Colour Matters: Exploring Chromatic Materialities in the Long Nineteenth Century (1798-1914)

Abstract

Colour Matters provides a fresh investigation of colour in the long nineteenth century. Across fourteen richly researched essays, the book explores the materiality, politics, and sensory experience of colour—from synthetic dyes and chrome pigments to the role of colour in medicine, gender, empire, and identity. By weaving together art history, literature, anthropology, science, and conservation, the contributors reveal a dynamic world where chromatic experimentation shaped aesthetics, technology, and social life. Colour Matters offers an essential contribution to colour studies and the humanities’ material turn, showing how pigment and perception illuminate both past and present.This book will appeal to scholars and students of art history, literature, cultural studies, and the history of science in the long eighteenth-century, as well as curators, conservators, and readers fascinated by the histories of colour and material culture.