Victoria Finlay: Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox

Reviewed by PAT BASKETT

Butterflies are very good at seeing purple but not red, although they can see other colours of the rainbow from yellow to ultraviolet. Victoria Finlay learned this little gem from a lepidopterist hitch-hiker she picked up in Lebanon where she had gone in search of information about the colour violet.

He went on to explain that some flowers and butterflies appear white to human eyes, but, when looked at under an ultraviolet detector, they are covered in ghostly markings that butterflies respond to as signals.

This anecdote is one of the shorter byways Finlay, an English social anthropologist and then a journalist in Hong Kong, takes on her travels to discover the origins of the ingredients of paints and dyes.

Here's another (useless?) piece of information. The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius practised synaesthesia - he believed he could see music and hear colour. When asked what colour he would like his stove painted, he is said to have replied F Major and so it was duly painted green.

The story of lead white is one of Colour's sadder tales. No other form of white - zinc, chalk, barium or rice - could match its luminescence. The English artist Whistler loved it, but using it made him ill - as it did those involved in its preparation. Women also loved it for the pallor it gave their complexions, until they died of a disease known as plumbism.

Finlay writes with inexhaustible enthusiasm, imparting endless information about art, history and the technicalities of making dye and paint.

Her starting point is often a painting, such as Michelangelo's unfinished Entombment in which Mary's robe is unpainted, most likely because the artist couldn't afford the blue paint. This would have come from Afghanistan, at that time the only source of the lapis lazuli from which blue, or ultramarine, was made.

There is almost nowhere Finlay doesn't get to on her explorations. She crosses the Australian outback to understand the nature of ochre, visits Chile to find the cochineal beetle that gives us red food colouring E120, and explores the caves of Dunhuang in western China to see how lead white, in paintings done 1300 years ago, has turned black.

Her text has the scrupulousness but not the solemnity of an academic work, with copious footnotes and an 11-page bibliography. At a certain point, however, too much fascinating detail has a tendency to turn to overkill. And how one craves more illustrations than the four pages of photographs sandwiched between 438 pages of words.

Hodder and Stoughton, $29.99