Paul Smith - Painting, Science, and the Perception of Coloured Shadows: ‘The Most Beautiful Blue’

If this book has an origin, it was the experience of coloured shadows I had in 1982 that I describe in the Introduction. It was only much later, however, that I began to collect my thoughts about them, when Peter Mack kindly asked me to speak at the conference on colour held at the Warburg Institute in June 2014. It subsequently received a shot in the arm when Sonia Sedivy generously invited me to present a paper at the colloquium on art and perception she hosted in Toronto in May 2017. I am grateful to all those present, but especially to Bence Nanay and Dominic Lopes for their supportive response to my paper, which gave me the encouragement to submit my manuscript to Routledge later that month. The following March, I was equally heartened when Claude Imbert told me she enjoyed the paper on ombres colores I presented at the SERD conference in Paris, LOeil du XIXe sicle.

Not long afterwards, Sonia Sedivy and John Hyman were good enough to include a version of my Toronto paper in the special issue of the British Journal of Aestheticsthat appeared in October 2018. And rika Wicky and her colleagues at SERD saw fit to publish a version of my Paris paper in the actes du colloquethat went online in December 2019.

Writing this book was particularly difficult for me as an art historian because it involved acquiring a basic understanding of recent psychological and neuroscientific theories of colour constancy. I am especially grateful therefore to Anya Hurlbert and David Foster for their infinitely patient and unwaveringly constructive responses to my many, often hopelessly naive questions. I must also thank John Mollon, whose work on Gaspard Monge has been foundational to my project, for alerting me to the pitfalls awaiting the unwary trespasser into this field.

My primary scholarly debt, however, is to the late Michael Baxandall for the handful of brilliant pages he wrote on the historical understanding of coloured shadows. I have profited in addition from the deeply serious research into coloured shadows undertaken by Georges Roque. I must also acknowledge a debt to Francesca Fioranis recent work on Leonardo da Vincis coloured shadows and to Janis Bell for her writing on Leonardos theory of colour more generally. More recently, I have benefitted from Julia Schllers richly descriptive and lavishly illustrated book on coloured shadows in later nineteenth-century art. Of the older literature on the subject, Oscar Reutersvrds essay of 1950 on The Violettomaniaof the Impressionists remains a touchstone, as does Alan Staleys evergreen study of the Pre-Raphaelites, first published in 1973.

All translations in the text are my own, unless otherwise stated. Among those I have borrowed are the translations of Leonardos Trattato della pitturamade by Claire Farago and Janis Bell for The Fabrication of Leonardo da Vincis Trattato della pittura, published by Brill in 2018. I have also taken excerpts from David Britts translations of Carl Gustav Caruss writings, which appeared in Nine Letters on Landscape Paintingpublished by the Getty Research Institute in 2002. All translations from German sources unavailable in English were made by Elena Theodorakopoulos.

I am greatly indebted to Stephanie Nebbia for granting me access to the George Field archives housed at Winsor & Newton. I must also thank Giorgia Bottinelli for allowing me to peruse the Joseph Clover papers kept at Norwich Castle Museum. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain relevant permissions for the passages quoted from these and other archival sources.

A number of curators were kind enough to allow me to inspect and photograph paintings which I discuss in this book. In the UK, these include Colin Harrison at the Ashmolean Museum, Carol Jacobi at Tate Britain, Robert Wenley at the Barber Institute, and Hannah Williamson at Manchester Art Gallery. Among those in Germany who helped me are Hanna Bahr at the Kunstpalast in Dsseldorf, Markus Bertsch at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, and Anna Marie Pffflin at the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett.

The Clark Institute awarded me a summer fellowship in 2015. I am much indebted to those responsible for this vital period of study and reflection, which enabled me to make considerable headway with this project. I should also acknowledge my especial thanks to the Getty Research Institute, where I spent a wonderful year in 200708, reading colour science. It was here that I also experienced the Damascene moment involving the green shadow described in the Introduction.

I am lucky enough to have had colleagues at Warwick who shared my enthusiasm for coloured shadows, particularly Lorenzo Pericolo, who invited me to speak to his students about them. I must also thank Michael Hatt for allowing me to join him on his excursions to Denmark in pursuit of Eckersberg and for joining me on my trip to Dsseldorf to see Carus.

I am grateful to Isabella Vitti at Routledge for placing her faith in this project and to Katie Armstrong for answering my interminable questions with consummate professionalism and good humour. I am equally indebted to Barbara Larson, the series editor of Science and the Arts since 1750, for her many insightful comments on my manuscript.

My greatest debt is nevertheless to my wife, Elena. I must thank her, more especially, for the unstinting support she gave me for the whole of this books long gestation period.