Periodic Reporting for period 4 - CHROMOTOPE (The 19th century chromatic turn - CHROMOTOPE)
Berichtszeitraum: 2024-04-01 bis 2025-09-30
CHROMOTOPE aimed to offer the very first analysis of the changes that took place in attitudes to colour in the 19th century, and notably how the ‘chromatic turn’ of the 1850s mapped out new ways of thinking about colour in literature, art, science and technology throughout Europe.
Approaching this ‘colour revolution’ from a cross-disciplinary perspective, the project team, composed of curators, heritage scientists, chemists, anthropologists, art historians and specialists of literature from Sorbonne Université, the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers and the University of Oxford, succeeded in unveiling hitherto neglected aspects of 19th-century European cultural history while dispelling popular myths about the gloominess of the industrial age whose dark coal paradoxically became the source of the first aniline dyes in 1856.
In keeping with its three scientific objectives (to reveal the artistic and notably literary impact of new scientific approaches to chromatic materialities ; to highlight 19th-century International Exhibitions as the colourscapes of modernity; to understand how industrial colours introduced new forms of ‘colour pedagogy’) the CHROMOTOPE team produced numerous high-impact outcomes, including a thorough pigment analysis of William Burges’s Great Bookcase which led to a ground-breaking interdisciplinary scholarly publication (William Burges’s Great Bookcase and the Victorian Colour Revolution, Yale UP, 2023); a major exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (Colour Revolution, Victorian Art, Fashion and Design in 2023-24), as well as to the creation of the ChromoBase, the project’s collaborative database documenting the 19th century chromatic turn.
Approaching this ‘colour revolution’ from a cross-disciplinary perspective, the project team, composed of curators, heritage scientists, chemists, anthropologists, art historians and specialists of literature from Sorbonne Université, the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers and the University of Oxford, succeeded in unveiling hitherto neglected aspects of 19th-century European cultural history while dispelling popular myths about the gloominess of the industrial age whose dark coal paradoxically became the source of the first aniline dyes in 1856.
In keeping with its three scientific objectives (to reveal the artistic and notably literary impact of new scientific approaches to chromatic materialities ; to highlight 19th-century International Exhibitions as the colourscapes of modernity; to understand how industrial colours introduced new forms of ‘colour pedagogy’) the CHROMOTOPE team produced numerous high-impact outcomes, including a thorough pigment analysis of William Burges’s Great Bookcase which led to a ground-breaking interdisciplinary scholarly publication (William Burges’s Great Bookcase and the Victorian Colour Revolution, Yale UP, 2023); a major exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (Colour Revolution, Victorian Art, Fashion and Design in 2023-24), as well as to the creation of the ChromoBase, the project’s collaborative database documenting the 19th century chromatic turn.
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.
- 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.
The success of Colour Revolution exhibition, alongside the team’s numerous high-impact publications, summer school, conferences and public engagement activities as well as the project’s acclaimed open-access ChromoBase, gave CHROMOTOPE the scientific and international visibility it would not have achieved without the support of the ERC. Moreover, quantitative and qualitative evidence collected during the project and in particular the exhibition shows that, more importantly, it has succeeded in actively disseminating the core innovative ideas that team has been exploring since 2019, namely: 1) that the 19th century was far more colourful than black and white photographs and our contemporary popular culture tend to show; 2) that colour appreciation is not simply a matter of subjective taste but that it has wider reaching cultural implications (including in terms of religion, science, gender and race) ; 3) in a word, that colour matters – which is particularly relevant for the 19th century, a period when scientific and technical progress radically transformed the way colour and colouring materials were produced and perceived, a revolution that our own colourful world still reflects to this day.