Needlework As Art Part 24

[281] Elsewhere I have spoken of the embroideries of the early Christian times found in the Fayoum, in Egypt.

These afford notable examples of the ancient method in putting in patches on a worn or frayed garment. They invariably embroidered them, and so added a grace to the old and honoured vestment, and justified the cla.s.sical appellation, "Healer of clothes" for a darner. The comparatively modern additions of the restorer, are in ancient as in later specimens, often a puzzle to the archaeologist.

[282] The specimens in the South Kensington Museum, where Dr. Rock gives their approximate dates, are most useful to the student of this subject.

CHAPTER V.

COLOUR.

"My soul, what gracious glorious powers To hue and radiance G.o.d has given!"

Cautley, "Emblems," p. 21.

It is my intention to confine myself to the discussion of colour, in as far as it belongs to the dyes of textiles and the materials for embroidery. I will adhere as closely as I can to this part of what is a great and most interesting subject--one which the science of to-day has opened out, and by the test of experiment, cleared of erroneous theories; revealing to us all its beauty and fitness for the use and delight of man.

As through all ages the eye has been gradually educated to appreciate _harmony_ in colour, so _dissonance_--that is, what errs against harmony--hurts us, without apparently a sufficient reason; and we have to seek the causes of our sensations in the scientific works and lectures of Professor Tyndall and others.

There is no doubt that the appreciation of colour has belonged in different degrees to the eye of every animal, but especially to that of man, ever since light first painted the flowers of the field. The eye is created to see colour, as well as form. But we know that men, being accustomed to acquiesce in the powers with which they find themselves gifted by nature, enjoy and use them, long before they begin to study, cla.s.sify, and name them.

When we recollect that the circulation of the blood was not known within the last three hundred years, and that Albert Durer painted the skeleton Death on the bridge of Lucerne, with one bone in the upper and one in the lower arm, we shall be surprised to find that the ancients had named the colours they saw, with some degree of descriptive and scientific precision. The word "purple," for instance, covered a mult.i.tude of tints, which had not as yet been differentiated, either in common parlance or in poetry,[283] though as articles of commerce the purple tints had been early distinguished.

What names have we now, in this present advanced day, for defining tastes or smells? We say that something smells like a violet, or a rose, or a sea breeze, or a frosted cabbage. We say a smell is nice or nasty, that a taste is delicious or nauseous; but beyond calling it sweet or sour, we have no descriptive words for either smells or tastes, whereas the nations who traded in the materials for dyes exchanged their nomenclatures, which we can recognize from the descriptive remarks of different authors.

Colour, as an art, was born in those lands which cl.u.s.ter round the eastern sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean--the northern coasts of Syria and Arabia, and the isles of Greece. All art grew in that area, and all its adjuncts and materials there came to perfection, though often imported from more southern and eastern sources.[284]

E. Curtius says that the science of colour came into Europe with the Phnicians and accompanied the worship of Astarte. This, of course, applies to artistic textiles, as the Greeks had already acquired the art of dyeing for plain weaving. Numa, in his regulations for necessary weaving, refers also to colour. The Italians therefore must at that time have made some advance in the art, especially the Etruscans.[285]

The infinity of variation in colour is difficult to imagine. The chemists of the Gobelins have fixed and catalogued 4480 tones.

Besides, we must not forget that it is now all but ascertained that the same colour is probably appreciated differently by nearly every eye.[286]

How the eye accepts colours and conveys them to the mind is still a question in dispute, though the theories of Tyndall, Helmholz, Hering, Charpentier, and others, aided by experiments, are drawing ascertained facts into a circle, which will ere long be complete, and the mysteries of colour may be ascertained.

Probably the effects of colour on educated minds are as various as the tints and shades of tones of the many substances which receive them,--reflected from all surrounding objects, blazing in light, or softened by shadow,--fresh and glowing, or permanently faded--shining with modern varnish, or sobered by the dust of ages.

It is the art of the colourist, whether he paints pictures, or dyes textiles, or embroiders them, to reduce the tints of the prism to an endurable and delightful lowness of tone, while preserving as far as possible all their light and purity.

Prismatic colours are so radiantly glorious, that when we see the rainbow in the sky it is each time a joyful surprise. The most stolid natures are moved by it; we have even seen our dog staring at it.

When, in experiments on light, the shafts of colour are thrown on the wall, they are greeted with shouts of admiration; but these glories are veiled to us by the fact that the eye cannot dissect the prismatic ray without the a.s.sistance of the instrument that has revealed it.

This is a merciful arrangement; for we are not fitted to live in a prismatic display, any more than in a continuity of lightning flashes.

We should go mad or blind if exposed to either.

Science has shown us the perfect beauty of colour without form, the soothing pleasures of its harmonies, and the delightful surprises of its contrasts. From the glimpses we have of its nature and laws, we may hope for fresh inspiration for the art of the colourist.

Though it is true that each eye, even when educated, retains its own special appreciation of the colours that gratify its seeing nerve, yet there are certain standards which give almost universal pleasure.[287]

The blind and the colour-blind must remain exceptions for all time; and there are many gradations in colour-blindness, till we come to the normal cla.s.s of seeing eyes; and pa.s.sing them by, reach to those few men, gifted beyond all others with that fund of sensitive eye-nerve and mental power, which enables them to create new thoughts in colour.[288] t.i.tian and his school arose from the inherited science and tradition, and carefully prepared pigments of his immediate predecessors, acting on an exceptional eye and mind, imbued with the splendours of the early mornings and the sunsets in the glowing atmosphere of Venice.

Colour has long been supposed to convey certain impressions to the mind. The absence of all colour, which we call "black," symbolizes in dress, grief, pride, or dignity; according as it drapes the mourner, the Spanish grandee, or the priest.[289] Yellow being the colour of the sun and of corn and gold, represents riches, generosity, and light. Red stands between the dark and the lively colours, and represents warmth and animation, dignity, splendour, life, love, and joy.

The expression of blue is that of purity. It recalls the distant sky, the calm ocean, and has an immortal and celestial character. It ascends to the highest and descends to the lowest tones of _chiaro-oscuro_. Nothing so nearly approaches pure white as the palest blue; nothing is so nearly black as the darkest.

Green has been a.s.signed by nature the place of the universal background. It is the complementary colour of red, softening and a.s.similating it by reflected shadows, and setting off the glory of every flower and fruit. The expression of green is gaiety and modesty, light and tenderness, shadow and repose, to both the eye and the mind.[290]

It must be allowed that it is by the earliest a.s.sociations of the individual, or by those derived from the family, the tribe or the nation, that colours are connected with such attributes welded by art and time into traditional meanings, which they absolutely possess,[291] and from which fashion cannot disconnect them; such, for instance, is the royalty of purple.

The word purple is so indiscriminately used as a poetic epithet, rather than as a distinctive appellation, that much confusion has been caused by it. Historically, among the Persians, Greeks, and Romans it appears to have been simply the royal colour, varying from the purest blue, through every shade of violet, down to the deepest crimson.

Sometimes, poetically, "purple" seems to have described only a surface. The breezy or stormy sea was purple; the sky was purple; the hyacinthine locks of Narcissus, the rosy lips of Venus were purple. As a textile, velvet was purple, even when it was white.[292]

The epithets "purple" and "wine-coloured" are often bestowed on the Mediterranean Sea, and are justified by its occasional hue:--

"As from the clouds, deep-bosom'd, swell'd with showers, A sudden storm the purple ocean sweeps, Drives the wild waves, and tosses all the deeps."

Pope's Homer, "Iliad," b. xi. v. 383.

Professor Tyndall suggests that the soft green of the sea, shadowed by clouds, a.s.sumes a subjective purple hue. Homer must have observed this before he became blind.

Pliny gives us much information about this colour; he enumerates the different sea-sh.o.r.es and coasts, Egyptian, Asiatic, and European, whence came the sh.e.l.l-fish (the murex and pelagia) that produced the so-called Tyrian purple dyes.[293]

He says that Romulus wore the purple, and that the dyed garments, all purple, were sacred to the G.o.ds in those days. After saying that it was still a colour of distinction, he continues: "Let us be prepared to excuse the frantic pa.s.sion for purple, though we are impelled to inquire why such a high value is placed on the produce of this fish, seeing that in the dye the smell of it is offensive, and the colour, of a greenish hue, resembles the sea when tempestuous." He describes purples[294] as being differently coloured according as to whether these "conchylia" inhabited the sea mud, the reefs, or the pebbly sh.o.r.es, the last being the most valuable.[295] This purple, said to have been imported from the coasts of Tyre, was till lately sold in Rome for its weight in gold; it gave the burning rosy red dye of the Cardinal's robes, and was called "Porpora encarnadina," purple incarnadine. It is full of light and freshness, and never fades; in fact, it has all the qualities ascribed to it by Pliny. It intensifies in the light.[296]

After purple, scarlet was the colour most esteemed by the ancients.

The Israelites must have carried with them the dyes which coloured the hangings, woven or embroidered, belonging to the sanctuary in the wilderness, of which the outer covering of rams' skins was dyed scarlet, and was probably of the nature of red morocco.[297]

There was the mineral dye, (cinnabar or red sulphate of mercury), and the insect dye; the first was probably used in mural painting. It is translated in our Bible as vermilion, in the account given by Jeremiah of a "house, ceiled with cedar, and painted with vermilion."[298] Also Ezekiel gives us another instance of house-painting in vermilion.[299]

Homer, who as a rule does not describe colouring, says the Greek ships were painted red.

It is probable that cinnabar was tempered, by admixture of white or other colours, for the monochrome painting of the Egyptians and Greeks. It was called by the Greeks miltos, by the Romans minium.

The dye of the red portions of the funeral tent of Queen Isi-em-Kheb, Shishak's mother-in-law, is found by a.n.a.lysis to be composed of hemat.i.te (peroxyde of iron) tempered with lime. This is a beautiful pink red.[300]

The mineral red now called vermilion must have borrowed its name from the insect dye which the Greeks and Romans called "kermes." In the Middle Ages the dye from the kermes was still called "vermiculata," of which the word vermilion is a literal translation.

We should be fortunate if we could find how the Greeks and Romans prepared the cinnabar for mural painting, of which we find remnants in ruins and tombs--a lovely and pure red, with a tender bloom on it like a fragment of the rainbow, and not the slightest shade of yellow.

One of the most beautiful specimens of this scarlet that I am acquainted with, is a small drinking-cup (a "rhyton") at the British Museum, in the form of a sphinx, with a white face, gilded hair, and a little cap of pure cinnabar, which is so soft in tone that it suggests the texture of scarlet velvet.

Cochineal, which was first brought from America in the sixteenth century, has now replaced almost every other scarlet dye for textiles.

Crimson is once mentioned in Chronicles as karmel,[301] which may mean the dye of the kermes insect;[302] and from this the word crimson is legitimately derived. Whether the scarlet coupled with it is a vegetable, mineral, or insect colour, we have no means of ascertaining. "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red as crimson, they shall be as wool."[303]

From what Pliny says, it appears that some green dyes were produced from a green clay; others from metals. Copper furnished the most beautiful shades.

Blue has always been extracted from indigo. Pliny tells us that the Phnicians brought it from Barbarike, in the Indies, to Egypt; and he quotes the "Periplus" on this subject. He gives an amusing report that indigo is a froth collected round the stems of certain reeds; but he was aware of its characteristic property, that of emitting a beautiful purple vapour when submitted to great heat; and he says it smells like the sea. The Egyptians likewise extracted blues from copper.

Yellow was anciently, in Egypt, sometimes a vegetable and sometimes a mineral dye. Browns and blacks were prepared from several substances, especially pine wood and the contents of tombs burned into a kind of charcoal.