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For BJ, Jake and Diane  | |
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Despite his immense wealth, Sir William Perkin seldom travelled abroad. | |
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Sugar Ray Leanord slipped out of his red and black Ferrari Boxer Berlinetta, strode through the front door of Jamesons restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland, and made his way to the bar. Leonard always seems to be the handsomest man in the room, especially when someone calls his name and he flashes that dazzling smile, and on this August afternoon he looked as if he had stepped right out of the pages of GQ.
He wore a mauve cardigan, a light mauve shirt with the cuffs folded meticulously over the sweaters' cuffs, mauve suspenders embroidered with figures of Cupid.
'I feel great, I really do,' Leonard said. - Former World Welterweight Boxing Champion Sugar Ray Leonard, profiled in Sports Illustrated, 1986 Wandered in the town, to the Museum and Zoo . . . Reconstructions of Hausa and Sanghay villages - combination of indigo and pale calabash. Hunchback boy with staff and bowl and mauve purple jumper stretched like a landscape over his totally deformed body . . . A restaurant in a garden. I drank a beer on a red spotted cloth-covered table. Mosquitoes bit the hard parts of my fingers. - Bruce Chatwin in Niber, 1971, from Photographs and Notebooks She said she was going to do it, and by golly,on Thursday, she did it. Because she is the first female secretary of state of Missouri, Judi Moriarty changed the color of the state manual to...mauve.
For those who don't know, mauve is a delicate shade of purple.
'I wanted a color that represents me and made a statement,' Moriarty said when introducing the new state manual. 'It's in good taste, and it has a lot of beauty.' - St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1994 Patrick mixed paints - a delicate shadowy mauve, a scarlet, a rich blue, a pale sharp green. The paintings, when they arrived, were done suddenly and fast. I watched, from inside my head. Patrick would always smile apologetically, and both of us would laugh nervously, and then his face would set into a detached, slightly furious look, and he would take a stab at the cnavas, and then a rush.
A square head appeared, and a decorative trellis of flowers. Various faces, shadowed in the delicate mauve, existed for a moment, and then were wiped away. I was fascinated by how the ghosts of the expunged forms continued to exist and to make the subsequent versions more complex and substantial. Purple is Patrick's favorite colour. It is not mine. But I became entranced by the shadowy half-depths of that particular mauve running across the canvas. - A.S. Byatt on being captured by Patrick Heron, Modern Painters, 1998 Knights of old broke each other's ribs, and let out each other's blood, dying happily among a heap of shivered armor, so that their ladies' colours still waved from their helmet, or sopped up the blood oozing from their gaping heart wounds; but you, Mr Perkins [sic], luckier than they, rib unbroken, skull uncracked, can itinerate Regent Street and perambulate the Parks, seeing the colours of thy heart waving on every fair head and fluttering round every cheek! - All the Year Round, September 1859 You want things just right when you're paying all that money, don't you? The Queen certainly does: as we discovered this week, she issues a list of royal demands before arriving at foreign hotels. She doesn't want the management to think she's fussy, you understand, but could they please make sure that any flower arrangements do not contain anything mauve (or carnations of any colour) . . . - A six-page Buckingham Palace memo reaches the press. From the London Evening Standard, November 1999 The local spy - and there was one - might thus have deduced that these two were strangers, people of some taste, and not to be denied their enjoyment of the Cobb by a mere harsh wind . . . he would most certainly have remarked that they were people of a very superior taste as regards their outward appearance.
The young lady was dressed in the height of fashion, for another wind was blowing in 1867: the beginning of a revolt against the crinoline and the large bonnet. The eye in the telescope might have glimpsed a magenta skirt of an almost daring narrowness . . .
The colour of the young lady's clothes would strike us today as distinctly strident; but the world was then in the first fine throes of the discovery of aniline dyes. And what the feminine, by way of compensation for so much else in her expected behaviour, demanded of a colour was brilliance, not discretion. - John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman, 1969 Ordinary women always console themselves. Some of them do it by going in for sentimental colours. Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means they have a history. - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 In a continuing effort at precision repoting, a New York Times reporter covering the O. J. Simpson trial found himself at a loss in describing the colour of defence lawyer Johnnie Cochran's double-breasted suit. He dipatched a research assistant to a local drugstore to purchase a box of Crayola crayons, from which he selected the closest possible colour: periwinkle. In an informal poll, courthouse wags opted for the less precise purple. During a courtroom break, though, Cochran insisted his suit was blue. 'Just don't call it mauve,' he said. - USA Today, February 1995 The tyrrany of mauve is over! That's the word from Vivian Kistler, a member of the Color Marketing Group, an organization that helps decide which colors we wear and decorate our homes in. There's no doubt that mauve is now dead as a fashion color, Kistler said. Even firms that manufacture rubber and plastic kitchen products such as dish drainers are phasing out their mauve lines. 'In the last six or severn years we have been mauved to death,' Kistler said, laughing. - The St. Louis Post-Dispatch at the 12th annual New York ArtExpo art dealers' trade show, 1990 Like William Perkin I personally aspire / to metamorphose lower into higher. / His transforming coal-tar into brilliant dyes / has come for me of late to symbolize / chemistry at its most profound and true / creating radiance out of basest residue. / It is infinitely satisfying / to see what was black dreck serve the art of dyeing. // Those are the powers and forces that are needed / if the Western World is not to be superseded. / William Perkin's ingenious transformation / could have benefited the British nation / But unfortunately Britain still relies / on Germany for all synthetic dyes. / The coal tars of the Ruhr and Rhine / metamorphosed in industrial bulk into aniline. / If more of us in Britain had done work in / the process pioneered by William Perkin / we would not now as a nation still have to rely / on Germany for all synthetic dye. // Like many a physical or chemical invention / pioneered by the British I could mention / Perkin's valuable synthetic dyes / which will always, for yours truly, symbolize / the magic of chemistry, Germans monopolize. - Sir Charles Crookes, historian, physicist, spiritualist, and chemist (he trained under Hofmann, discovered the element thallium, and conducted important experiments on cathode rays and radiation), as portrayed in the play Square Rounds by Tony Harrison, first performed at the Naional Theatre in 1992 Colour may be extracted from substances, whether they possess it naturally or by communication, in various ways. We have thus the power to remove it intentionally for a useful purpose, but, on the other hand, it often flies contrary to our wish. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, 1810 He, Mertens, was a young chemist, German and Catholic, and I a young chemist, Italian and Jewish. Potentially two colleagues: in fact we worked in the same factory, but I was inside the barbed wire, and he outside. There were forty thousand of us employed in the Buna Werks at Auschwitz. That the two of us, he an Oberingenieur and I a slave-chemist, ever met is improbable . . . - Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve, 1981 British scientists have created the world's first electronic dictionary of colours, a digital palette containing more than 16 million shades. As a result, colours can now be transmitted electronically and accurately, allowing designers, manufacturers of cosmetics, and fashion workers to exchange images in precisely defined colours for the first time.
The system - developed at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology - has been designated as one of the Government's key industrial projects for the new Millennium and it is already being used by Marks and Spencer and cosmetics manufacturers. You can see what your M&S shirt will look like inside a store, and then out in the street. No more suave mauve creations turning naff pink in daylight. - Robin McKie, Observer, December 1998 I had lunch with Quentin Crisp the week before he died. We met in the Bowery Bar in Manhattan on the Lower East Side for crab cakes and whisky, and for two hours I sat and gazed in wonder at an old man with mauve hair, the self-styled Stately Homo of England. - Gyles Brandreth, Sunday Telegraph, November 1999 | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English (4)
▾LibraryThing members' description ▾Book descriptions Amazon.com Amazon.com's Best of 2001 (ISBN 0393323137, Paperback)
In 1856, while trying to synthesize artificial quinine, 18-year-old chemistry student William Perkin instead produced a murky residue. Fifty years later, he described the event: he "was about to throw a certain residue away when I thought it might be interesting. The solution of it resulted in a strangely beautiful color." Perkin had stumbled across the world's first aniline dye, a color that became known as mauve. "So what?" you might say. "A teenager invented a new color." As Simon Garfield admirably points out in Mauve, the color really did change the world. Before Perkin's discovery all the dyes and paints were colored by roots, leaves, insects, or, in the case of purple, mollusks. As a result, colors were inconsistent and unpredictably strong, often fading or washing out. Perkin found a dye that would always produce a uniform shade--and he pointed the way to other synthetic colors, thus revolutionizing the world of both dyemaking and fashion. Mauve became all the rage. Queen Victoria wore it to her daughter's wedding in 1858, and the highly influential Empress Eugénie decided the color matched her eyes. Soon, the streets of London erupted in what one wag called the "mauve measles." Mauve had a much wider impact as well. By finding a commercial use for his discovery--much to the dismay of his teacher, the great August Hofmann, who believed there needed to be a separation between "pure" and "applied" science--Perkin inspired others to follow in his footsteps: "Ten years after Perkin's discovery of mauve, organic chemistry was perceived as being exciting, profitable, and of great practical use." The influx of bright young men all hoping to earn their fortunes through industrial applications of chemistry later brought significant advances in the fields of medicine, perfume, photography, and even explosives. Through it all, Garfield tells his story in clever, witty prose, turning this odd little tale into a very entertaining read. --Sunny Delaney (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:56 -0400) (see all 2 descriptions) ▾Open Shelves Classification The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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The "Perkin's Purple" aniline dyes proved to be poisonous, and "fugitive" when applied to fabric (subject to extreme fading when exposed to light and/or water), but Perkin's discovery eventually influenced the development of explosives, perfume, photography, modern medicine, and plastics.
Several photos of Perkins, his dye works, and Victorian fashions, and an 11-page bibliography for those who wish to learn more. (