Colour
Victoria Finlay
494 pages, including notes and index
published in 2002

Over the past few years there has been a boom in non-fiction of what you could call "commodity history": books tracing back the social and cultural history of various everyday items; for example salt. Colour is another of these books, a massive tome dedicated to classic colours and their history. It wasn't a book I would've chosen to take home from the library, but Sandra has an interest in this sort of thing and she forcefully recommended it to me...

Colour consists of ten chapters, each examining a different colour: Ochre, Red and Brown, White, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet. All the colours of the rainbow, in other words, plus some additions. Finlay wisely concentrated on those aspects of colour she herself found interesting, viz the human quest for colours and the history behind it. She also choose to limit herself in time, not reporting on modern, post-19th century developments, as they clearly didn't have her interest as much and this would've made the book that much bigger. Finally, for the most part her outlook is firmly European and orientated toward classic art, especially painting for obvious reasons.

These limitations have led to a stronger book than if she had wanted to do it all. Too often in books of this type, every single aspect of the subject in question has been examined in minute detail, which leads to very exhausting books. And since no one writer can be an expert on everything related to a single subjects, those aspects that do not have the writer's interest as much tend to suffer. This is not the case here. Apart from the first chapter, which unfortunately read as if it was included not out of interest but because Finlay felt duty-bound to include it, this book sparkles. She has a genuine enthusiasm for the subject and can make even the duller parts come alive. There is never the feeling that she has written this book other than because of her love for colours. In the introduction she traces this love back to hearing at a tender age how the method to make the blue colour in the stained glass windows of Chartres cathedral had been lost. (She later learned and tells in the Blue chapter that this was not true...) This enthusiasm is catching and you find yourself reading the book quite quickly, immersed in the history and anecdotes she tells.

If you have even the slightest interest in this subject, this is a good book to get.