'Colour'

Victoria Finlay (2002) Colour: travels through the paintbox. London: Sceptre. (7th edition)

Summary
Victoria Finlay became fascinated with colour after a childhood visit to Chartres cathedral, when she was mesmerised by the blues and reds of the stained glass windows. Her fascination lay dormant for many years until, as Arts Editor of the South China Morning Post, she read a book about colour that made her realize that art history is usually about those producing the art, rather than about the paints and the dyes. Her search for a book about the paints and dyes was fruitless, so she decided to write one herself. As Finlay immerses herself in the different cultures of the world, she dips into folk legend, anthropology and politics.

My comments
I enjoyed reading Colour - Finlay is an experienced journalist who writes clearly, succinctly and yet colourfully; and while each chapter is full of details, she retains an eye for 'the big picture' - for example her comment that art history has been shaped by nostalgia (p. 194) - nostalgia, we might add, for one lost 'golden age of art' after another.

Colour resembles Geraldine Brooks's People of the Book. Brooks's book was fiction with foundations in fact; Finlay's book is wholly factual; BUT both collect historical anecdotes and present the result as 'a history'. People of the Book was woven together around her fictional detective story of the book restorer, but Colour has no such focus - it's just one chapter after another, with no connection between them but quotes from Cennino's The Craftsman's Handbook.

So while I can now retell little anecdotes about, for example, Napoleon dying of arsenic poisoning from his green wallpaper (p. 291), or the Portuguese naming Brasil after the red dye-producing brasilwood tree (p. 198), I haven't learnt much about the place of colour in history or in the present. Does anything tie these anecdotes together into something bigger? If not, then while I might know something about the history of green paints and glazes, I'm no wiser about the place of green - or of any colour - in human history. In a way, Colour is a book without a point.

Background

1. Victoria Finlay has a Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Finlay

2. Victoria Finlay was interviewed by Hamish Robertson for ABC Radio National's The World Today following the publication of Colour: travels through the paintbox:
www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2003/s865729.htm
She was also interviewed by Sharon Verghis of the Sydney Morning Herald
following the publication of Colour: travels through the paintbox:
www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/23/1053585694454.html
Victoria Finlay has done a piece to camera for Meet The Author:
www.meettheauthor.co.uk/bookbites/441.html
She has also been interviewed (by Mo Wu) for her publisher - Random House:
www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0203/finlay/interview.html

3. Subsequent books by Victoria Finlay
Buried treasure: travels through the jewellery box. (2006) Hodder & Stoughton.
Jewels: a secret history. (2007) New York: Random House. Originally published in Britain in 2006 by Sceptre and in the USA by Ballantine Books.

4. Victoria Finlay's publishers
Sceptre. Owned by Hodder & Soughton, itself owned by UK-based Hachette Livre (top selling publisher in the UK in 2007 by sales value), itself part of the French multinational Lagardère group (part-owner of Virgin Megastores, run as Sanity stores in Australia).
Random House. The world's largest English-language general bookseller, it's owned by German multinational Bertelsmann AG. Random House imprints include Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus, Doubleday, William Heinemann, Hutchinson, Secker & Warburg, Vintage Books.