I was super excited to read this book as I love any book that will teach me random facts about obscure things. By a stroke of weird timing, I happened to be reading it while in France, during the week I was in Paris and went to the Louvre, and also to Giverny to see Monet's gardens. That was ideal, of course. I couldn't help but look at the colors in the painting more closely, and wonder about the saturation and what types of pigments were used. I also had to tell my family that there are more yellow flowers than any other color of flowers.

This book isn't just for artists though. It's about color going back to the beginning of our understanding about color. In that way, it's also about humanity and sociology. It's about all of history--why royalty wore purple and why mauve become so popular in the late Victorian period. The story I found most fascinating was one of the Australian Aboriginals (although this has also been the case with other indigenous peoples, it's best documented with the Australians), who did not understand the concept of blue. When Europeans first came to the continent and tried communicating, that was a stumbling block. It's not that they just didn't have a word for it--they didn't understand it as a color. Blue appears really infrequently in the natural environment--very few flowers, fish that look blue aren't blue up close--so their only interaction with it was through the sea (which also often a whole bunch of other colors and to my mind is usually more green, especially close to land) and the sky, where it was more of less a non-color, because of its ubiquity. It's so fascinating to think of not understanding blue.

Interesting bits about the development of artists' pigments, some of which were astonishingly expensive and others which were dangerous, which lead into stories of patent law. Other parts were more conceptual. I do wish the book had covered orange (or at the very least, had told us why it didn't.) My mother and I had a long discussion of whether or not white and black are colors after this one (she came down heavily on the side of "yes!" to both. Whereas I'm not so sure.) It's fascinating! You should read it!

This book is published by St. Martin's Press, a division of Macmillan, my employer.