September 3, 2018 Issue

Simon Schama is a superb word-painter. His “Blue as Can Be,” in this week’s issue, contains a bravura passage that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker writing. Inspired by his tour of Harvard’s Forbes Pigment Collection, he writes,

Gazing at Vincent posed against his poisoned teal, his jacket edged with the bright-blue trim of his imagination, I thought of the laborers behind all those Forbes pigments: the women who rinsed, kneaded, sieved, and dried the pulverized lapis lazuli that Giovanni Bellini used for the Virgin’s ultramarine robe; who stood waist-deep in horse manure, the vapors of which hastened the flaking of lead that produced the “lead white” used by Frans Hals and Rembrandt to capture folds of linen and lace. I thought of van Gogh claiming to recognize more than twenty black pigments in the portraiture of Frans Hals, the best of them created from charred bones. And of the bright pigments made in grim captivity: the North African slaves and the forzado convicts condemned to work in the mercury mines of Almaden so that the Spanish crown could sell cinnabar; the Caribbean slaves who grew and harvested indigo; the inmates of the Amsterdam House of Correction, rasping away at brazilwood.

Schama’s brilliant piece not only celebrates paint; it reminds us that paint is a product, sourced in rocks, roots, oxides, and, yes, even horse manure and charred bones.