Sir Isaac Newton’s famous experiment with light (1666‐1672) depended on “the complete symmetry and reversibility of the triangular prism”. In a chapter here entitled “The fool’s paradise” John Gage traces the convoluted development of this seemingly simple instrument (that rock‐crystal can “intercept the rays of the sun and project rainbow‐colours on to a surface” was noted by Pliny the Elder). The author was encouraged by the acclaim that greeted his (1993) remarkable book Colour and Culture; Colour and Meaning presents more of his scholarly researches into “the history of colour”. Among a vast array of topics discussed are the colour theories of Goethe and Philipp Otto Runge, the relationship between the work of medieval mosaicists and the neo‐Impressionist painters, the thinking and practice of Turner, Seurat, Matisse and Kandinsky, the phenomenon of synaesthesia, and the invention of spectacles.
In his introduction Professor Gage describes the late Derek Jarman’s Chroma (1994) as an “autobiographical rag‐bag”, but he suggests that it is more stimulating than most philosophical discussions of colour (I noticed that the indexer has called Jarman “David”). I tend to imagine Matisse as an intuitive master, but he seems to have been very interested in contemporary scientific developments; he was struck particularly by Henri Poincaré’s statement that “movement exists only by means of the destruction and reconstruction of matter”. Seurat seems to have been more concerned with “harmony” than with the latest developments in optics. Kandinsky seems to have been interested in everything.
Kasimir Malevich attributed enormous symbolic significance to white (“Sail forth! The white, free chasm, infinity, is before us …”). Ruskin thought that Turner liked to paint fruit and vegetables because he grew up near Covent Garden. Shortly before his death Monet said that “he would have liked to have been born blind and to have had his sight suddenly restored”. Colour‐defective vision “is nearly a hundred times more common among white males than among white females”. At one point Professor Gage remarks that the quality of colour reproductions in books has declined since the Second World War, but I think the illustrations here are excellent.
I recommended Colour and Culture to everyone with any interest in art or nature, and I would do the same with this book. William Blake was aware of Newton’s optical discoveries; in Blake’s work the rainbow becomes “a perfect image of the divided and fallen material world” (“Blake’s Newton”).
