Where Do We Get Color? Purple
Humans have come up with some pretty interesting, innovative, and even a few barbaric ways to create pigments. This is my seventh post in my series on pigment origins. This is a stand-alone post, but you can [read the other posts here.]
In ancient times purple represented wealth and royalty because it was rare and expensive. In Victorian times and in Impressionist paintings it represented femininity, youthfulness and innocence. In modern times, purple may carry one of the older meanings or symbolize magic, psychedelia, or counter-cultural movements. Purple is a color of wonder and mystery
Tyrian purple
Tyrian purple is an ancient dye manufactured by the Phoenicians using putrefied glands of crushed Murex brandaris shellfish. Creating this dye was labor intensive, since each shellfish only secreted a small amount of dye. The shelfish had to be caught, crushed, left in the sun until they became putrid, collected and boiled down for the coveted purple dye to be collected.
It took 4,530,000 shellfish to create 1 pound of dye, which would then sell for 150,000 denarii, which, according to my calculations, would be worth more than $8,700,000 in today's U.S. dollars.
This dye became so associated with the city of Tyre that the surrounding region became known as Phoenicia, from the Greek word phoinos, meaning deep red or purple.
This source of dye was so renowned in antiquity that our modern word "purple" comes from the Latin purpura, meaning, shellfish.
Perkin's Mauve
William Perkins was a lab assistant in 1856, assisting in an effort to produce a cheaper cure for malaria. While experimenting with coal tar, a messy black substance left over from gas lamps, something strange happened. As he was cleaning up from a failed experiment, he noticed the processed coal tar he was working with turned his rags purple.
He suspected he had stumbled across a new dye. This might not seem like a big deal because we’ve all seen colored stains before. But up to this point, dyes had all come from natural sources, like plants and rocks and shellfish. They were expensive, and both rare to find, and time-consuming to prepare. The thought of a dye that could be made chemically was a invention that would rock the world of art, fashion and design.
He experimented on the dye in secret, testing whether it would be resistant to washing and sunlight. At the age of 18, he patented this new purple dye, called mauvine, and became very wealthy.
Perkins had great timing with this discovery. Purple was all the rage that season, despite being so expensive and difficult to produce. For a brief time, all the most fashionable ladies were wearing this new mauve color.
Perkins went on to invent other dyes as well and changed the way people viewed science, since he had created a profitable, widely sought after substance. Before this discovery, people considered science a fanciful waste of time. But one Perkins demonstrated that useful, relevant, and profitable substances could be made with science, it began to be more respectible, but sadly, more commercialized as well.
Perkin's mauve, mauvine, and aniline purple all refer to the same color.
Indigo
In the mnemonic "ROY G. BIV" referring to the colors of the rainbow, the “I” stands for indigo. Issac Newton listed seven colors of the rainbow because he wanted to match the seven days of the week, the seven (known) planets, the seven notes of the Western music scale, and because 7 is considered the number of perfection.
Indigo as a dye had been around for a long time. It comes from the fermented leaves of the indigo plant, (Indigofera tinctoria,) a shrub native to China, southeast Asia, Africa, and South America. The name means "of India" because most of the Europe's indigo dye was imported from India.
This dye was used in pottery and fabric, often used to cheaply color white fabric so it didn't show dirt (or blood in the case of army uniforms.) Because it was so prone to fading, it was not often used in painting until after William Perkin's work in synthesizing pigments led to the discovery of synthetic indigo Adolf Von Baeyer in 1878.
Since ancient times, color has been an important part of our lives, socially, economically, spiritually, and creatively. The wide range of colors --and of pigment sources, strange as they might be--is a gift of God. Let us use them responsibly to bring glory to His handiwork. Until next week, thank you for reading.
sources
https://www.winsornewton.com/na/articles/colours/spotlight-on-permanent-mauve/
https://guides.othmerlibrary.sciencehistory.org/c.php?g=339709&p=2286299
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/perkin-mauve-purple/index.html
https://www.worldhistory.org/Tyrian_Purple/
https://www.winsornewton.com/na/articles/colours/spotlight-on-indigo/
https://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/PlantFinder/PlantFinderDetails.aspx?taxonid=280305
https://coolors.co/colors
https://www.winsornewton.com/na/articles/colours/purple-an-enchanting-pigment-reserved-for-royals-and-rulers/