Thames & Hudson The Anatomy of Colour: The Story of Heritage Paints and Pigments

Superb book. Once you start reading it you may realise you know more than you think you do! It is full of the bits of information that old painters told me when I started work, things that they learnt when they started work some ninety years ago, like how to make brilliant white paint. A couple of years ago I asked the ladies in the local Dulux paint store to look up the mix for brilliant white paint on the paint mixer computer to settle an argument, I bet there are not many people who know the correct mix. This book explains why one of the colours added to the mix is black, there are others!

Amazing book!! Lots of history and information we take for granted these days! Such an amazing study of the history of colour and its use.

This book is a very complete scientific study on the use of pigments, mainly in interiors shown in magnificent photographs

It is everything I hoped it will be and more. I am a painter and love to make my own paints. I was well served. I have no idea how they were able to produce such a gorgeous, vivid, color book for such little cost. I want to rip out every page and frame them

I volunteer as a tour guide at a local colonial-era mansion—restored with paint colors and reproduction wallpapers authenticated for the house. Visitors often have questions about these because (1) many of the colors are so striking, and at odds with contemporary tastes; and (2) some of the wallpapers offer no pattern, but merely present a field of color—“Why didn’t they just paint it?!” people ask. And this is a book that offers answers – along with plenty more, to questions I didn’t yet know I had, about paint preparation and application. Each color really had its own process, durability (and cost)—so they might be found only in certain homes, or certain rooms of homes. What I appreciate most in this book (aside from it’s obvious high production quality, and plentiful color plates) are: (1) considerable detail about the various types and components of paints in the colonial, and later periods; and (2) the organization (eg, lots of page headings and pictures) and relative brevity, by which this is all laid out. In other words, the book is easy to scan as a reference, when you’re looking for something in particular—and presents straightforward details, when you get there. I’ve purchased lots of books on color history – and they’re all interesting, full of story and anecdote. But this one has done, by far, the best at delivering “news I can use“: why a colonial mansion looks the way it does, and what it took to get it that way. (A near-perfect book! My only cavil is that aging eyes may have trouble with some portions that are in fine print.)