 255 320

index

see also indigo; Prussian blue blue-green, 45, 48, 63n74 application/use, 46, 47, 49, 54, 56–7, 58, Plate 10 production, 56 significances, 46, 49, 52, 56–7, 58 Blunt, Wilfrid, 265 body color, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 207, 210, 211, Plates 33–4 book illustrations, 8, 265–78, 278n1, 279n6, 280n34, Plates 46–8 Booth, Stephen, 74 Boudin, Stephane, 258 bracelets, see glass bracelets Brandt, Sebastian, 222 brasil wood, 89, 124, 243 Brathwait, Richard, 125 Brazil, 144, 235–6, 243 Brazil, indigenous people of feathered capes, 7, 236, 238, 240–43 tapirage, 235–43, 245n12 brick, 17, Plate 3 Brickell, John, 128 British East India Company, 7, 8, 32, 85, 139, 140, 143, 144–9, 252, 256; see also English East India Company Brome, Richard, 221–2, 225, 227, 232 bronze blue, 168 brown, 120, 270 application/use, 85, 89, 90, 188, 189, 208, 253, 255, 267 circulation, 188, 193, 194 production, 31, 68, 90, 176, 255 brown-face, 223–7 recipes, 228–31 Brown, Eleanor S., 259 Brown, John, 170–71 Brown, Pierre, 272 Browne, Clare, 33 Bruster, Douglas, 77n2 Buatta, Mario, 260 burying grounds, 5, 13–24

cadmium yellow, 235 Cahill, James, 250 Calabresi, Bianca F.C., 72 Campbell, Paul, 121 Campion, Thomas, 231 Canada, 120, 121, 123, 129 Canella, Anne-Francoise, 191 carbon, 49 Cardenas, José Mariano de, 110 Caribbean, 119, 157, 162 Carleton, Dudley, 219, 223 carnation, 203, 205, 210, 211, 212, Plates 34–5 Carrizosato, Fernando, 45 Castiglioni, Giuseppe, 252 Catherine of Brandenburg, 199, 200, 201, 209–12, 211, 212, 213, Plate 31, Plates 34–5 Caulfield, Ernest, 14 Central America cochineal, 117n58 indigo, 144 Central Asia, 189, 192 chalk white, 48, 255, Plate 44 Chambers, William, 249 Chaplin, Joyce E., 158 Chapman, George, 231 Chaptel, Jean-Antoine, 176 charcoal, 222 Charles III, 6 Charlotte, Queen, 37, Plate 7 Chaumonot, Pierre-Joseph-Marie, 127 chemicals, 2, 89, 149, 150, 168–9, 170–77, 179n34, 189, 252, 253, 255 chemistry, 6, 89, 167–8, 170–77, 179n34 Chenciner, Robert, 8, 32 cherry, 204, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211, 211, 212, Plates 33–5 Cheshire, Maxine, 259 child labor, 8, 104, 113n24, 273, 274–5, 276, 277, 278 China chintz, 142 cinnabar, 254–5 glass bracelets, 190, 191, 194, 197n32

Cabrera, Miguel, 57, 64n83 Cadet de Gassicourt, Louis-Claude, 173 321

the materiality of color

indigo, 253 lacquer wares, 82–3, 88, 91 natural dyes, 31 painting, 92–4, 247–57 porcelain, 85–6, 87–8, 259, Plate 14 silks, 6, 85, 191, 193, 249, 251, 252, 255, Plate 13, Plate 27 verdigris, 254 vermilion, 130, 255, Plate 17 wallpaper, 7, 83–5, 92–3, 247–57, 248, 257–60, 262n30, Plates 39–44 woad, 262n31 China red, 130 Chinese decorative objects, 5, 81, 82–6, 87, 88, 91, 92–5, Plates 12–14 Chinese white, 131 chinoiserie, 7, 81, 82, 83, 86–91, 92–5, 247, 259 chintz, 139, 142–3, Plate 18 Chiriguaná, 123 Christianity, 19–20, 22–3, 29–30, 33–5, 36, 39–40, 47, 50, 50, 55–6, 57, 58, 61n31, 64n81, 123, 126–7, 238, 242, 243, Plates 9–10 chromophilia, 81, 82–6 chromophobia, 81, 82, 92–5 cinnabar, 129, 252, 253, 254–5, Plate 43 cinnamon, 270 clay, 51, 56, 60n16, 63n74, 121, 247 Clerck, Charles, 276, Plate 48 cloth, 4, 7, 30, 41n4, 42n25, 172, 173, 185, 192, 193, 194, 195n2, 204–5; see also material; textiles clothing, see cloth; material; textiles coal, 50, 52 cobalt blue, 85, 86, 87 cochineal, 2, 29, 42n23, 42n28, 48, 167, 235, 253 application/use, 6–7, 31–3, 42n25, 48, 49, 103, Plate 15 circulation, 6–7, 48, 59n12, 103, 109–12, 111, 113n15, 115n41, 115n42, 115–16n45, 116n48, 116n54, 116n57, 117n59 dyeing, 32–3

production, 6–7, 31–3, 42n25, 48, 101–12, 108, 111, 112n2, 112n6, 112n7, 112n10, 112n12, 113n13, 113n24, 114n26, 114n34, 115n40, 115n41, 115n42, 116n49, 116–17n58, 117n59, 173, Plate 16 Cockerill, J., 88–9, 88 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 42n34 color application, 2 circulation and exchange, 2, 6–8 consumption, 6–8 dyeing, 32–3, 141–2, 152-173, 175, see also dyes names, 4, 48, 120–21, 203, 267–8 perception, 3, 6 production, 2, 6–8, 31–2 significances, 2, 21, 23, 45, 47, 48, 52, 57–8, 185, 199, 203–4, 212, 236, 240–41 study, 8–9 value, 1 – aesthetic, 1 – economic, 1, 6–8, 47 – socio-cultural, 1, 2, 3–6, 45, 47, 243 color wheel, 41n16, 269–70, Plate 45 Columbia blue, 4 Columbus, 119 Condamine, Charles-Marie de la, 236 Coon, David L., 156 copper, 90, 254, 270 coral, 203 Coromandel lacquer ware, 83 Corrigan, Karina, 252 Cortez, 31, 48 cosmetics, 5, 91, 92, 94, 119 circulation, 123–4 fashion, 5, 123–6, 131 performances, 5, 217–31 recipes for blackface, 227–31 Cossigny, M. de, 144, 153n30 cotton, 33, 38, 40, 139, 140, 142, 152, 172, 175, Plate 18 Coyolxauhqui stone, 45–6, 46, 58, Plate 8 cream, 83, 85 322

index

crimson, 20, 203, 220 application/uses, 250 production, 31, 32, 101 significances, 30 Cromwell, Nicholas, 156, 158–9 Cromwell, Patrick, 156, 159 Crowley, Elizabeth, 256 Crowne, John, 232 Crozat, Antoine, 130 cucumber green, 254 Cué, Lourdes, 45 cyclamen root, 124 Cyprian, St, 123

dyes, 2, 29, 31–3, 40, 41n4, 42n28, 52, 60n16, 60n19, 204, 235 application/use, 31–3, 48, 49, 55, 91, 139, 235, 240, 247, 253, Plates 18–20, Plate 22 books, 32, 42n34 circulation, 143–4 production, 6, 7, 31–3, 41n17, 42n23, 101–12, 108, 111, 139–42, 144–9, 151–2, 155–63, 172, 173, 224, 243, 253 synthetic, 31, 41n17, 149, 150, 152, 172, 173, 174–5

D’Avenant, William, 232 Dance, Peter, 273, 276 Darwin, Erasmus, 87 dawn color, 203 death, 21, 29, 30, 56, 58 Dehouve, Danièle, 48, 56, 59n4, 60n24 Dekker, Thomas, 231 Delany, Mrs, 88 Demos, John, 16 Derrida, Jacques, 16 Deveaux, Andrew, 156, 157, 158 Diaz del Castillo, Bernal, 48, 102 Diderot, Denis, 247 Diesbach, 167, 168–9, 170, 173 Dillon, C. Douglas, 258, 259, 260 Dillon, Phyllis Ellsworth, 258, 259 Dioscorides, 142 Dippel, Johann Conrad, 167, 168–9, 170 Dongan, Thomas, 129 Donne, John, 27n46, 125 Dorville, Eliza, 280n34 Dow, Arthur Wesley, 14, 17, 20, 21, 22 Drewsen, Viggo, 149 Drury, Dru, 265, 266–72, 273, 277, Plate 46 Dryden, John, 35, Plate 6 Duke, Angier Biddle, 258 Duke, Robin Chandler, 258 Duke blue, 4 DuPont, Henry Francis, 258 Durán, Diego, 54 Dutch East India Company, 82, 143

East Asia, 82–3, 86, 191 Edwards, Joan, 43n39 Egypt, 31, 142 Egyptian blue, 4 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 65 Elizabeth, Queen, 124, 125 embroidery, 29, 30, 33–40, 38, 39, 41n3, 41n5, 193, 202, 210, 212, 220, Plates 4–7, Plate 15 emerald green, 189, 254 Emmerling, A., 149 England book trade, 8 Chinese decorative objects, 81, 82–6, 87, 88, 92–5 Chinese wallpaper, 81, 83–5, 92–3, 247, 248–57, 248, 257–60 chinoiserie, 81, 82, 83, 86–91, 92–5, 259 churches, 30 coats of arms, 30 cochineal, 112n10 cosmetics, 124, 125 indigo, 143, 159, 160 ink, 68–72 madder, 31 market economy, 79n36 needlework samplers, 5, 33–40, 38, 39 Prussian blue, 170, 175 verdigris, 254 woad, 143 323

the materiality of color

English East India Company, 86; see also British East India Company Europe Chinese wallpaper, 7, 247, 248, 255, 256, 257 cloth, 193, 204 cochineal, 6–7, 31, 42n23, 103, 115n45 cosmetics, 119, 123–6, 131 featherwork, 236, 238, 241–3 glass bracelets, 190–91 indigo, 143–4, 146, 172, 253 madder, 31 painting, 93, 94, 95 red, 30 vermilion, 7, 130, 131 woad, 172, 262n31 see also Western Europe European color models, 4 Evelyn, John, 85 excrement, 76, 120 Exton, Mary Nickolls, 34–5, Plate 5

cosmetics, 124, 125 indigo, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 159, 172 madder, 31, 32 Prussian blue, 168, 171–5 verdigris, 254 vermilion, 129, 130 wallpaper, 257, 258 woad, 143, 172 Francisco de Croix, Don Carlos, 108 Franze, Gerhard, 260 Frencken, H.G.T., 32 Frisch, Johann Leonhard, 169, 170 Frost, Robert, 23 fur, 48, 202, 208, 209, 210 furniture, 82–3, 88–91, 92, Plate 12 Gage, John, 1, 4, 5, 30, 41n3 gall, 69–70, 76, 224, 228 gamboges, 89, 255 Gândavo, Pero Magalhães de, 235, 242, 243 Gandhi, Mohandas K. “Mahatma”, 153n29 García, Don Estaban, 110, 116n54 Garfield, Simon, 8 Garneau, François-Xavier, 130 Garrick, Mrs, 85 gaudiness, 5, 16, 82, 83, 90, 92–4 Geoffrey, Etienne-François, 171, 172, 173, 176 Germany indigo, 143, 149 Prussian blue, 168–9, 176 woad, 143 gilding, 82, 86, 89, 91 glass bracelets, 5, 7, Plates 28–30 circulation, 185, 186, 186, 187, 187–8, 193, 197n32 color, 185, 187–8, 189, 190, 191–4, 195n7, 197n32 production, 185–7, 189–91, 195n7 gold, 4, 32, 86, 87 application/use – Aztec/American Indian sacred art and bodypainting, 58

fabric, see cloth; material; textiles fall leaves, 14, 15, 17, 20, 21, 22, 26n37 Farber, Dabiel and Jessie Lie, 14–16, 15, 16, 24n9, 25n10 feathered capes and bonnets, 7, 236, 238, 239, 240–43, 245n21, 245n24, Plate 36 feathers, 7, 48, 51, 52, 56, 58 tapirage, 235–43, 243n3, 243n5, 245n12 Fenollosa, Ernest, 17 Ferrari, Mary, 156 Festive Parrot, 235 Finlay, Victoria, 8 fire, 29, 50–51, 52, 53, 123, Plate 11 flame, 203, 205 Fletcher, John, 231, 232 Flexney, Mary, 33–7, Plate 4 Flores Mogollón, Juan Ignacio, 127 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 71 Follie, Louis-Guillaume de la, 174, 180n40 Forbes, Harriette Merrifield, 14 Fordyce, George, 273 France cochineal, 117n58 324

index

– Chinese decorative objects and chinoiserie, 82, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 250, 255, Plates 13–14, Plate 39 – clothing/textiles, 193, 202, 203, 205, 210, 212, 212, 219, 220, Plate 15, Plate 35 – embroidery, 30, 193, 202, 212, 220, Plate 15 – glass bracelets, 185, 188 circulation, 188 significances, 192, 193 Gosson, Stephen, 125 Gracie, Charles R. (& Sons), 257, 259, 260, 262n30, 263n55 granite, 5, 13 grass green, 254 Grassi, Lucillo, 257 gravestones, 5, 13–24, Plates 1–2 painted, 22, 26n42, 30 photographing, 14–16, 24n9, 25n10 graveyards, 5, 13–24, 24n9, 25n10, Plates 1–3 gray, 23, 24, 120, 204, 205, 210, 255, 270 Great Britain cochineal, 32 education, 36–8 illustrated natural history books, 8, 265–78, 278n1, 279n6, 280n34 indigo, 143, 144–9, 159 madder, 31, 32 vermilion, 129 Greece, 254 green, 3, 4, 5, 21, 41n16, 48, 120, 152, 203, 235, 238, 269, 270 application/use – Aztec/American Indian sacred art and bodypainting, 53 – Chinese decorative objects and chinoiserie, 83, 89, 92, 250, 252, 253, 254, 256, Plate 40 – clothing/textiles, 142, 193–4, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, Plate 27, Plates 33–5 – embroidery, 36, 37

– glass bracelets, 188, 189, 190, 195n7, 197n32 – gravestones, 13, 17 – natural history illustration, 268, 270 circulation, 131, 188, 194, 197n32 production, 237, 252 significances, 2, 22–3, 27n46, 52, 53, 191, 193–4, 236 Greene, Robert, 220 Greenfield, Amy Butler, 8, 32 Grendy, Giles, 88 Guatemala cochineal, 111, 116n58, 117n59 indigo, 144 Gurr, Andrew, 219, 226 Guyton de Morveau, Louis-Bernard, 174, 176 Gwich’in, 121 Hahn, Roger, 174 hair, 33, 203, 205, 207, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212, Plates 33–5 Haiti, 145; see also San Domingo Hall, Edward, 220 Hamburg blue, 168 Hampton, Mark, 260 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 77n2 Harris, Moses, 265, 266, 268–72, 277–8, Plates 45–6 Hatchett, Charles, 176 Hatchett’s brown, 176 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 26n32 Hellot, Jean, 172, 174 Henderson, Julia, 189 Henry VIII, 220 Henslowe, Philip, 69, 220 Herman, Peter, C., 78n6 Hervey, James, 14, 20, 22–3 Heumann, K., 149 Hewes, George, 128 Heywood, Thomas, 231, 232 Hickes, George, 34 Hidatsa, 122 Hilliard, Nicholas, 228 325

the materiality of color

Holland cochineal, 32 cosmetics, 124 indigo, 143, 144 ink, 68, 69 madder, 31, 32 Prussian blue, 170 vermilion, 129 Holme, Randle, 220 Hornback, Robert, 218 Howard, Constance, 3 Howard, Jean E., 77n2 Hudson Bay Company, 130 Humphrey, Carol, 34, 35 Hungary, 199, 201 Hunter, Dard, 251 Hunter, Robert, 129–30 Huntington, Elizabeth, 20 Huron, 127

iron oxide, 51, 255 iron pyrite, 52 iron red, 86, 120 Iroquois, 7, 122, 123, 126, 129 Islam, 185, 192, 193–4 Islamic glass bracelets, see glass bracelets Italy, 204 cosmetics, 123, 124, 125, 220 woad, 143 Itten, Johannes, 8 ivory black, 89, 131 Jackson, John Baptist, 92–3 Jacobsen, Emily, 251 jade, 57, 63n74, 194, 236 jadeite, 56 James I, 219 Japan indigo, 140, 142 lacquer wares, 82, 83, 89, 90, 91 Japanese color models, 4 japanning, 82, 83, 88–92 jet, 52, 53, 55, 58 Johns, Adrian, 68, 69, 71 Johnson, Lady Bird, 258 Johnson, William, 128 Jones, Eldred, 220 Jones, Inigo, 219 Jones, William A., 131 Jonson, Ben, 219, 223, 224, 226, 228, 230, 231 Judaism, 29–30 Judeo-Christian tradition, 29 Jullien, Francois, 95 Juvenal, 35, Plate 6

illustrations of natural history, see natural history illustrations Incas, 3 indentured labor, 8; see also slave labor India, 83 chintz, Plate 18 glass bracelets, 7, 185, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195n7, 195n9, 197n32 indigo, 7, 8, 139–52, 150, 151, 153n29, 153n30, 253, Plate 19 madder, 32, 142 Indian black, 142 Indian yellow, 2, 4 indigo, 2, 41n16, 89, 169, 254, Plates 19–20, Plate 22 circulation, 6, 7, 101, 141, 142–4, 148, 149, 159, 160 production, 7, 8, 139–42, 144–52, 150, 151, 153n29, 153n30, 155–63, 175, 253, Plate 21 synthetic, 149, 150, 152 Indonesia, 144, 190 inks, 29, 30, 34, 37, 49, 52, 60n16, 68–72, 224, 251–2, 254; see also black ink iron, 120, 167, 171, 172, 175, 176, 181n57

Kalm, Pehr, 129 Kanizsay, Orsolya, 203 Karttunen, Frances, 50–51, 60n16 Kay, Paul, 120 Kayapo, 241 Kennedy, Jacqueline, 257–8 Kirk, John T., 16 Korea, 142 Kraft, Alexander, 169, 170 Kyd, Thomas, 72, 75 326

index

La Potherie, Bacqueville de, 129 La Salle, Cavelier de, 129 Labayru, Sebastian de, 109, 116n49 lac, 142, 253 Lacan, Jacques, 65, 76–7 lacquer wares, 82–3, 87–91, 92, Plate 12 Lafitau, Joseph-François, 123, 126, 128 Lambert, Aylmer, 272 lampblack, 68, 70, 89, 235 Lancaster, Joseph, 37 Langlois, Pierre, 88 language, 3, 4, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 56, 57, 58, 59n4, 78, 120, 121, 125, 127, 128, 141, 203, 243, 267 lapis lazuli, 235, 236, 253 Latin America, 6–7 lavender, 203, 205, 210, 211, Plate 34 lawn green, 205 Le Camus, Antoine, 131 Le Chandelier, Charles-Pierre, 174, 175, 180n40 lead white, 124, 126, 174, 235, 252, 255 Lee, Raymond, L. 102–3 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 169 Lemire, Beverly, 156 Lichtenstein, Jacqueline, 27n43, 94 limestone, 17 linen, 30, 37, 38, 40, 159 linseed oil, 68–9 lion color, 203 Lopez, Salvador, 127 Loucheux, 121 Louis XIV, 125 Louis XV, 125 Lowengard, Sarah, 85 Lucas, George, 156, 157, 158–62, 165–6n45 Lucas, John, 157, 162 Lucas Pinckney, Eliza, 155–63, 164n19, 165–6n45 lung color, 203 Lynn, Catherine, 252

maize, 46, 49, 58, 60n24 makeup, see cosmetics malachite, 252, 254 Mallin, Eric, 67 Mamluks, 185, 187, 190, 191, 192, 193 Mansouri, M. Tahar, 185, 192 marble, 17 Marco Polo, 142 Marggraf, Andreas, 176 Markham, Gervase, 32 maroon, 31 Marston, John, 231 Martin, Claude, 153n30 Martyn, Thomas, 266, 272–7, 274, 277–8, 278n1, Plates 47–8 Mary of Orange, 82 Masefield, Richard, 83, 84 masks, 220, 223, 227 Massinger, Philip, 232 material, 3, 6, 60n19, 85, 152, 195n9, 199, 200–202, 204, 210, 220, 223; see also cloth; textiles Mather, Cotton, 13, 14, 17–20, 18 Matisse, Henri, 5 Maton, William George, 276 mauve, 41n17 Maya blue, 56, 63n74 Mayans, 56 meat color, 203, 205 Medici, Caterina de’, 124 Meikle, James, 35, 43n42, Plate 6 Melville, Stephen, 5 Ménon, François, 171–2, 174–5, 179n25 Ménonville, Thierry de, 117n58 Merbury, Francis, 222, 225, 227 Mesopotamia, 31 Métraux, Alfred, 236, 244n3 Mexica-Aztec religion, 5, 45–6, 46, 49–56, 54, 56–7, 58, 62n56, 62n61, 62–3n63, 63n74, Plate 8, Plate 11 Mexico, 45, 47, 56, 57, 58, 59n12 cochineal, 101–12 indigo, 101 ochre, 120 silver, 101

Macky, John, 85 Macquer, Pierre Joseph, 172, 173, 174–5 madder, 29, 31–3, 42n28, 142 327

the materiality of color

Middle East, 219 cloth, 192, 193, 194 cochineal, 42n23 glass bracelets, 185–7, 186, 187–8, 189, 190, 191–4, Plates 28–30 Middleton, Thomas, 231 milk, 76, 120 Milton, John, 76 minerals, as color source, 2, 6, 31, 47, 48, 52, 120, 189, 235, 252, 253 Miranda, Antonio, 127 mirror stone, 52, 53 Mohave, 122, 131 Mohawk, 121, 128 Molina, Alonso de, 60n16 Molina, Antonio de, 50 Molina, Don José, 108 Mongols, 187, 191, 192, 195n2 Monkman, Betty, 258 Monod, Théodore, 187 Montagnais, 127 Montagu, Elizabeth, 85 Montagu, George, 280n34 Moors, 217–27 passim Mora y Peysal, Antonio de, 103, 115n42 Morgan, Philip D., 158 Morris, Robert, 93 Motolinía, 49 Motteux, Peter, 82 Moxon, Joseph, 68 Müller, George, 38 Munsell system, 4 Murguia y Gallardi, Jose Maria, 115n42

New England graveyards, 5, 13–24, 24n9, 25n10, 26n42, Plates 1–3 Newton, Isaac, 41n16 Nieto-Galan, Agusti, 6 Nila, 141 North America, 119 body and face painting, 119, 120–23, 126–8, 130, 131, 131, 134n24, 135m.50 Chinese wallpaper, 7, 256, 257 indigo, 144, 145, 146, 147, 155–63, 253 ochre, 120, 121–3, 130 vermilion, 7, 128–30, 131, 136n68, Plate 17 Nuñez de Vega, Francisco, 55–6 nut brown, 270 Oaxaca, 103–12, 108, 115n42, 117n59 obsidian, 52, 55 ochre, 48, 132n7 application/use, 30, 50, 51, 52, 89, 119, 120, 130, 255 circulation, 119 production, 48, 120, 121–2 significances, 50–51, 52, 133n12 olive, 4, 208, 209, 209, 270, Plate 34 orange, 5, 41n16, 120, 205, 269, 270 application/use, 13, 17, 34, 188, 206, 207, 207, 208, 209, 253, 267, 268, Plate 33 circulation, 188 production, 31, 32, 238–40 orpiment, 142, 255 Otero, Don Pedro, 110 Ottomans, 31, 187, 191, 192, 199, 201 Oviedo y Valdés, Gonzalo Fernández de, 123

Nádasdy, Tamás, 203 Nankin, 85, 87 Narragansetts, 126 Naskapi, 121, 136n68 natural history illustrations, 8, 265–78, 278n1, 279n6, 280n34, Plates 46–8 needlework and needlework samplers, 5, 29, 30, 33–40, 38, 39, 43n39, 43n42; see also samplers Neumann, Caspar, 170, 173

Paine, Sheila, 29, 30, 41n5 paint, 49, 68, 92, 252, 253, 254 chinoiserie, 82, 92–5 production, 7, 252, 253, 254 painting body and face, 48, 52, 53–5, 54, 58, 62n56, 62n61, 62–3n63, 70–71, 92, 328

index

103, 119, 120, 122–8, 130, 131, 131, 132, 134n24, 135m.50, 221–7, 242 furniture, 90, 91, 92 gravestones, 22, 26n42, 30 manuscripts, 46, 47, 49, 54, 57 material, 152 murals, 46, 47, 49–50, 50, 56–7, 255, Plates 9–11 sculptures, 45–7, 58, 60n24, 255, Plate 8 silk, 85, 91, 249, 252, 255, Plate 13, Plate 27 styles, 92–4 wallpaper, 85, 91, 249–57 see also natural history illustrations Panini, 142, 152–3n6 Paris Academy, 171, 172–4 Paris blue, 168, 170 Parish, Sister, 258 Parker, George, 88, 89, 91, 92 parrot color, 203, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, Plates 33–5 Pastoureau, Michael, 3, 6, 8, 41n4, 41n5, 172 peach blossom, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, Plates 33–5 Peacham, Henry, 219, 220 Peele, George, 231 Pennant, Thomas, 272 Pérez, Juan, 110, 116n54 Perez Bonilla, Manuel Eduardo, 113n24 Perkin, Henry, 149 Perkin, William, 41n17 Persians, 123 Peru, 235, 244n5 Philip III (Spain), 203 Philip IV (Spain), 203 Philip the Good of Burgundy, 203 Phillips, Nicola, 156 Phipps, Elena, 29, 32, 41n9, 59n12 phlogiston, 171–2, 173, 176, 179n34 Phoenicia, 253 Piegan Blackfeet, 121 pigments, 2, 29, 31, 45, 132n7, 179n32, 235 application/use, 31–3, 49, 52, 63n74, 91, 124, 132, 136n68, 168, 169–70, 173–7,

225, 226, 228–31, 237, 250, 251–2, 253, 254, 255 circulation, 59n15, 128–30, 131, 169, 170–72 production, 7, 31–3, 48, 51, 52, 58, 68, 120, 128–31, 167–9, 171, 173, 175–6, 181n57, 228–31, 236, 238, 247, 251, 252, 253, 254 synthetic, 129–30, 167–77, 181n57 Pimentel, Lucas, 110 Pinckney, Charles, 156, 159–62, 164n32, 166n45 pink, 5, 48, 120 application/use, 13, 17, 48, 86, 124, 188, 250, 256, Plate 13, Plate 39, Plate 42 circulation, 188 production, 31, 32, 48, 86, 87, 124 significances, 124 Pirès, T., 191 Pistoja, Cino de, 124 pitch, 52, 68 Pittenger, Elizabeth, 79n36 plants, as color source, 2, 6, 8, 31, 41n18, 47, 48–9, 54, 56, 120, 124, 129, 235, 237, 245n12, 252, 253; see also indigo; madder Plato, 13 Pliny, 142 Plotinus, 13 plum, 4 Polish cochineal, 42n23 Pollard, Tanya, 70–71 Pompadour, Madame de, 7 Pope, Alexander, 36, Plate 6 porcelain, 85–6, 87–8, 91, Plate 14 Porley, Antonio, 108–9 Portland, Duchess of, 271, 272, 273, 276, Plate 47 Portugal featherwork, 7, 236, 238, 242 indigo, 143, 144 Postlethwayt, Malachy, 93 Powhatans, 120 primary colors, 3, 41n16, 269 Prinsep, Henry Thoby, 139–40, 144, 147 329

the materiality of color

Prinsep, John, 139–40, 144, 146 Prussia, 143 Prussian blue, 171, Plates 23–6 application/use, 168, 169–70, 173–7, 179n26, 253, 254, Plate 27 circulation, 7, 131, 169, 170–72 production, 7, 167–9, 171, 173, 175–6, 181n57, 254 Prussian red, 176 Pueblos, 127 pulsatilla, 205, 207, 207, Plate 33 purple, 2, 5, 21, 23, 120, 204, 235, 241, 269, 270 application/use – Chinese decorative objects and chinoiserie, 87, 256 – clothing/textiles, 203, 204, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211, 211, 212, Plates 33–5 – glass bracelets, 188, 189, 190, 194 – gravestones, 13, 17, Plate 3 circulation, 188, 194 production, 30, 32, 41n9, 48, 87, 194, 253 significances, 41n9, 204

– churches/monasteries, 24, 50, 50, 64n81, Plate 9 – clothing/textiles, 41n18, 142, 194, 204, 205, 206, 206, 207, 207, 208, 209, 209, 210, 211, 212, 212, 213, Plate 15, Plates 33–5 – cosmetics, 119, 124, 125, 126, 131 – embroidery, 29, 30, 33–40 passim, 41n5, Plates 4–7 – featherwork, 237, 238, 242 – glass bracelets, 188, 189, 190, 193, 193, 194 – natural history illustration, 268 circulation, 119, 129–30, 188 production, 6–7, 29, 30, 31–3, 40, 72, 87, 89, 120, 129–30, 173, 176, 237, 243, 252, 253 significances, 2, 5, 29–30, 40, 41n4, 41n5, 46, 49, 50–52, 53, 56–7, 58, 120–21, 122–3, 193, 204 see also cochineal; ochre; vermilion red lead, 124, 128, 129–30, 136n68, 252 Redford, John, 222 Reeves, William, 252 religion, 1, 3, 41n5, 217, 237–8, 242, 243; see also Christianity; Islam; Judaism; Mexica-Aztec religion resin, 52, 54, 68, 224 Revillagigedo, Viceroy, 104, 112n2, 114n28 Reyes-Valerio, Constantino, 56 Ridley, Matilda, 37, 38 ritual, 3, 4, 47, 50, 51, 52, 53–4, 54, 62n56, 62n61, 121, 134n24, 235, 237–8, 240–41, 242, 243 Rogers, Sarah, 35–6, Plate 6 Romans, 6, 123 Roosevelt, Selwa “Luck,” 260 rose, 203, 205, 208, 209, Plate 34 rosemary blossom, 205 rosin, 68–9 Rouelle, Guillaume-François, 173, 174 Rouean Academy, 174, 175 rouge, 6, 7, 91, 125 Rowley, William, 232 royal blue, 204

Qianlong, Emperor, 252 Quash (aka John Williams), 155, 156, 158–63, 164n19, 164n32, 165n41, 165–6n45 Rackett, Thomas, 276 rainbows, 13, 17–20, 59n15 Ravenscroft, Edward, 232 red, 2, 4, 5, 13, 17, 21, 25n23, 41n16, 45, 48, 120, 132n4, 203, 204, 235, 269, 270 application/use – Aztec/American Indian sacred art and bodypainting, 46, 47, 49, 50–52, 53, 56–7, 58, 59n4, 62n56, 119, 132, Plate 8, Plate 11 – Chinese decorative objects and chinoiserie, 86, 89, 90, 92, 93, 252, 254–5 330

index

royal purple, 204, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211, 211, 212, Plates 33–5 royal red, 204 Royal Society of London, 170, 171 Royle, John Forbes, 145, 146, 147 rubber, 52 Russia, 32 rust, 31 Ryukyu indigo, 142

Shakespeare, 69, 77, 125, 218, 221, 226, 227, 231 his sonnets, 5, 65–7, 71, 72–6, 77, 78n6, 78n7, 79n32 Shawm Peter, 171 shells, 52, 53, 58, 90 as color source, 41n9, 127, 253 illustrations, 265, 267, 271, 272–4, 274, 275–7, 280n24, 280n34 Shindo, Yoko, 185, 186 shine, 4, 52, 53, 55, 58 Sidney, Philip, 75 silk, 6, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 85, 91, 152, 172, 175, 191, 192, 193, 200, 202, 206, 210, 249, 251, 252, 255, Plate 13, Plate 15, Plate 27 silver, 20, 32 application/use, 30, 85, 89, 90, 202, 205, 208, 209, 210, 212, 212, Plate 13, Plate 15, Plates 33–5 circulation, 101 sinophilia, 5, 81, 82–6 sinophobia, 81, 82, 92–4 sky blue, 89, 205 slate, 5, 13, 17, 23, 270, Plate 1, Plate 3 slave labor, 8, 144, 145, 155–63, 163n9, 164n19, 165n41, 165–6n45 smalt, 247 Smith, Bruce, 13, 22 Smith, John, 120 solar halo, 19–20, 20, 25n23 soot, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 128, 222–3, 224, 227–8, 247, 255 South America cochineal, 59n12 featherwork, 235–40, 239, 240–43, 243n3, 243n5, 245n12, Plates 36–8 South Asia, 187 South Carolina, 8, 155–63, 163n9, Plate 21 Southeast Asia cloth, 192 glass bracelets, 185, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195n7 indigo, 142

Sahagún, Bernardino de, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 59n15, 60n19 Sahlins, Marshall, 47, 243 samplers commemorative samplers, 37, Plate 7 marking samplers, 37–40, 38, 39 pictorial samplers, 35–6, Plate 6 prayer tablet samplers, 33–5, Plates 4–5 see also needlework and needlework samplers Sanchez Solache, Yldefonso Maria, 106, 110 San Domingo, 117n58, 144; see also Haiti sandstone, 5, 13 Scandinavia, 176 scarlet, 203, Plate 37 application/use, 204, 205, 238, 240, 270 production, 32, 253 significances, 30 Schagticoke, 130 Scheele, Karl Wilhelm, 176 schist, 5, 13, Plate 2 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 130 Schultz, Gottfried, 129 sea color, 203, 205, 209, 210, 211, 212, Plates 34–5 semen, 72, 73, 76, 120 semiology, 5 semiotics, 1, 4 Settala, Manfredo, 240 Settle, Elkanah, 232 Seymer, Henry, 266, 271–2, 276, 277–8, Plate 46 Shaftesbury, Lord, 94 331

the materiality of color

Spaer, Maud, 185 Spain, 6 cochineal, 6, 31, 48, 101–12 passim, 112n10, 112n12, 117n58, Plate 15 cosmetics, 124, 125, 127 indigo, 6, 144, 145, 146, 147 vermilion, 129 sparkle, 13, 20, 53, Plate 2 Sri Lanka, 189, 194 Staden, Hans, 241 Stahl, Georg Ernst, 167, 168, 169, 177n5 Stalker, John, 88, 89, 91, 92 Stearn, William, 265 Strachey, William, 126 straw, 209 Sullivan, Garrett A. Jr, 71 sun, 13, 17, 19, 20, 29, 51–2, 53, 56, 58 Swetnam, Joseph, 125

Tomlinson, Gary, 49 Transylvania, 199–200, 202–3, 204–9, 206, 207, 209, 209–12, 211, 212, 212–13 Traub, Valerie, 79n32 Tuke, Thomas, 125 Tupi, 7, 235–43, 245n12, 245n21, 245n24, Plates 36–8 Turkey, 32 Turnbull’s blue, 168 Turner, Terence, 241 turquoise, 46, 49, 52, 56 application/use, 6, 53, 57, 187, 188, 189, 190, 250 circulation, 6, 187, 188 significances, 57, 192 Turrell, James, 22 Tutankhamen, 31 type, 34, 37, 50, 61n31, 68 Tyrian purple, 2, 235

Taíno, 119, 122 tapirage, 235–43, 244n3, 244n5, Plates 36–8 tar, 52 Taussig, Michael, 45, 46, 52, 53, 58, 243 tawny, 208, 224, 226, 267, 268 technologies, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 86–91, 112n10, 128–30, 149 Teixeira, Dante Martins, 236–7, 240, 243, 244n3 tempera, 226, 230–31 terracotta, 203, 205 textiles, 7, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 40, 41n3, 41n18, 48, 85, 139, 140, 142, 172, 175, 199, 200–202, 203, 204–9, 206, 207, 209, 209–12, 211, 212, 212–13, 253, Plates 33–5; see also cloth; material Theophilus, 191 Thoreau, Henry David, 14, 21–2, 26n32, 26n37 threads, 31, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, 42n25, 202, 210 Tilley, Christopher, 22 Tipper, M.A., 38–40, 39 Tlaxcalan, 103, 113n13 Tokson, Elliot H., 218

ultramarine blue, 71, 169, 170, 235, 253 umber, 89 United States, 120, 257–60 urine, 2, 33, 71–2, 76, 89 value of color, see color, value Vaughan, Virginia Mason, 217, 218 Vegas gold, 4 Vendler, Helen, 74 Venetian red, 4 verdigris, 89, 128, 254 vermilion, 72, Plate 17 application/use, 6, 90, 119, 123, 124, 126, 130, 131, 132, 136n68, 255 circulation, 7, 119, 128–30, 132 production, 6, 7, 128–30 Victoria, Queen, 37, Plate 7 violet, 41n16, 205, 208, 209, Plate 34 Wake, Eleanor, 47, 57, 64n81 Wallace, Alfred Russell, 238 wallpaper, 7, 83–5, 84, 91, 92–3, 247–57, 248, 257–60, 262n30, Plates 39–44 walnuts, 223–4, 228–31 Walpole, Horace, 125 332

index

Wappoo (North American Indians), 163n4 Wappoo (town), 156–8, 159, 161, 162, 163, 165n45, 166n48 water, 56, 57, 120, Plate 11 Watt, George, 141 Watts, Isaac, 34–5 Weardon, Jennifer, 33 Webber, Pauline, 251 Webster, John, 231 Wecker, Johann Jacob, 69, 224, 228, 229 Wedgwood, Josiah, 87 West Indies, 145, 146 Westcott, Sebastian, 222 Western Europe, 29, 30, 34 white, 17, 29, 45, 48, 68, 78n7, 120, 174, 235, 241 application/use – Aztec/American Indian sacred art and bodypainting, 46, 47, 49, 50, 57, 58, 119, 122, Plate 8 – Chinese decorative objects and chinoiserie, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 95, 250, 253, 255, 256, Plate 39, Plate 44 – churches/monasteries, 50, 55, 57 – clothing/textiles, 194, 204, 206, 207, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 211, 212, 213, 219, 226, Plates 33–5 – cosmetics, 119, 124, 126, 131, 226 – embroidery, 37, 40 – glass bracelets, 188 – natural history illustration, 267 circulation, 131, 188 production, 124, 230, 237 significances, 30, 41n4, 41n5, 46, 49, 50, 55, 58, 120, 122, 193 White, John, 72 White House, 257–8 Williams, John, see Quash Williams, Roger, 126 Wilson, Ernest Henry, 256

Winfield House, Plates 40–41 Winter, John, 252, 254 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3 woad, 143, 172, 175, 262n31 wool, 33, 34, 35, 36, 152, 172, 175, 193, 202, 204 Woodward, John, 170 Wu Xiangmei, 251 Wycherly, William, 232 Xie He, 255 Yale blue, 4 yellow, 2, 3, 4, 41n16, 45, 48, 68, 120, 235, 269, 270 application/use – Aztec/American Indian sacred art and bodypainting, 46, 49, 58, 119, Plate 8 – Chinese decorative objects and chinoiserie, 83, 85, 89, 90, 92, 250, 255, 256 – clothing/textiles, 193–4, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 219, Plates 33–5 – embroidery, 36 – featherwork, 238, 240–41, 242, 245n24 – glass bracelets, 188, 190, 194 – gravestones, 13 – natural history illustration, 267, 268 circulation, 131, 188 production, 237, 238–40, 255 significances, 2, 46, 49, 58, 191, 193–4 Young, Diana, 29 Yu Feian, 254 Yucatán, 111, 116n58 Yuma, 121 zamindars, 8, 139, 147 Ziegler, Marx, 42n34

333

1 Margarett Cumings stone (slate), 1790, Billerica, Massachusetts, carved by a member of the Lamson family. Photo: author

2 Elizabeth Huntington stone (schist), 1751, Windham, Connecticut. Photo: author

3 Colonel Isaac and Elisabeth Dodge tomb (slate, red brick, and mortar), 1785, Ipswich, Massachusetts. Photo: author

4

Mary Flexney, prayer tablet sampler, 1737. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London, T.318-1960

5 Mary Nickolls Exton, prayer tablet sampler, 1755. Courtesy of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, T.155-1928

6

Sarah Rogers, sampler, 1772. Courtesy of Witney Antiques, Witney (UK); from Paradise Revisited: British Samplers and Historic Embroideries, 1590–1880 (Witney (UK): Witney Antiques, 2000), p. 25

7 Cheltenham Female Orphan Asylum commemorative sampler, 1842. Courtesy of Witney Antiques, Witney (UK); from Stitched in Adversity: Samplers of the Poor (Witney (UK): Witney Antiques, 2006), cat. no. 29

8 Coyolxauqui Stone, (reconstructed) polychrome stone, late fifteenth century, Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlan. Photo: Molly H. Bassett

9 Vault painting, Augustinian monastery of Malinalco, Mexico, c. 1571–73: red and black inscription (lower register) and vegetation and bees (upper section). Photo: Jeanette Favrot Peterson

10 Juan Gerson, Noah’s Ark in upper medallion, sotocoro paintings, Franciscan monastery, Tecamachalco, Puebla, 1562. Photo: Jeanette Favrot Peterson

11

Chantico with atl tlachinolli glyph on back (note blue water and red burning); from Codex Borbonicus, fol. 18. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale, Paris. Photo: Jeanette Favrot Peterson

12

Cabinet, China, c. 1700, 79 × 90 × 53.5 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, FE.39:1 to 21-1981. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

13 Silk robe, made in London, woven and hand painted in China, 1760–65. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, T.593:1 to 5-1999. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

14 Plate, porcelain, painted in famille rose enamels and gold with coat of arms, China, Qing dynasty, Qianlong reign period, c. 1750. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, FE.64-1978. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

15 Man’s cloak made of silk dyed red with Spanish cochineal and embroidered with silvergilt threads. Made in France at the end of the sixteenth century when red dyes were expensive. Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 793-1901. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

16 “Indian Collecting Cochineal with a Deer Tail”; from José Antonio de Alzate y Ramirez, Memoria sobre la naturaleza, cultivo, y beneficio de la grana (1777). Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, Vault Ayer MS l03l

17 A “paper” of vermilion. By the mid-nineteenth century much of the vermilion traded in North America was produced and packaged in China. Museum of the Fur Trade Collection, Chadron, Nebraska

19 Fragment of indigo-resist-dyed cloth, Gujurat, fifteenth century; textile with alternating elephant and flowering tree with geese and deer design. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, No. T.253-1958. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

18 Chintz palampore with double tree design, cotton, mordant-dyed and resist-dyed, Coromandel Coast, c. 1725–50. Made in South-East India for the European market. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, No. IS.10-1976. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum

20 Indigo resist-dyed fabric designed by author. Photo: author

21 Indigo making in colonial South Carolina, from Henry Mouzon Jr., A Map of the Parish of St Stephen, in Craven County (London, 1773), from the collections of the South Carolina Historical Society

22 Reproduction of colonial slave garment made by Kendra Johnson, dyed with indigo. Photo: Anderson Wrangle

Plates 23–26 The color created with Prussian blue depends on both the quality of the pigment and the surface preparation. All images © Elsbeth Geldhof

23

24

Substrate gray laid paper: 1 Prussian blue wash in gum arabic; 2 Prussian blue wash in milk; 3 Prussian blue with chalk as size and binder

Substrate cream laid paper: 1 Prussian blue wash in gum arabic; 2 Prussian blue wash in milk; 3 Prussian blue with chalk as size and binder

25 Substrate wood panel treated with six gesso layers, dried and polished with pumice stone and sepia between applications. These samples represent Prussian blue used in traditional house paint techniques: 1 Prussian blue in stand oil; 2 Prussian blue oil glaze over an opaque Prussian blue-lead white oil paint mixture; 3 Prussian blue in dead flat oil (boiled linseed oil with turpentine oil)

26 Canvas given various preparations. These samples represent Prussian blue used in eighteenth-century easel painting techniques: 1–3 Prussian blue mixed in boiled linseed oil with a little beeswax added; 4–6 Prussian blue in linseed oil (4 on a pinkish ground layer, 5 on a yellowish ground layer, 6 on a white ground)

27 Until the end of the eighteenth century, Prussian blue was more commonly used as a textile paint than as a dyestuff. It was used to create the blue and green colors on this silk fabric, imported from China to France in the 1770s. Chinese painted-silk fabric, detail showing the flower and leaf pattern. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Accession # 1942-033-02. Photo: S. Reiter and B. Price, 1995. Courtesy of the Textile Conservation Department, PMA

28 Polychrome medieval glass bangle fragment from Masyaf (Syria) castle’s excavations (Syrian antiquity soundings). Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Stéphanie Boulogne, Sorbonne (Paris IV). Stored in situ. 4.6 cm × 0.4 cm. Photo: author

29 Six colored glass bangles fragments from Shabwa, Hadramaut, Yemen. (C. Darles’ private collection, France). A: length: 4.5 cm, width: 1.3 cm; B: length: 3.8 cm, width: 1.1 cm; C: length 2.4 cm, width: 0.9 cm; D: length: 1.7 cm, width: 0.4 cm; E: length: 3.5 cm, width: 1.2 cm; F: length: 4.5 cm, width: 1.3 cm. Photo: author

30 A Polychrome medieval glass bangle fragment from Shabwa, Hadramaut, Yemen (C. Darles’ private collection. France), 3.6 cm × 0.8 cm. Photo: author

31

Gala dress of Catherine of Brandenburg, Hungarian National Museum, cat. no. 1954. 664

32

Mente of Gabriel Bethen, Hungarian National Museum, cat. no. 1950. 177

red red and white royal purple black blue and yellow red-yellow blue ash pulsatilla

not specified green reddish white blackberry silver green and yellow body orange hair

textiles measured by the ell

red and yellow yellow white sour cherry parrot color peach flower green, yellow and blue blackberry, green and red other

textiles measured by the bolt

33 Distribution of textile colors in the Account Book

sour cherry blackberry parrot color rose black yellow

Clothes of Gabriel Bethlen

34

red ash violet hair peach flower lavender flower

royal purple silver olive sea body black, green

green not specified white carnation blue other

Clothes of Catherine of Brandenburg

Comparison of colors worn by Gabriel Bethlen and Catherine of Brandenburg

white yellow red blackberry black hair sea carnation peach flower sour cherry parrot color green, red and other blackberry, gold green black, green ash silver royal purple blue

35

Distribution of textile colors worn at the court of Catherine of Brandenburg

36 Unknown Italian artist, Tupi feathered cape with bonnet from illustrated inventory of Manfredo Settala’s collection: Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, Modena, Codice Campori, 338 · H.1. 21 fol. 5 recto. The later title to the Codex includes the words “disegni originali del Museo Settala” (Original Drawings of the Settala Museum)

37 Example of tapiraged feather of a scarlet ibis (Eudocimus ruber), specimen from The Division of Birds, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Museum. Photo: Amy Buono (2007)

38 Tupi bonnet, Nationalmuseet Etnografisk Samling, Copenhagen, #EH5932, 29 cm, down parrot feathers. Photo: Amy Buono (2004)

39 Colorful overall double panel, 12 × 8 feet (3.66 × 2.44 meters), featuring a golden pheasant and blue heron with their mates amidst magnolia tree blossoms of pink and white. Past and present, the wallpaper has delighted dignitaries and guests over the centuries. Courtesy of Blair House, US Department of State. Photo: Louise Krafft

40 Similar to the Blair House wallpaper, the Green Room of Winfield House in London displays a jade-like green background to its eighteenth-century hand painted Chinese wallpaper. This wallpaper came from Townley Hall, County Louth, Ireland. Courtesy of Winfield House, US Department of State

41

A brightly colored parrot rests on a tree branch surrounded by multicolored leaves. Courtesy of Winfield House, US Department of State

42 A striking pink background to a hand painted eighteenth-century Chinese wallpaper shows off a pair of birds rendered in a framed architectural element. This unusual wallpaper is in the home of New York interior designer, David Kaihoi. Courtesy of David Kaihoi. Photo: Ngoc Minh Ngo, New York

43 Upside-down bird perching on a tree branch shows off cinnabar-colored features. Courtesy of Blair House, US Department of State. Photo: Louise Krafft

44 Perched on rockery, a chalk-whitecolored cock gazes toward its partner. Courtesy of Blair House, US Department of State. Photo: Louise Krafft

45 Moses Harris, “Scheme of Colours,” in An exposition of English insects including the several classes of Neuroptera, Hymenoptera, & Diptera, or bees, flies, & libelullae Exhibiting on 51 copper plates near 500 figures, accurately drawn, & highly finished in colours (London, 1776). By permission of the Linnean Society of London

46 Moses Harris drew and engraved this illustration of butterflies for Dru Drury’s Illustrations of Natural History; wherein are exhibited upwards of two hundred and forty Figures of Exotic Insects, according to their different Genera (known as Exotic Insects), 3 vols (London, 1770–82), plate V. The engravings were colored by Henry Seymer. By permission of the Linnean Society of London

47 Two views of the Duchess of Portland’s Mitre Shell, copied and colored by students of Martyn’s seminary, fig. 19 in Thomas Martyn, The Universal Conchologist (London, 1784), 37.g.8 (2). © The British Library Board

48 Frontispiece by Thomas Martyn and his Academy for Illustrating and Painting Natural History to Aranei; or the Natural History of Spiders, by Charles Clerck and Eleazar Albin (London, 1793). University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center