Curated by Ashok Roy (Director of Collections) and Caroline Campbell (Curator of Italian Paintings before 1500), the National Gallery’s Making Colour was an ambitious exhibition, which aimed to enlighten visitors about the science and technology behind artists’ use of pigments and paints. The press release boldly claimed that this was the ‘first exhibition of its kind in the UK’. While there has been an increase in all aspects of colour studies and artists’ materials in the recent past, it is true, and quite surprising, that a substantial exhibition on colour in art had not been curated before in Britain. The National Gallery was certainly one of the most appropriate places for an exhibition examining the production and sourcing of, as well as the creativity and thinking behind the use of colour. Much of it was informed by research carried out by the National Gallery’s own Scientific Department, which was founded in 1934 and is one of the leading institutes for the study of materials and techniques of Western European paintings in the world.

Making Colour is one of the National Gallery’s “inspires” exhibitions programme, which, providing fresh views, uses paintings from its own collection, in combination with some loans and expert research. The large exhibition space, comprising ten rooms in the basement of the Sainsbury Wing, was therefore predominantly filled with paintings from the National Gallery collection, and the exhibition content remained roughly within the time frame and traditional remit of its collection (Western European painting from the 13th to the 19th centuries), with a few notable exceptions, such as an Egyptian mummy portrait (on loan from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL), and a couple of lapis lazuli figures dating from the fourth and second centuries BC (on loan from the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and the British Museum). A single object dating from the twenty-first century was a fragment of Roger Hiorns’ installation Seizure, for which he flooded rooms in a derelict London building with copper sulphate in 2008, resulting in the formation of stunning blue crystal shapes. The artificiality of the creation of this particular blue “interior” was symbolic of one of the main aims of this exhibition, to draw attention to the fact that we are surrounded by artificially created colour and pigments.

The difference between colour and pigment and how both inform art was successfully explained by panels and labels written in a clear and succinct style, and by displaying raw materials, pure pigments and tools for pigment manufacture alongside many of the paintings. For visitors with considerable previous knowledge about pigment and paint manufacture this may not have provided new insights, but presumably it worked well for the majority of the general audience.

The exhibition began with an introduction to how materiality and critical thinking about colour need to be seen and understood together. The panels referred to primary colours being used in design and decoration for millennia, but identified the early seventeenth century as the beginning of modern colour theory and research into the interaction of colour and the manifestation of the colour wheel. On entering the first room visitors saw a gigantic copy of one of the most important colour wheels of the nineteenth century, one of several created by the chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul from 1839 onwards. Sadly there was no explanation for why this was chosen as a prime image, although a reference was made to the Impressionists’ use of Chevreul’s formalisation. This section was crucial in providing basic concepts underlying colour study and included a number of hugely significant objects, including an extremely rare first edition of The Natural System of Colours from c.1776 by the English entomologist Moses Harris, who can be credited with providing the first fully formed colour wheel designed for use in art and scientific illustration in Britain. While the hand-coloured Harris wheels are stunning works of art in their own right, the general importance of this late eighteenth-century book cannot be underestimated, as it links the earlier scientific treatise on colour by Isaac Newton (Opticks, 1704) and the artistic circles of the newly founded Royal Academy. The copy on display in the exhibition (on loan from the Royal Academy) is one of only four surviving copies in the world and probably belonged to Sir Joshua Reynolds. Harris’s book also inspired the next generation of Royal Academicians and artists, as it was published in a second edition in 1811, again from within Royal Academy circles. The link to the early nineteenth century was thus made, and it was fitting that in the same room a gloriously messy paint box and paint palette belonging to James Mallord William Turner (on loan from the Tate Archive) were also displayed, highlighting the connection between theory and practice, or colour research and the materiality of colour. It would have been advantageous to be given information about Turner’s own interest in colour theory, and the important contribution to the field of the National Gallery’s first director Charles Lock Eastlake, who translated Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s substantial work Zur Farbenlehre (first published 1810) into English from the 1820s onward and published it in 1840 as Goethe’s Theory of Colours. Turner owned a copy, heavily annotated in his own hand, and even produced two canvases inspired by it (available online here and here).

After the difficult task of introducing these rather complex concepts to a general audience the exhibition focussed on individual colours by roughly following the visible colour spectrum, devoting a room each to blue, green, yellow, red and purple, with the addition of gold and silver. The latter two were a daring but interesting inclusion, as gold and silver are not conventionally included in the colour spectrum, or in colour diagrams. However, the curators argued that these precious materials played a key role in Western painting. The display highlighted the need to differentiate between the use of the actual material in the form of gold or silver leaf and the illusion of them, or ‘fictive’ gold and silver, as painted by artists using pigments and paints. This section, placed at the end of the colour trail, further alluded to the significance of surface finish and the close connection between colour, light and shade. While the inclusion of gold and silver was an inspired curatorial decision, it was not explained why orange was not treated separately and why black, white and browns were omitted entirely in the exhibition.

The arrangement of an exhibition on colour in art according to primary and secondary colours may easily be criticised as being too simplistic, but I would argue that it worked well in a gallery context, providing a clear and visually strong structure. The works chosen to inform the visitor about the pigments used to create blues, yellows, reds, greens and purples were expertly and beautifully hung and lit against a neutral dark background. The curators drew predominantly and understandably, given the collection context, on examples from painting, but made good references to other materials and techniques, supported by loan items. The use of cobalt blue for example, was illustrated by the inclusion of examples of seventeenth century Chinese porcelain bowls, while the use of pigments in textiles, as dyestuffs, was explained using paintings showing figures dressed in expensively coloured and decorated garments, as well as original pieces of fifteenth-century crimson velvet and silk (on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum) and examples of fabrics dyed with different types of red lake pigments.

Some of the paintings chosen for each colour section were surprising and inspired choices and added much to the understanding of the materiality and cultural significance of colour. For example, the story of ultramarine blue is exciting and easily told, as it is geographically particularly evocative (for a long time this most vibrant of blues could only be sourced from remote caves in Afghanistan and its monetary value was reflected in its use in painting, with only the most important figures, such as the Virgin Mary, being painted in blue garments), but the inclusion of Orazio Gentileschi’s David Contemplating the Head of Goliath (c. 1612, on loan from a private collection), painted in oil directly on to a surface of lapis lazuli, added another dimension to the interplay of value, use, availability and symbolic significance of colour. In the red room a painting from the National Gallery’s own collection, Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas’ La Coiffure (Combing the Hair) from c. 1896 was an unexpected star, almost single-handedly proving that the artist’s handling of colour within a limited palette and the subtle differences between pigments contribute as much to the brilliance of a painting as applying laws of colour contrast.

While there was a strong emphasis on the sixteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the eighteenth century was represented by a few impressive works, for example Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s Self Portrait with a Straw Hat, hung in the first room next to Turner’s paint box, in which the artist proudly holds some of the tools of her trade, a carefully arranged palette and paint brushes. In other rooms the early eighteenth-century pigment, Prussian blue, often referred to as the first synthetically produced colour and a blue of great intensity, is deservedly given much space and focus and illustrated by Thomas Gainsborough’s Mrs Siddons (1785), in which he used Prussian blue copiously for the sitter’s dress and sash. In the yellow room Gainsborough was used again; the touching picture of The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly (c. 1756) was included to provide an example of the use of particularly high quality Naples yellow for one of the dresses, but it may also have served as an example of the use of fictive silver, considering the brilliance of the other girl’s dress. Coincidentally, Gainsborough’s Daughters depicts an utterly fleeting moment in time, while the label text informed about the fugitive nature of pigments.

It was a big task telling ‘the story of colour’ through several centuries of Western European art in the context of one exhibition, but the National Gallery succeeded in introducing an impossibly large and multi-faceted topic in an elegantly designed display and in a very accessible manner. Admittedly it does feel truncated, given the absence of the twentieth century, during which the large-scale industrial production of paints developed even further and several generations and groups of artists embraced colour not just as a tool but as a subject and concept in its own right. However, it was logical and sensible of the curators to reflect the time-frame and scope of the National Gallery collection, i.e. finishing, apart from a couple of exceptions, with the end of the nineteenth century and focussing on the use of colour by the Impressionists. What was surprising was the exclusion of a number of works from the National Gallery collection that are known as prime examples of the use of certain pigments. It was perhaps a missed opportunity not to bring down a Titian to illustrate the use of ultramarine blue in a non-religious context and in combination with other blue pigments, or one of Turner’s light-drenched works to explain his use of yellows in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. And if you have two Vermeers in your collection, why not use them to highlight the importance of the quality and purity of pigments? Similarly, the first room, which introduced the world of colour, pigments, tools and colour studies to the visitor and provided many intriguing tasters, could have made more use of archives, collections and historic connections on the National Gallery’s doorstep. The loan of Moses Harris’s Natural System of Colours was a coup, but considering the ample display space in the room, it could easily have been flanked by other examples of colour literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example a copy of Newton’s Opticks, a publication by the great English colour man and researcher George Field (c. 1777 – 1854), Eastlake’s translation of Goethe’s colour theory, or manuscripts from Eastlake’s own colour library, which survives intact on site. Apart from the National Gallery’s own substantial resources, the Royal College of Art, just across town, is home to the Colour Reference Library, one of the most important collections on the subject of colour in the world. That said, the exhibition included one other rarely seen colour manuscript, displayed not in the first room but in the context of green: The De Mayerne Manuscript (on loan from the British Library) compiled between 1620 and 1646 by a physician to James I, Charles I and Charles II, charts the author’s experiments with making paints and testing their stability. Almost every entry is accompanied by a paint sample, making this a stunningly beautiful object to look at. But the manuscript is also an early and important example of colour being a subject and field of interest shared by both artists and scientists for centuries, if not millennia. Coinciding with the preparations for Making Colour, it has just been digitised by the British Library. Colour studies, manuscripts and printed literature therefore add much to the understanding of this complex relationship, which was probably born out of both necessity and fascination. Perhaps the exploration of this relationship needs to be addressed in a separate exhibition, but a few more examples of colour literature (scientific, academic, as well as painting manuals) would have enhanced an otherwise successful and educational exhibition.

Regrettably and inexplicably no exhibition catalogue was published, but the excellent short introduction to colour by Ashok Roy, A Closer Look: Colour (second edition 2009) was a good substitute, and the shop was well-stocked with other recent, relevant and more substantial literature on colour. Scholarly articles and specialist publications by the National Gallery’s Scientific Department were easily available in print and online for visitors who may have felt the exhibition labels and panel texts were too basic for anyone with considerable existing knowledge of the subject. An excellent, extensive and varied programme of events accompanied the exhibition, comprising workshops, gallery talks, lunchtime talks, lectures and social events, many of them free of charge.

Making Colour is at the National Gallery from 18 June to 7 September 2014.