Abstract

Debates about the nature of colour transcended the boundaries between the sciences and arts of Victorian England. While 'Grammars' of ornament and colour were a prominent feature of the Victorian design reform movement, their seemingly pedantic rules for colouring have repelled most art historians. The precepts are meaningless until they are placed in the context of contemporary Victorian sciences: not only optics, but also chemistry, physiology, and comparative anatomy. The design reformers invoked arguments from sciences tinged with Romanticism and applied them to arts tinged with Utilitarianism. Foreign to current aesthetics, this combination of rationales is the key to understanding Victorian 'laws' of colouring. ;Furthermore, the epistemological role of colour was a major source of tension between German idealism, for which colour signified the interaction of the mind with the world, and indigenous British pragmatism. These two philosophical frameworks collided and then blended in British art theory between 1830 and 1850. The nature of colour was debated vehemently because entire ideologies were built around it. Victorian Chromatics traces their development from the physicist-philosopher J. H. Lambert in the late eighteenth-century through Goethe, Sir David Brewster, and the dye chemist Michel Chevreul to the historian and philosopher of science William Whewell and the painter and art scholar Sir Charles Eastlake, who translated Goethe's Farbenlehre into English. It concludes with the botanist and designer Christopher Dresser, who created strikingly 'modern' abstract designs in the 1870's. ;The history of colour in the nineteenth-century not only reveals the complex interaction of sciences and sensibilities in the period, but also answers a specific question in the history of nineteenth-century art. While art theorists proposed abstract colour harmonics in the eighteenth century, representational colour persisted in fine art for a century. However, in the 1850's arbitrary colour was rationalized and practiced by Owen Jones and other design reformers at the London Schools of Design and used by decorative painters and illustrators who were also easel painters. Thus the arguments from science to support theories of ornament played an important role in the transition from academicism to abstraction in nineteenth-century art