The Blue of a Robin’s Egg

 

Finding a paint color or fabric swatch that matches the blue of a robin’s egg ought to be a straightforward process because the model exists in nature. There will be some variation in shade from one nest of robins’ eggs to another, of course, but certainly not enough to justify the wide variation in commercial products and in the arts, which go from a green with a blush of blue to a pale turquoise, and all going by the name “Robin’s Egg Blue”. How can that be, when the eggs themselves exist in nature every spring for everyone to see?

 

The answer has to be that perceptions of color, like perceptions of everything else, differ from person to person. It’s all well and good to attach a number to a color, as the design company Pantone and as the federal government have done, or a combination of letters and numbers as computer programmers and as the makers of display monitors have done, but to then assign a descriptive name to that color and have everyone agree the name is apt gets into murky territory, particularly when the name is drawn from nature. Many people have seen a robin’s egg in nature, after all, but of those people not all of them will agree that display monitor color #00CCCC is the same shade of blue they have seen.

American Robin Eggs in Nest
American robin eggs in nest. Photo by Laslovarga.

That display monitor color hex code is not even a uniform descriptor for Robin’s Egg Blue from one manufacturer to another or from one computer program to another. Pick an industry that relies on descriptions of color in its products, and few of them can agree on which objective color code matches a subjective color descriptor. Go in the opposite direction, from subjective to objective, and the situation is equally muddled. The best people can do is to trust their own eyes and not be overly swayed by the names on cans of paint or on fabric swatches. The only true judge of the right shade of blue is the mother robin herself, who knows her own eggs and couldn’t care a whit about any fancy designer shades of blue claiming to be made for her babies.
— Vita


In the 1948 film Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, Myrna Loy as Muriel Blandings instructs one of her contractors, played by Emory Parnell, on the various paint colors she wants him to use in the different rooms of the house.

 

This Colorful Life

 

Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark recently discovered arsenic in the green pigment used on the covers of some Renaissance manuscripts, which means they are unreadable without special handling. The pigment was not put there by the original writers or printers, but by Victorian preservationists who were most likely trying to prevent insect damage. The pigment, known as Parisian Green, was known at the time to ward off insects, but the link to arsenic was little known at the time. Production of Parisian Green has since been discontinued, joining a list of other toxic pigments whose drawbacks became known over time.

 

The late nineteenth century Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh may have succumbed to lead poisoning, dying at 37 of a self-inflicted gunshot after one of his many fits of delirium. This is one of many speculations about van Gogh’s troubled mental life. Van Gogh was extraordinarily prolific in his short career, producing over two thousand paintings in the course of ten years. He left behind many letters describing his technique and materials, and from those historians have speculated van Gogh’s high productivity exposed him to the lead in his oil paints more than what other artists of the period experienced.

WLA ima Landscape at St Remy
Enclosed Wheat Field with Peasant / Landscape at Saint-Rémy, an 1889 painting Vincent van Gogh produced while staying at an asylum in southern France.

There is another aspect of van Gogh’s use of certain pigments which has come to light in recent years, and that is the susceptibility of some of them, mainly the yellows he mixed with white in order to lighten them, to fade to a dull brown after prolonged exposure to sunlight. Van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers are particularly vulnerable to losing their unique quality on account of this unfortunate chemical reaction. Ironic that an artist who delighted in the strong sunlight of southern France and attempted to bring out its shining brightness in the strong yellows of his paintings should have his efforts diluted by the effects of sunlight.

Homo sapiens have some of the best color vision in the animal kingdom. Only birds have better color vision overall, as evidenced by the wide range of color displays in their plumage. Humans don’t have colorful plumage, of course, but there are many other ways we make use of our excellent color vision, and one of them is our zealous pursuit of pigments and dyes to reproduce the colors we see in the world. Our desire to display the colors we see in the world and express to others our own imaginative vision manifests not so much with our own bodies, which are limited canvases, but in art and design, in paintings and fabrics since antiquity, and in film and electronics over the last hundred or more years.

A video tribute to Vincent van Gogh set to Don McLean’s 1971 song “Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)”.

Vincent van Gogh, driven as he was to recreate in his paintings the life he saw not only with his eyes, but with his mind’s eye, may have gone on even knowing the health risks of some of the pigments he was using because the colors he sought could be achieved no other way at the time, though he may have reconsidered using some others had he known of their eventual degradation of his vision. It’s also possible that for him the painting was the thing, capturing what he saw and felt at the moment, and letting the future be what it will.
— Vita