CHROMOTOPE’s groundbreaking results were achieved/reached thanks to the completion of three key scientific objectives:
- Firstly, to reveal the artistic and notably literary impact of new scientific approaches to chromatic materialities: Moving away from the fallacies of a pseudo-universal colour symbolism which had so far dominated individual case-studies of colour in literary texts, the Chromotope team produced a number of high-impact publications highlighting the importance of shifting chromatic materialities as well as their multi-sensorial effects in the analysis of both painting and poetry or fiction. Their pioneering methodology bringing together literature, visual culture, the history of sciences and techniques and the chemistry of pigments and dyes, was applied to both little-known artefacts and their literary sources (like William Burges’s Great Bookcase in the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford) as well as to canonical texts such as Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. This should ensure that the next generation of scholars in the rapidly growing field of colour studies will have the tools to approach their own research objects.
- Secondly, to highlight 19th-century International Exhibitions as the colourscapes of modernity: this, again, was a very new area of investigation which the team successfully embraced by documenting and recreating some of the lesser known exhibitions which heralded the aniline revolution (such as the London International Exhibition in 1862). This research also opened up new collaboration possibilities, in particular with Japanese colleagues as the 1862 exhibition was the first time Japanese cultural artefacts were displayed to a European audience. This field of enquiry – also reflected in some of the ‘colour narratives’ published on our OA ChromoBase - has proved so fertile that several team members are pursuing this research to this day.
- Finally, the third objective, to understand how industrial colours introduced new forms of ‘colour pedagogy’ was completed thanks to the innovative research carried out by its younger team members (and notably the doctoral and post-doctoral students/fellows) into the reception and dissemination of the colour revolution in the every-day lives of 19th century men and women from all sections of society. This research also shaped the narrative of the Colour Revolution, Victorian Art, Fashion and Design with was the principal outcome and milestone of the project.
This major exhibition took place at the Ashmolean Museum (which is part of the University of Oxford) from 21 September 2023 to 18 February 2024 and was seen by 42,725 visitors. Thanks to its unique, mixed-media display of 140 colourful objects (including textiles, jewelry, sculpture, ceramics, pigment and dye samples, books and manuscripts etc.) This was the first exhibition to showcase the interdisciplinary research carried out by an EU-funded project, including the groundbreaking pigment-analyses carried out on Burges’s Great Bookcase. The major international conference Colour Matters, Exploring Colour and Colour Materialities in the long 19th century was held at Trinity College Oxford (6-8 December 24) to coincide with this crucial event in the life of the project. It was attended by over 300 people (both in person and online). The proceedings of the conference will be published in Spring 2026 by OpenBook Publishers.
