Color: A Natural History of the Palette (38 page)

The diaries from St. Helena were consulted for clues. Napoleon hated the weather, and was constantly pointing out how many wet days there were. He also despised the new governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, posted there soon after he arrived. “The pity of it,” wrote his biographer J. M. Thompson,
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“was that one who knew only how to command should be the prisoner of one who knew only how to obey.” Lowe knew this, and hated Napoleon in return. But did he hate him enough to kill him?

There was another possible answer to the arsenic question, and it was connected to paint. Carl Wilhelm Scheele was a chemist working in Sweden at the end of the eighteenth century. In the 1770s, when he was scarcely in his thirties, he isolated chlorine and oxygen, invented a bright yellow paint (which would be named Turner’s Patent Yellow after the British manufacturer who stole the patent) and then—almost accidentally, while he was in the middle of experiments with arsenic in 1775—produced a most astonishing green. He was not going to repeat his mistake on the patent front, and very soon he was manufacturing this copper arsenite paint under the name of Scheele’s Green. There was, however, something that troubled him, which he confided to a scientist friend in a letter in 1777, a year before the color went into production. He was worried about the paint, he wrote. He felt users should be warned of its poisonous nature. But what’s a little arsenic when you’ve got a great new color to sell? Soon manufacturers were using it in a range of paints and papers and for years people happily pasted poison onto the walls.

Perhaps, historians began to think, this might explain the mystery of St. Helena’s poisoner. Then in 1980 a British chemistry professor signed off his science program on BBC Radio with a little teaser.
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If only we could see the color of Napoleon’s wallpaper we might know whether this was the cause of the poison, he said. And to Dr. David Jones’s astonishment he received a letter from a woman who by astonishing coincidence had a sample of the wallpaper from Longwood. An ancestor who had visited the house had stealthily torn a strip off the wall of the room where Napoleon died, and stuck it in a scrapbook. Dr. Jones tested it, and to his excitement found traces of Scheele’s arsenite in its pattern, which was of green and gold fleurs-de-lis on a white background. When he learned of how wet St. Helena was he became more excited: the mold reacting to the arsenic would have made the whole atmosphere poisonous. The Scheele’s Green theory explained the arsenic, and the possibility of fumes in the air gave a clue as to why the formerly active soldier spent so many of his last months lying on one of his two camp beds (he never could decide between them) inside the house. But perhaps there was not enough green there to explain the final cause of Napoleon’s death. His doctors said that it was cancer of the stomach. But others said it was simply sadness.

It took the medical world a long time to react to cases of wallpaper poisoning. As late as January 1880, more than a hundred years after Scheele invented his green, a researcher called Henry Carr stood in front of the assembled members of the Society of Arts in London and held up a sample of cute nursery wallpaper. It was printed with pictures of boys playing cricket on a village green. This innocent-looking paper, he told them,
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had recently killed one of his young relatives, and had made three of the child’s siblings seriously ill. He then went on to give other horrifying examples of arsenic poisoning—an invalid who went to the seaside for a cure, and ended up almost dying from the paint in her hotel; a team of decorators who developed convulsions; even a Persian cat that became covered with pustules after being locked in a green room.

It wasn’t just green which contained arsenic either, he told his audience. Some blues, yellows and especially the newly invented magenta also carried poison. As well as in paint and wallpaper, he had found arsenic on artificial flowers, on carpets and on dress fabrics, where it had been used to remove chemicals involved in the dyeing process. “The production of arsenic in this country is on a scale that will surprise most people,” he told the Society. “When it is borne in mind that two to three grains will destroy the life of a healthy man, an output of 4,809 tons . . . in one year, does seem a large quantity to be dealt with.”

Most of his listeners were shocked and agreed with his call for an investigation. But a statement from a Dr. Thudichum
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gave everyone else in the hall that evening an insight into why, despite all the dangers, and even despite its inventor’s warning, arsenic paint had continued to be used for a hundred years. Thudichum said Carr was being alarmist. He said his eyes rejoiced at the “beautiful bright arsenical paper,” and when he looked at the “abominable grays, hideous browns and dreadful yellows made without arsenic,” he could not help thinking that this would be the paper he should like to have in his room.

This love of green, so tastelessly expressed by Dr. Thudichum, was one shared by many artists—for, of course, green is in many ways the most “natural” color in the world. After all, most of the world (the bits that are not covered by sea, at least) is green. Yet for artists it has long been a difficult color to reproduce, and this most “organic” of colors—the color of grass and trees and fields—has in fact often been made traditionally from metal, or, to be more accurate, from the corrosion of metal.

Cennino had four suggestions in his
Handbook
for a lively spring-oniony green to reflect the bright Tuscan light. As well as recipes for mixing various yellows with various blues, he had one natural, one “half natural” and one manufactured green on his palette, and they all—like Scheele’s disastrous recipe—contained copper. They may not have been poisonous, but none of them was quite perfect either.

The natural earth color was called “terre-verte,” and was particularly good for underpainting European flesh
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—with lime white and vermilion layered over it.
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The “half natural” green on Cennino’s palette was malachite, a mineral found in copper mines along with its cousin blue azurite and called
verde azzurro
or blue-green. It seems strange to call this basic copper carbonate “half” natural: after all, it can be found fully formed in the earth if you know where to look. But Cennino lived in a world of alchemists’ taxonomies, and to him malachite was an alchemical rock. It had been cooked by the explosions of the earth, and was therefore not in a strictly “natural” state. It had to be coarsely powdered, warned Cennino, “for if you were to grind it too much, it would come out a dingy and ashy color.” Pliny thought it was wonderful—because it could protect against evil spirits—and even until the late eighteenth century in Germany it was called a
Schreckstein
or scary stone, and was used to frighten demons. The Ancient Egyptians were probably the first to use malachite as a pigment—on their paintings and also on their eyelids. It made a pretty pale green eye shadow (as long as it wasn’t ground too much), but was also—along with black kohl—believed to protect the lids against the glare of the sun. Thus malachite provided the earliest “sunglasses” for a civilization so cool that its people would have just loved to have worn shades.

Eighth-century Chinese artists used to grind malachite— coarsely—for the haloes of their Buddhas, and from Japan through to Tibet it was a popular pigment for hundreds of years. The best paint comes from stone the “color of a frog’s back,” according to the Chinese authors of the seventeenth-century
Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting
, “and it should be ground and dissolved in water.” Actually, in its uncut form, the malachite stone itself has something approaching the texture of a frog’s back anyway—or perhaps a toad’s. It is full of warty excrescences that, when sliced into a cross-section, create the pretty circle patterns for which the stone is famous.
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Cennino’s third green was verdigris, which was “very lovely to the eye but it does not last.” Leonardo da Vinci was equally worried about it a century later, warning that it “vanishes into thin air if not varnished quickly.” There was another problem with this paint. Verdigris was “very green by itself,” Cennino noted, but on no account should it even touch white lead, “for they are mortal enemies in every respect.” The paint was usually made, rather as white lead was made, by suspending metal—in this case copper—over a bath of vinegar. After a few hours the orange metal and red wine would combine to leave a green deposit. It was sometimes called van Eyck Green
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because the Flemish master used it so often and so successfully—unlike the Italians,
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whose verdigris tended to blacken as Leonardo and Cennino had warned. The Flemish artists found the secret of locking the green by using a preserving varnish, and it has therefore, for the most part, lasted the centuries.

Recipe for curing gangrene using verdigris

One of the most extraordinary examples of this is the bright green skirt in van Eyck’s
The Arnolfini Marriage
, painted in 1434. It is one of the most debated skirts in art history—mainly because of its shape, or rather because of the shape of the young woman inside it, who looks very pregnant (even though some critics have argued that she is not). But why is it green at all? Newlyweds wanting to parade their wealth in fifteenth-century Bruges would be more likely to boast their social position through their ample use of expensive kermes red. The painting, which hangs in the National Gallery in London, is one of the most controversial pieces of fifteenth-century art: few people can agree on what it means, or indeed whether it is even a marriage portrait.

It shows a couple standing inside a richly furnished room; they are holding hands but to me they do not look as if they are in love. In fact, quite the opposite: the man looks old and cold in his fur cloak and huge hat; the woman is looking away from him, and both of them seem to exude a deep sadness. For years the painting was believed to be a portrait of the marriage of a wealthy merchant called Giovanni Arnolfini and his young bride Giovanna. But why should they have commissioned such an unhappy picture? And why are they surrounded by objects that might be read as symbolizing corruption?

On a wooden chair there is a tiny carving of St. Margaret of Antioch, a virgin martyr, who became the patron saint of childbirth— reinforcing the suggestion that this lady is pregnant. The very large and very red bed in the room rather suggests the same. More disturbing, however, is the mirror. It is decorated with scenes from the Passion of Christ (a cycle of suffering), and it also has ten “teeth” around it, reminiscent of the ten-spiked wheel under which another virgin martyr, St. Catherine, was tortured to death. St. Catherine’s story, like St. Margaret’s, is one of brutality—and the room in van Eyck’s painting is full of objects that could signal a brutal relationship. There is a gargoyle hovering above the couple’s clasped hands, and a brush that looks like a parody of male and female private parts, hung up like a trophy. As I looked at it one day, I wondered whether this object may possibly have been intended to symbolize sexual abuse, and whether this painting might actually be an allegory rather than a wedding picture.
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The couple have always seemed to me to look like Adam and Eve (transposed to van Eyck’s own time in terms of costume) just after the Fall, and that idea is reinforced by fruit tumbling over the windowsill. And if this
was
the artist’s intention, it perhaps solves the mystery of the woman’s ermine-lined dress. It is green—and therefore symbolic of fertility and gardens. And it is also made of verdigris, a manufactured substance that is born from the corruption of pure metal. Although today it is almost as bright as when van Eyck painted it, the artist cannot have known for sure that his new technique would last the centuries and be named after him as a result. For him verdigris would have been a seductive green paint that sometimes turned black: a perfect pigment, perhaps, to represent the fall of humanity.

Verdigris is often described as coming from somewhere else. So “verdigris” means “Greek Green” in English, while the Germans call it Spanish green, “Gruenspan,” although it probably arrived in both places via the Arabs. The Greeks themselves describe it as “copper flowers,” or more vividly “fur-tongue,” perhaps because of how the verdigris deposit on the copper plate looks the way one’s mouth feels after a heavy ouzo session. In France this paint was usually a byproduct of the vineyards; in England it was often made with apple cider vinegar.

Verdigris was popular with artists until the mid-eighteenth century, but it was also used enthusiastically by housepainters—and with the rise of orientalist decoration fantasies, those wealthy households in Europe that were lucky enough not to have access to Scheele’s Green would have been likely to include at least one verdigris room. The chinoiserie fashion spread to America as well, and by the eighteenth century many grand rooms in the colony were festooned with Chinese wallpapers and daubed with Orient-inspired paints. Everyone who was anyone, it seemed, wanted green for their drawing rooms and dining rooms, and that included the first President of the new republic. Even, perhaps, at a time when he ought to have had more on his mind than how to redecorate his home.