In January 1883, the India Office (Delhi) received a peculiar request from the renowned British botanist William Turner Thiselton-Dyer. The letter was addressed to Sir Louis Mallet, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State of India. Dyer’s letter was an appeal on behalf of his father-in-law and Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker.
The letter’s subject inquired into the precarious origins of a curious shade of yellow known as Puree or Indian yellow. Hooker was eager to uncover how and where the colour had come to be. The archives show that the bureaucratic networks of the British colonial state became briefly absorbed by the origins of a pigment. Given the times, this was barely surprising.
This was the late nineteenth century, Impressionism as a movement soared to its peak, with the French at the helm, their skill unchallenged. Britain, in contrast, had no one to rival French talent. Nevertheless, the Impressionists’ relationship with colour stemmed from a prolonged and strenuous battle to regulate light and represent reality on canvas. At a time when the painter Jacques-Louis David was revered for his fidelity to the Académie des Beaux-Arts and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres for his dedication to classical themes, it was in Eugène Delacroix’s work that light began to emerge in paintings, foreshadowing what the Impressionists would one day embrace. Moreover, the audacious brushstrokes of the British Romanticist J.M.W. Turner, apparent in works like Rain, Steam, and Speed (1844) and The Fighting Temeraire (1838), championed the impasto technique. The bold application of paint, capturing light and atmosphere with an almost tactile intensity, foreshadowed the expressive vigour that would come to define an Impressionist’s brushwork.
