Time Travel with Colour

The thing that stays with me about Virginia Woolf’s time travelling novel “Orlando” was how the scents in history were different in each era . When I first became interested in natural dyes one of the most revelatory aspects of it was the notion that colour is also different in time. This is because up until 1856 with the discovery by an 18 year old English chemist called William Henry Perkins who was attempting to make quinine, a treatment for malaria from coal tar, he instead created a mysterious purple sludge. Rather than throwing it away he tested it on silk and it produced a brilliant mauve colour. He named it mauveine and it became very fashionable and was worn by Queen Victoria herself.

So this chemical accident began a whole new age of dyes that were synthetically produced. They were cheaper, more stable and were suitable for mass production. These dyes are what we see and wear mostly .

The traditional dyes obtained from natural sources like minerals, plants and crushed insects are the ones we can still see if we go to a gallery and look at paintings and tapestries. Or if we are lucky enough to see cave paintings made with ochres from minerals that span millions of years.

It is a kind of time travel , to look at colour with historical eyes.

One of the magical parts of using natural dyes is that the colour molecules are made up of multiple colour components. Indigo contains not just one molecule but a group of compounds that interact with light in subtle ways, giving it depth and variation in hue. Weather conditions, soil and harvest time can also influence the dyes. To me this makes them more dynamic and nuanced.

So next time you see an old painting have a closer look at the colour and look at it through an historical lens.