Copyright
Stefano Evangelista; Charlotte Ribeyrol; Matthew Winterbottom; Copyright of individual chapters are maintained by the chapter author(s).ISBN
Language
- English
THEMA
- AGA
- PDX
- NHTB
- DSBF
- JHMC
BISAC
- ART015260
- HIS054000
- SCI034000
- LIT004130
- DES003000
- SOC002010
Keywords
- Colour studies
- Material culture
- History of science
- Art history (long nineteenth century)
- Pigments and dyes
- Empire and identity
Colour Matters
Exploring Chromatic Materialities in the Long Nineteenth Century (1798-1914)
Colour Matters provides a fresh investigation of colour in the long nineteenth century. Across fourteen richly researched essays, the book explores the materiality, politics, and sensory experience of colour—from synthetic dyes and chrome pigments to the role of colour in medicine, gender, empire, and identity. By weaving together art history, literature, anthropology, science, and conservation, the contributors reveal a dynamic world where chromatic experimentation shaped aesthetics, technology, and social life. Colour Matters offers an essential contribution to colour studies and the humanities’ material turn, showing how pigment and perception illuminate both past and present.
This book will appeal to scholars and students of art history, literature, cultural studies, and the history of science in the long eighteenth-century, as well as curators, conservators, and readers fascinated by the histories of colour and material culture.
Contents
‘Nature Is so Much Better than Dyeing […] You Cannot Get the Same Colour’ Colourful Feathers, Nature and Artifice in the Age of Empires
- Ariane Fennetaux
Chrome Yellow American Mineral, American Fancy
- Kirsten Travers Moffitt
Wavelengths and Potato Starch The (Im)material in Colour Photography
- Nathalie Boulouch
Whitewashing the Wards? Colour, Health, and Victorian Hospital Interiors
- Kay Simpson
From Hysteria to Healing Félix Vallotton’s Bon Marché and the Ambiguous Nature of Colour in Fin-de-Siècle Culture
- Alessandra Ronetti
Masculinities, Colour, Dyeing and the Design of Tweeds 1829–1914
- Fiona Anderson
The Queerly Racialised Colours of Religion and Decadence at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge
- Dominic Janes
‘The Look of Measurement’ Colour and Sight in Victor Fulconis’s Depictions of the Indo-Caribbean in Martinique, 1883
- Helena Neimann Erikstrup
Annotating Syme Nineteenth-Century Marks and Marginalia in Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1814/1821)
- Joyce Dixon
Between Heritage, Militaria and Concept The Magenta Case
- Marie-Anne Sarda
The Hayters and the Controversy on Colour
- Giulia Simonini
John Ruskin’s Painting Materials A Quest for Durable Colour between Industry and Nature
- Tea Ghigo
‘Rather revolution than evolution’ Chinese White and Watercolour Painting Techniques in England 1850-1880
- Fiona Mann
Colour on Trial Concerns about the Quality of Artists’ Pigments
- Kathrin Kinseher
Contributors
Stefano Evangelista
(editor)Stefano Evangelista is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Oxford University and Fellow of Trinity College. He works on nineteenth-century literature and is especially interested in Aestheticism and Decadence, the relationship between literary and visual cultures, and the reception of Japanese and European classical culture. His latest monograph is Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle: Citizens of Nowhere (OUP, 2021). His edited volumes include The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe (2010), A. C. Swinburne: Unofficial Laureate (2013, together with Catherine Maxwell), and Literature and Sculpture in the Fin de Siècle (2018, together with Luisa Calè). Together with Catherine Maxwell, he is general editor of the Jewelled Tortoise series published by the MHRA. He currently holds an Einstein Visiting Fellowship (2023-26) at the Humboldt University, Berlin, where he is also a fellow of the Centre for British Studies.
Charlotte Ribeyrol
(editor)Charlotte Ribeyrol is Professor of 19th-century British Literature at Sorbonne Université in Paris and honorary curator at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Her main field of research is Victorian Hellenism and the reception of the colours of the past in 19th-century painting and literature. Her first monograph entitled “Etrangeté, passion, couleur”, L’hellénisme de Swinburne, Pater et Symonds came out in 2013. In 2014-2016 she co-directed a major interdisciplinary project on chromatic materiality with chemists and archeologists, which led to the publication of a collection of essays entitled The Colours of the Past in Victorian England (Peterlang, Oxford, 2016). Following her Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellowship at Trinity College, Oxford (2016-2018), she was awarded a major ERC grant for her project CHROMOTOPE (2019-2025) which explores the 19th-century ‘chromatic turn’. As part of this research programme she co-curated with Matthew Winterbottom the exhibition Colour Revolution, Victorian Art, Fashion and Design at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (21 September 2023-18 February 2024). She is also the author of William Burges’s Great Bookcase and the Victorian Colour Revolution (Yale University Press) which came out in June 2023.
Matthew Winterbottom
(editor)Matthew Winterbottom is Curator of Western Art Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He has over 35 years’ experience working with and researching European decorative arts. His research interests cover a wide range of European decorative arts from the late medieval to the early twentieth centuries. He has extensive knowledge of metalwork, furniture, ceramics, glass and textiles and sculpture. He is committed to exploring ways of making this material more engaging and accessible to museum visitors. Most recently, Matthew co-curated the exhibition Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and Design at the Ashmolean Museum.