Rouge Garance passé (Dull Madder Red) – the colour of the faded trousers of the French Line Infantry

I have written about important collections of colour on several other occasions – most recently Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours and prior to that – Thomas Parsons’ A Tint Book of Historical Colours. Here, I will look at another key work of the twentieth century.

Société française des Chrysanthémistes
The Chrysanthemum was brought to Europe in the 17th century. Linnaeus named it from the Greek word chrysous, “golden” (the colour of the original flowers), and -anthemon, meaning flower.

It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that they were cultivated in France. In the 1860s, horticulturalists introduced new varieties of the flower, namely the pompon variety, which became especially popular in that country. By the turn of the twentieth century, the assortment of chrysanthemum colours had become so extensive that the Société française des chrysanthémistes published (in 1905) a Réptertoire des couleurs, which then came to be used as a colour catalogue in many other fields.¹

The rest of this essay has been removed after six years. You can now read more about this in The Anatomy of Colour, published by Thames & Hudson and available from John Sandoe (Books).

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