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Concerns over colour durability in the nineteenth-century industrial revolution: insights from John Ruskin’s teaching collection

Ghigo, Tea; Occhipinti, Michele; Beeby, Andrew; Domoney, Kelly; Bone, Daniel

Concerns over colour durability in the nineteenth-century industrial revolution: insights from John Ruskin’s teaching collection Thumbnail


Authors

Tea Ghigo

Michele Occhipinti

Kelly Domoney

Daniel Bone



Abstract

The numerous new pigments that gradually became available to artists during the nineteenth-century Colour Revolution were received with contrasting attitudes. The initial enthusiasm for new chromatic possibilities was soon nuanced by concerns about the stability and performance of industrial materials. This study focuses on the work of John Ruskin, the famous art critic of Victorian England, whose artistic production was as impressive as his penmanship. Archival research into nineteenth-century literature is combined with material analyses with macro-XRF, XRD and FORS on a group of watercolours by Ruskin preserved at the Ashmolean Museum to determine his attitude towards pigment stability. The results show that he was very concerned with colour durability and chose his materials carefully, using the treatise Chromatography by the chemist George Field (first edition 1835) as guidance. The material analyses also provided new insight into the composition of specific pigments, revealing the use of a hitherto unreported cobalt-based blue.

Citation

Ghigo, T., Occhipinti, M., Beeby, A., Domoney, K., & Bone, D. (2023). Concerns over colour durability in the nineteenth-century industrial revolution: insights from John Ruskin’s teaching collection. Heritage Science, 11(1), Article 168. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-023-01010-6

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jul 22, 2023
Online Publication Date Aug 9, 2023
Publication Date Aug 9, 2023
Deposit Date Feb 21, 2024
Publicly Available Date Feb 21, 2024
Journal Heritage Science
Electronic ISSN 2050-7445
Publisher SpringerOpen
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 11
Issue 1
Article Number 168
DOI https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-023-01010-6
Keywords Archeology; Archeology; Conservation; Computer Science Applications; Materials Science (miscellaneous); Chemistry (miscellaneous); Spectroscopy
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2271123

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Copyright Statement
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

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