Colour
Purity of Light
Thursday, 25 June 2009
Posted by Niki Fulton at 09:36 AM in Colour
Over the past few weeks I have been searching for a very natural violet to add to our palette. A hue that appears on stones at the shore line or the shade you occasionally see on the surface of an early evening tide.
There has long been a curiosity around shades of violet, perhaps because as Victoria Finlay points out in her book “it is the last colour in the rainbow spectrum, symbolising both the end of the known and the beginning of the unknown”
The word purple is thought to have come from the latin puritae lucis meaning “purity of light” It is a shade that was favoured by Roman Emperors and is still to this day regarded as a regal colour.
Legend tells of how on a Mediterranean beach Hercules’s dog bound back to his master with purple dye dripping from his mouth. The dog had been chewing on sea snails (murex brandaris) which secrete purple mucus from their glands. This discovery led to millions of snails being crushed for their dye! It was such an expensive process and literally took thousands of snails to dye one robe, that the shade was reserved for people in power.
Luckily for the snails, in 1856 a young student, William Henry Perkin was trying to find a synthetic alternative to quinine to fight malaria and produced by accident a synthetic purple dye….and that’s another story…..but you will be glad to hear we have many shades of violet in our collection, my personal favourite being S426, a fairly deep violet-grey-brown.
Comment posted by willanabe on Thursday, 25 June 2009 at 21:39 PM
Love the way artists such as Cadell used violet colours, esp in his interiors.
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