Color: A Natural History of the Palette

This book is wonderful. A history, a set of short stories, personality and culture all in one. I was sad when the book was over because i wanted more. It is a journey, travel log, and personal insight that make this book a keeper.

I made it through two colors (chapters) and gave up, bored. The book could have been trimmed to 1/2-2/3 of it's length and made far more interesting if some of the rambling, boring parts of stories (like her own journey, rather than the actual history I was interested in) were shortened or skipped. Maybe it gets more interesting in later (more colorful) chapters, but the author failed to hook me enough in the first two long chapters for me to get invested enough to push through.

This author isto be commended. This is one of the best books I've ever read. Not only does the author give you an interesting travelogue, but historical snippets as well....more than just color! Anyone interested in the world should read this book!

I am very interested in the subject of pigments and color and was disappointed at how tedious this book is. I'm not interested in the characters she meets in her travels. I'm not interested in her fantasies about what ancient people might have been like (or what their love life was like!).
I want to know about the history of pigments and paints. I want to know how one sort of pigment gave way to another or how it was improved or even how tastes shifted from one favorite to another...advantages and disadvantages of different pigments. This book has some of that (buried in travel anecdotes), but when those sorts of topics come up, she quotes "The Art Forgers Handbook" again and again. Seems like that's the book I really wanted.

"Color" by Victoria Finlay is a fascinating investigation of color, packed with information, stories, and anecdotes. One example of the historic mysteries of color is the chapter about orange. This is a surprising book for anyone curious, who may or may not be an artist.

The author rambles about her travels more than explains any technical history of colours. Maybe I bought the wrong book; I was looking for an explanation of how colours are made. While not altogether boring, the stories around colours are not very enlightening.

This book was on the syllabus for a painting class, so I'd expected something more interesting than a self-indulgent peripatetic travel memoir by a superficial journalist. While it might be possible to cull a page worth of amusing trivia from Finlay's 448pp, I for one don't have the time for such a mining expedition. Neither should you.

I bought a hard copy after reading some reviews. I give this One star simply because there is no way to give it 0 stars. This book suffers from several flaws. It is clumsily written (a fundamentally poor handle on language and concept; logical flow would be too much to ask), is disorganized and lacks clarity on part of the writer. Most of all, the book does total injustice to its theme. I read through 75 pages and it was struggle, I give up sensing the futile ordeal ahead. It does not give any insight on "Color" to its user, be it an artist or simply an audience of art. You will neither learn anything nor enjoy the reading itself. I would have rather donated the price of the book for something meaningful. Most of all, the valuable time I spent trying to get a grip on the book - irreversible!

I wanted to love this book--it promised everything that would tempt me including science, art, travel, culture, and good stories. At least, that's what the jacket blurbs promised; however, it fails in its execution.

First, I agree with another review which criticizes the book's lack of focus. I've come to love the great storytelling that I get from Malcolm Gladwell, Freakonomics, and Radiolab but Finlay can't muster the same narrative skill and gets terribly distracted in travelogue and her pseudo-artsy fantasies. The chapter on ochre read like bad, drug-induced, beatnik poetry and I skipped most of the chapter, hoping that the later chapters were better (and they were). She needs a good editor who could help her find direction and purpose.

Second, Finlay's writing is poor. Really poor. She should cut out half her words--starting first with the British slang and Anglo references that are foreign to American readers. There are many places where she uses parentheses and dashes to insert rambling thoughts into a perfectly good sentence so that I have to backtrack to the original subject to pick up the trail of thought. She constantly starts into thoughts but doesn't quite complete them, or references events so obliquely that I wonder what on earth she's saying. I'm constantly having to stop and think, "Now what in the world is she talking about here?" and after a while I finally figure it out (or don't) and I labor on.

So why read this? Sigh . . . I'm not sure. If you can survive the climb, there are nice little vistas here and there that are worthwhile. I don't know if they're enough to justify 400 pages of circumlocution---I finished the book feeling as if I survived the experience but I didn't necessarily learn anything.

Where was her editor?

A better title for this book might be, "Victoria Finlay's Wild & Curious Travel Adventures".
While "Color" no doubt has a wit, eloquence and intelligence that make it appealing to the curious and intelligent reader, I find it to be less about color and "a natural history of the palette" and more about Ms. Finlay's wandering experiences and imagination in relation to a plethora of historical topics and trivia that she connects to the places she visits. If you enjoy 395 pages of bite sized historical anecdotes, this one might be for you.
Well suited for the general public, and for popular consumption. A true work of marketing genius.

The premise is that Victoria Findlay is intrigued by the colours in her art box. She begins to wonder about the origin of pigments and colours, their values and related meanings through history. She looks for the natural sources of the initial pigments used in art.

And we take off on a trip around the world. She creates a story around each colour telling us about the origin of the name, the origin of the pigment and how each colour came to the world market. I was engrossed and couldn’t put it down.
Now when I see a piece of artwork or admire a delicious looking colour it gives me a much better appreciation of how we use and admire colour.

Thoroughly entertaining and a great travel log, all about the people around the globe involved in the harvest of pigments.

I also went on to read "Buried Treasure: travel through my jewellery box" about precious stones.

Victoria Finlay has ALREADY led an interesting life, from the hints we get throughout her book. Raised for a while in India, a British citizen living in Hong Kong, she is educated in art and is a fearless traveler. She tracks down the ancient pigments at their source; lapis from Afghanistan, Indian yellow from a rural area near Kolkata, ochre from the Arhemland of Australia and orange from the mystical varnishes of Cremona, Italy. I was particularly thrilled to learn the story of the itinerant stained glass makers of the great cathedrals of Europe, who moved from town to town as needed in the construction, and lived in camps near the edge of the forests, keeping their recipes for glass color a trade secret. Every now and then, I found some of the prose was a bit convoluted; I had to untangle a couple of sentences and there were, as other reviewers pointed out, some errors that could have been caught (for example "Blutenweiss" is translated as "blood white" (blut does mean blood) which makes NO sense, but if you realize it is "blossom white" (bluten are blossoms) it is quite clear what the word really meant. Despite those quibbles, I read the entire book, totally enthralled and I think this is a must-read for anyone interested in art or painting. Absolutely fascinating and one of the most adventurous art books I've ever read.

I wish that I had read the reviews first, especially the 1-stars...

I bought this book for my Dad for his birthday. He's a watercolor artist and a history buff. So I thought, "perfect marriage of the two topics!" He was gracious enough but then confessed by saying, "How can a book be 400 pages about COLOR and have very few pictures...and they're in BLACK AND WHITE? Ugh...Next time, I'll do better research. Wasted my money on this gift. :(

Kris

This book was highly recommended to me by a colleague. My professional interest lies in architectural coatings, prmarily paint. The author does not address that issue at all, which is not surprising. Instead, she writes at great length about her personal odyssey in search of traditional pigments used in the fine arts as well as everyday objects such as textiles. I found her lyricism to be rather tedious at times, but did learn a number of intersting things in the process.

Victoria Finlay is a natural born writer as proven by the fact that she has managed to take this difficult and at first glance not particularly sexy subject and deliver a chatty, fact filled and amusing analysis and travelogue that approaches the subject from so many oblique angles that she manages to keep the reader turning pages.

The reader remains enthralled as Finlay hopscotches around the globe examining the cultural, political and historical aspects of the story of color. A jerky, quixotic and delightful read.

Richard W. Wise, author: The French BlueThe French Blue

This book takes you on rollicking adventures all over the globe in pursuit of the origins of natural pigments and dyes used throughout history. The writer is one gutsy lady - she's the kind who will go to Afghanistan, twice, while still under Taliban rule, to see some idle lapis lazuli mines just to complete her story. So the reader gets the benefits of her audacious journeys minus the formidable dangers, visa and permit applications that never get approved, and the flapping boot that she had to endure.
Overall, this book suited me just fine. I am interested in color, love travelogues, and appreciate it when I can get an intelligent account of something minus the pretension, i.e. with some of the earthy details of everyday living and the real, human emotional reactions that go with it. I enjoyed reading about Finlay's interactions with people of all different colors, cultures, social stations, languages, and cuisines. I was amazed at how she would simply up and fly to a tiny, exotic place mentioned in letters or other historical documents as the source of some pigment, armed with only persistence and the expectation of good luck - and then actually succeed in tracking down a story for her book. I wonder how many disappointments and wild goose chases she omitted from the text! Prepare for journeys on the rough through aboriginal Australia, Spanish saffron farms, Monghyr and Barasat, India, Mixteco-speaking Mexico, Tyre, Lebanon, and the Dunhuang caves in Western China. You will learn why Spain worked so hard to keep the origin of cochineal red secret, how Indian farmers rebelled against forced labor on indigo plantations, about yellow and orange ochre body paint in the Australian outback, deadly Scheele's green (is that what really killed Napoleon?), and mummy brown, which really did come from mummies.
I especially like how this book draws on history that I have a passing acquaintance with and suddenly makes it feel close and real, peopled with men and women like anybody you know.
I didn't much care for the 'I would like to imagine...' parts, since once something is in print it is so easily cited and re-cited and soon becomes part of the historical canon - I think Finlay could have practiced a bit more restraint and omitted these.
I read the original UK version of this book, entitled _Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox_, and wish that books from the UK could just stay in British English for the US market, maybe with footnotes added for clarity when needed - it would help increase mutual understanding, for one thing, and it's also nice to keep the original flavor of the writing.
Order, and get ready for a heady, dizzying journey into colors with a past.

This book is probably my most recommended.

I am an artist as well as an art history teacher. The thing that makes both this book and her book about jewels exciting is the variety of the story. Victoria is a great story teller. The book is not about just the history of color -
- This story is about the authors journey to FIND the histories of the colors. She writes of her travels, adventures and mishaps in her quest for knowledge. Her work has since inspired me to look deeper at the materials I am using - and ponder their own histories. I hope she writes more books and has more adventures...
Also, as an art history teacher, I am constantly using information I learned in the book to add interest to the subjects I speak of. I have not found a better source for exciting tidbits of color history all in one place.
Great read, and a fun combination of history and travelogue.

Mighty slow going in the beginning, but stick with it. It gets quite interesting. I don't know what I expected but this is a travelog that illuminates the origin of certain natural pigments. She also talks a lot about artists and peoples who used various colors. Particularly interesting to me was information about Turner, who apparently used cheap pigments. His paintings have faded because of it. And he KNEW the pigments were fugitive when he used them! There is little about color theory or psychology, just as the title says, "a history..."