More colour

Back to the colour exhibition last week, not put off by the complaint that it included no explanation of where prussian blue came from, an explanation which might have balanced the rather large amount of material from Afghanistan and which colour, I am pleased to inform readers, was discovered by accident and is chemically known as iron-hexacyanoferrate, with the cyano bit suggesting a connection with similarly named prussic acid. Were Prussians known for a fondness for cyanide?

We also decided that a lot of the pigments on display were probably rather poisonous, being oxides of dodgy stuffs like mercury or cadmium. One, the name of which I forget, was very poisonous, suggesting a whole new sort of symbolism in painting. So when one painted a lady in what was well known to be a very poisonous paint, what was one saying about the lady?

Interesting off-piste displays about the use of gold and silver, about scratching through (sgraffito) and about raising up (pastiglia). And then, having come across lakes at the exhibition, was moved to look them up in the OED back home, to find that the word 'lake' has all kinds of interesting meanings, the one illustrated being that relevant here. I learn that this lake is a relative of the shellac in the French polish I had so much trouble with as a child.

But perhaps the most important take-away was having it pointed out that a lot of old colours, before the invention of modern chemical colours, degraded over time. The decay of old pictures was not just a matter of all kinds of dirt and varnish accumulating on the surface, the paint itself might break down, which no amount of restoration was going to put right. From which we get the preoccupation of better painters at the end of the 19th century with the stability of their colours; they wanted their oeuvre to last forever.

And so, upgrading from the bacon sandwiches of Duncannon Street, to lunch at the nearby Terroirs, the place last visited on or about September 13th last year. Bread still good and plentiful, supplied by the Paul of http://www.paul-uk.com/. I had a superior slice of black pudding to start followed by a rather good, rather new to me cheese called livarot and taken with some more bread. The others went for a confection of salt cod. All washed down with a rather good glass of riesling. Very pleasant, young French service.

It being a Friday, we were then able to stock up on comté and tome (de jura) from the outpost of the Borough Cheese Company under the Festival Hall.

Then further still on the way home, we visited the library at Raynes Park (the one in a railway station rather than a Wetherspoons) and picked up a novel from my birth year: a reissue of a famous detective novel from 1949 from Gollancz, lately of Sutton Library. 'Bland Beginning' by Julian Symons, described as a thriller but really a murder mystery constructed out of the world of the forgery of minor first editions and set in the 1920's. A world which was, it seems, only invented in the late 19th century with nobody bothering much about such things before that. I also came across the phrase 'bird of dawning' again (see December 22nd 2010 in the other place): was one poet borrowing the phrase from another? A light and pleasant read, with sex & violence merely hinted at rather than laid on with a shovel, but one which has left me a little confused, being said to be based on the affairs of a real poet, one Martin Rawlings, but a poet of which google can find no trace, other than in the googled version of this very book.  There is also reference to a book called 'An enquiry into the nature of certain nineteenth century pamphlets', a book which does exist and which can be had for £20 or so, rather too much for me on this occasion. Was Rawlings real or did Symons just lift the general idea from the enquiry?