Room 40

40.1
Attitudes to colour changed radically in the late Middle Ages, resulting in a ‘de-colouring’ of clothing. In response to the colourful fashions of previous centuries, a movement arose within the Catholic Church and society at large that denounced the wearing of bright colours, which were considered indecent and the ‘devil’s work’.

A distinction was drawn between ‘honest’ colours (black, grey and blue) and ‘dishonest’ colours (the bright colours, such as red, green and yellow). Pious Catholics therefore wore blue, grey and black. The Protestants also embraced this ‘de-colouring’. The fashion for luxurious black continued into the eighteenth century, while men’s clothing was stripped of colour even more after the French Revolution.
 

40.2
For centuries, artists and textile dyers purchased mineral pigments from apothecaries and had to mix the colours themselves. Ready-to-use tubes of paint did not become available until the mid-nineteenth century, allowing artists to paint outdoors, or ‘en plein air’.

For many centuries, ideas about mixing colours were very different from those we have today. Textile dyers were strictly governed by their guild, which forbade them to mix colours. Achieving green by dyeing fabric blue and then yellow could be punished with a prison sentence.

40.4
With the secularisation of society and the democratisation of fashion, many colours lost the meanings they once had. 

In the 1960s and 1970s, vibrant yellow and orange were expressions of the emerging youth culture, which demanded visibility and cheerful colours without loaded associations. Colour without a code. Or was colour actually the new youth code?