on colour

Mr. T and I went to a poetry reading on Wednesday night. This week is the Bath Literature Festival and as part of the event, the poet Ruth  Padel was reading from her book “Darwin, a life in poems.”  The reading took place at the Bath Scientific and Literary Institute and on the ground floor was a wonderful exhibition “Mr. Darwin’s Fishes” detailing how Darwin collected his fish specimens on the Beagle voyage and how many of them were sent to Bath to be studied by Leonard Jenyns, a local vicar.

As well as enjoying the poetry very much, I  was intrigued by a snippet of information in the exhibition. Many of the animal specimens collected aboard the Beagle were sent back preserved in “spirits of wine” or alcohol, if you prefer. The length of time it took and the fragility of the creatures meant that many arrived in England in a poor condition. Darwin anticipated this and took with him a little book,the none- too-  snappily- titled

“Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, with Additions arranged  so as to render it highly useful to the Arts and Science by Patrick Syme (1821)”

The colour charts were originally done by a geologist (Werner) but in 1821, Patrick Syme a Scottish flower painter, made them into books, hand painting the charts with water colour and placing them into every copy of the book. There were  108 hand-painted colour swatches, each named, and which Darwin referred to in describing the specimens when they were freshly obtained. The book was also used by the receiving naturalists who were then able to recreate the colours as Darwin had seen them. Genius.

I have found the book on Google books , reproduced as a facsimile. The colour descriptions are wonderful but unfortunately the colours are not included. I have found on-line a link to  one page of yellows,and one of reds showing the colours and how each colour was linked to an animal, vegetable and mineral to aid the artist/scientist. (These  links are to the work of Canadian artist Arnaud Maggs who photographed all of the colour charts for and exhibition staged in the mid 1990s.)

Some of the descriptions are wonderful-Tile Red, colour 81-”a mixture of hyacinth red with much greyish white and a small portion of scarlet red”  is the colour of  “Breast of cock Bullfinch, shrubby pimpernel, Jasper”. I played with “breast of bullfinch” today.

And after a day trawling through dusty volumes and old laboratories, I am just coming out to pay you a visit in thanks for the many visits here recently. I hope my changes of subject are not too irritating..at the moment I seem to need to be out gathering information about multitudes of things!