Early photography has painted our perception of the 19th century with sepia tones. However, an encounter with an actual 1860s gown reveals a surprising truth: “It’s electric purple and still shocking today,” exclaims curator Matthew Winterbottom. The exhibition Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion, and Design delves into this garishness that was typical of the 19th century.
A decade earlier, flamboyant purple dresses worn by Empress Eugénie of France were reserved for the fabulously wealthy. Yet, within a few years, colors that were once made with costly vegetable dyes became cheaply produced industrially, all thanks to the accidental discovery by an 18-year-old chemistry student named William Henry Perkin. While attempting to synthesize quinine, Perkin stumbled upon the intense purples produced by aniline, a derivative of coal tar. He quickly established a factory for his new “mauveine,” as he called this early synthetic dye. Chemists across Europe followed suit, expanding the synthetic color palette. Winterbottom states, “The modern world of ubiquitous color begins at this point.” London’s streets and train stations were adorned with brightly printed posters, people wore vibrantly colored clothes, and even books and postage stamps became colorful.
This rainbow transformation affected all levels of society, allowing the working class to afford bright colors and causing the social elites to reconsider their wardrobes. Winterbottom explains that “women asserted a more emboldened identity through color.” Alongside loud dresses, women showcased colored and striped stockings with the help of swinging steel-hooped crinoline petticoats, which replaced layers of fabric used to enhance skirts.
The synthetic revolution’s obsession with color also led to the exploitation of natural wonders, often with horrifying consequences. One curiosity in the exhibition is a necklace made from the heads of hummingbirds, whose iridescent plumage fascinated Victorians. Millions of these birds were killed for decoration on hats. Winterbottom adds, “A minority realized [the trade’s] devastating impact and formed anti-plumage leagues; it was women mobilizing other women.”
As expected, there was a backlash against the mass adoption of bright clothing. One French visitor to England in the 1860s, quoted in the exhibition catalogue, sniffed at the “outrageously crude” attire of shopkeepers’ wives. Critic John Ruskin of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood praised “God-given” colors, while William Morris hailed the faded beauty of expensive organic dyes and popularized muted tones among the bourgeoisie. However, the exhibition reveals that even the brotherhood used chemical greens in their stridently medievalist works.
This tension between nature and artifice prompted cultural shifts, with later generations intentionally challenging traditional color symbolism and embracing forbidden hues. Of all the color fads in Victorian Britain, green was the most contentious. By the 1860s, arsenic greens used in wallpapers became toxic and famously caused a young woman who worked with colorful silk flowers to vomit green before dying. Yet, two decades later, this dark history made green the color of choice for the decadents – writers and artists who rejected establishment values in favor of pure aestheticism. Oscar Wilde, the movement’s notorious figurehead, flaunted a green-dyed carnation that cleverly subverted norms and became a symbol of queerness.
While Winterbottom hopes the exhibition challenges people’s notions of Victorians wearing somber colors, the color that resonates most throughout the ages is black. Ramón Casas’s 1899 painting of a “decadent young woman” portrays her collapsed on an absinthe-green sofa, engrossed in a racy yellow novel, dressed in a jet-black dress. This deliberate rejection of mourning attire, according to Winterbottom, highlights “a marker of her chicness and decadence.” The synthetic rainbow not only revolutionized dyes but also affected shifts in mindset. The Color Revolution exhibition is on display at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from September 21 to February 18.
Living color: Five highlights from the exhibition:
1. A Decadent Young Woman, After the Dance by Ramón Casas, 1899: This painting showcases a thoroughly modern young woman relaxing after a night out. She reads a yellow French novel on a plush sofa with an absinthe-green hue that suggests both intoxication and decay. She dons a black dress, the height of fashion at the time.
2. Ladies’ aniline-dyed silk stockings, 1860s-1880s: Before synthetic dyes, underwear was limited to white or blue. The introduction of color in stockings led to gushing praise in the Lady’s Newspaper and Pictorial Times, which mentioned the allure of a “rainbow-spanned ankle” in 1861.
3. Front cover for The Yellow Book by Aubrey Beardsley, 1894: The “yellow 90s” were marked by ambiguity. Colman’s Mustard posters brightened London’s streets, while the decadent literary periodical The Yellow Book alluded to the yellow jackets associated with controversial and sexual French novels, as well as sickness.
4. English day dress in aniline-dyed silk and glass beads, late 1860s: This dress features the new “mauveine,” a commercial synthetic color created from chemicals extracted from coal tar. Queen Victoria popularized mauve by wearing an expensive mauve dress to her daughter’s wedding. When the color became affordable, a trend known as “mauve measles” swept Britain. Surprisingly, this eye-catching garment was intended for daywear and belonged to the daughter of a Baptist minister.
5. Lady Granville’s beetle parure and case, 1884-85: The Victorian obsession with color led to disturbing embellishments of natural wonders. This tiara, showcased in the British Museum, contains the iridescent bodies of 46 South American weevils. It was a gift from the Portuguese ambassador to the British foreign secretary, Lord Granville.
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