Seventy-five colors, two or three pages each, and every one has a story with a twist. Mummy brown was made from actual ground-up mummies, and Victorian painters kept buying it until they found out. Scheele’s green was arsenic and it poisoned the wallpaper of half of Europe. Ultramarine came from one mine in Afghanistan and cost more than gold. Tyrian purple took thousands of sea snails per gram. Indian yellow was supposedly made from the urine of cows fed only mango leaves. St. Clair organizes it by shade, writes short, and gets at how much of art history was decided by which pigments a painter could actually get.
The Secret Lives of Color