Concerns over colour durability in the nineteenth-century industrial revolution: insights from John Ruskin’s teaching collection

The numerous new pigments that gradually became available to artists during the nineteenth-century Colour Revolution were received with contrasting attitudes. The initial enthusiasm for new chromatic possibilities was soon nuanced by concerns about the stability and performance of industrial materials. This study focuses on the work of John Ruskin, the famous art critic of Victorian England, whose artistic production was as impressive as his penmanship. Archival research into nineteenth-century literature is combined with material analyses with macro-XRF, XRD and FORS on a group of watercolours by Ruskin preserved at the Ashmolean Museum to determine his attitude towards pigment stability. The results show that he was very concerned with colour durability and chose his materials carefully, using the treatise Chromatography by the chemist George Field (first edition 1835) as guidance. The material analyses also provided new insight into the composition of specific pigments, revealing the use of a hitherto unreported cobalt-based blue.