Unweaving the Rainbow: Nature’s Colours in Art, Fashion and Design

Madeline Hewitson

In the nineteenth century, science and art were engaged in a close dialogue, sparked by a cultural revolution that brought scientific discovery together with mass culture for the first time.87 In 1700, there were just 10 scientific journals in Britain. By 1870, there were 10,000 English-language science publications with titles such as The Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligencer, Hardwicke’s ScienceGossip and Midland Medical Miscellany to accommodate the tastes of such a broad new readership.88 The rapid development of the natural sciences and in particular, subjects such as biology, chemistry, zoology and botany quickly spilled over into popular culture becoming a source of entertainment as well as education. Scientists used visual tools to help disseminate new knowledge. These visual means of communication included diagrams, charts, drawings and anatomical illustrations to share research with peers as well as general audiences. As a result, artists, many of whom collaborated with scientists to produce these images, began to take note of scientific discourses and the way in which they altered people’s perceptions of the world. From oil painting to ceramics to newspaper illustrations, art was indelibly influenced by the culture of science. In 1856, the sculptor John Lucas Tupper declared, using a historical term that had been replaced by the word ‘scientist’ in 1833, that there had never been ‘so broad a road of intercourse between artist and [natural] philosopher as now’.89 Scientific culture had a powerful impact on the Victorians and shaped the ways artists and designers depicted the natural world.

Colour was one of the shared discourses between art and science and a mutual site for invention and experimentation. At the Royal Academy banquet in 1871, the biologist Thomas Huxley gave the toast to Science. He remarked to the artists gathered around him ‘We both seek truth and we both seek beauty.’90 However, there had been anxieties about the role of science in dissecting and revealing the secrets of colour which had a long history of association with poets and writers. In 1820, the Romantic poet John Keats wrote that natural philosophy, ‘Will clip an Angel’s wings/Conquer all mysteries by rule and line/ Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine/Unweave a rainbow’.91 Keats was making a specific reference to Sir Isaac Newton, who proposed that there were seven colours of a rainbow visible to the human eye, after he conducted experiments refracting light through prisms. Before this, in 1664, Robert Boyle had identified just five colours in the rainbow: red, yellow, green, blue and purple. Newton added orange and indigo, secondary colours, located between red and yellow and blue and purple on the visible spectrum. However, Newton wove poetic rationale into the prism experiments. A rainbow with seven colours conformed to the heptatonic scales of musical composition. Newton believed that