Color has been defined in numerous ways. In Antiquity, the Greeks saw the color spectrum as a system from light to dark limited to four colors: Pliny listed white (light), black (dark) and the intermediate colors yellow and red.(1) This does not indicate that the Greeks did not recognize or use other colors.  Their system of classification was focused on brightness and saturation, two of the three-dimensional aspects under which we currently classify color (the last being hue--what we usually mean colloquially by color)(2).

During the seventeenth century, the modern primary colors--yellow, red and blue--became accepted (3) and, in 1704, Isaac Newton (1642-1727) first published Opticks, a seminal work in the history of color.  Although he was not the first to break up a solar ray through a prism, he did identify the rainbow's irreducible hues in term of their slightly different angles of refraction.(4)  Following in his footsteps, many physicist and chemists would dwell on color theories and on ways to map the color spectrum.  Most researchers were concerned by theory rather than practice and, routinely, academic works were rejected by dyers.(5)

The art of the dyer involved numerous activities and a breath of knowledge that extended beyond the eighteenth-century chemist's theories.  Industrial historian Agustí Nieto-Galan reminds us that the technology of dyeing embraced vegetable, animal and mineral sources of colors in the forms of gums, resins, oils, salts, alkalis, acids and oxides, and operations such as washing, bleaching, degreasing, mordanting and dyeing (6) that were not yet fully understood by chemists.  However, when Diderot's (1713-1784) Encyclopédie was first published in 1751, dying was classified as a specific branch of chemistry.(7)  Although the dyer's art was complex and reserved for the initiated few, Diderot's efforts to classify human knowledge to make sense of the world--a pivotal aspect of the Enlightenment--included a field that, although rooted in chemistry and natural history, could only describe results and not the reason behind them.

From the 1770s to the 1820s, the world underwent many revolutions, one of which took place in the field of chemistry.  Before this time, barely any of the chemical elements were known and the scientific community spoke an antiquated language few would understand today.(8)  By the 1820s, this was no longer true.  Before his untimely death at the guillotine, Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier (1743-1794) listed thirty elements in his 1789 periodical table (9) and figured out that carbon was the common factor among natural products, the cornerstone of organic chemistry.(10)  The period witnessed a scientific explosion and, by 1848, twenty-nine more elements were added (11) causing the dyer's trade to change drastically.

Among the forgotten triumphs of chemistry and its application to fashion in the late eighteenth century was 1774 discovery of chlorine by Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742-1786) and the demonstration of its bleaching power by Claude-Louis Berthollet's (1748-1822) in the 1780s.(12)  In an era where Neo-Classicism's misconception of Greek fashions fostered a rage for sheer white cottons, the large-scale application of this chemical process paved the way for the Age of Nudity and facilitated the development of calico-printing.  Other research included the 1770s discoveries of two new sources of yellow: the first artificial organic dye, Peter Woulfe's picrid acid, obtained with the action of nitric acid on indigo, (13) and Edward Bancroft's quercitron, a vegetable dye discovered in North America.(14)  Although picric acid would not be manufactured until the 1840s, quercitron, applied with a mordant, was more stable and cheaper than weld and other sources of yellow such as old fustic, saffron or turmeric and thus became extremely popular in the late eighteenth century.(15)

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(1) Philip Ball, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2001), 15.
(2) Ibid., 47.
(3) Ibid., 37.
(4) Ibid., 25.
(5) Agustí Nieto-Galan, Colouring Textiles: A History of Natural Dyestuffs in Industrial Europe (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 86.
(6) Ibid., xviii.
(7) Ibid., 1.
(8) Ball, 147.
(9) Ibid.
(10) Ibid., 216.
(11) Ibid., 147.
(12) Ibid., 207-208.
(13) Alan Dronsfield and John Edmonds, Historic Dyes Series (Little Chalfont, UK: J. Edmonds, 2001), no. 6, The Transition from Natural to Synthetic Dyes, 1856-1920, 25.
(14) Nieto-Galan, 21.
(15) Ibid., 22.