The information resource
for printmakers The information resource
for printmakers
Growing Your Own Ink Historical Background I had to find out too, as much as possible about what had been done before. I knew that prior to the mid-19th century, when synthetic colours began to be developed in increasing numbers, plants were one of the chief sources of colour used in the textile industry. Indeed colour from plants of one sort or another can be seen in use throughout the whole of recorded history and across cultural and geographical divides. From Scythian burial mounds on the borders of South-West Mongolia, textiles preserved in ice and dating from the fifth century BC reveal an extensive and sophisticated use of vegetable dyes (Eiland,1979).Saffron (Crocus sativus) is well known as the source of a truly brilliant if rather fugitive yellow and there is evidence of its use, both as a colourant and medicine, in the Greek and Persian civilisations of the same period (Cannon,1995). Pliny, in his Historia Naturalis speaks of vegetable dyeing in Egypt during Roman times (Ciba Review, 1938) and it is thought that these people could have learned their craft from India, where textile dyeing had reached a position of preeminence. Indian skill in vegetable dyeing and painting reached a high point in the two centuries from 1600 to 1800 AD, when the painting and resist dyeing of cotton cloth known to us as Chintz became the basis of the largest trade in textiles that the world had ever seen.(Irwin and Brett,1970). In Mediaeval and renaissance Europe treatises and manuals on the preparation of artists colours contain many references to plant colours, one such being Cennini’s, ‘Il Libro dell’ Arte’ of 1437, in which he sets out recipes for the preparation of block-printing inks from saffron and brazilwood (Caesalpinia sp.) The Strasbourg manuscript, of an earlier period, also describes the use of a whole range of plants used in the manufacture of inks and water-colours. Later we see developments in vegetable block-printing inks in 17th and 18th century Japan (though their use of vegetable colours in dyeing goes back much earlier than this) where it is interesting to note that some colours were actually leached from previously dyed (indigo) cloth (Strange,1924). Throughout mediaeval Europe there was extensive cultivation of woad (Isatis tinctoria), the well known source of a blue dye said by both Caesar and Pliny to have been used by the ancient Britons to colour their bodies, though whether this practice was medicinal or warlike in intention is open to dispute (Goodwin, 1984). Even today, South American Indians use plants like Achoite or Annato (Bixa orellano) for much the same purpose, though we in Europe use it to colour cheese products (Uphof,1968). There is a huge historical precedent for considering vegetable colours as a serious alternative to present day sources, and production on an industrial scale is not altogether new either. In 1864, upwards of 40,000 tons of logwood (Haematoxylon campechianum), a sub-tropical tree grown principally in the West Indies and South America and from which was extracted a variety of blues, purples and blacks, was imported into the United Kingdom. Around 19,000 tons of madder (Rubia tnctoria),13,000 tons of Sumach (Rhus coriaria) and 3,000 tons each of Indigo (Indigofera tinctoria) and Oak bark (Quercus velutina) were also imported into Britain during the same period (Rhind, 1872). The same kinds of figures for these, and a whole range of other dye-plants, can be assumed for the textile industries of other industrialised countries at that time. It can be readily seen then, that vegetable sourced colours were very big business in the pre-synthetic era. And yet within the space of around forty years from the discovery of a mauve ‘aniline’ dye derived from coal-tar by W.H.Perkin in 1856 (Story, 1974), the vegetable colour industry was virtually dead. Fortunately the dyers and chemists of the period were nothing if not meticulous in their recording of detail, and a whole host of books were published throughout the 18th and 19th centuries outlining with utmost care the procedures involved in vegetable colour extraction. Principal among these was the magnificently titled ‘Experimental Researches Concerning the Philosophy of Permanent Colours’ by Edward Bancroft, published in 1813 and still available for inspection in the National Art Library at the V&A.
Phil Shaw MA(RCA) |
