Left: Perkin’s mauve; centre, Tyrian purple threads and murex shells; right; orchil lichen, orchil-dyed silk and wool
At the end of the month I’ll be taking part in an online symposium run by The Loom Shed. What is The Loom Shed? Well, it’s a shed and it has looms in it. But weaving isn’t all that’s planned at this new and imaginative venue.
The Loom Shed has been set up by Louise Cottey, weaver and tutor, and Liz Croft, crochet specialist, weaver and tutor. Both Laura and Liz are passionate about yarn craft and the benefits to mental health that craft work can bring.
My talk Pursuing Purple: Shellfish, Lichen and Mauve will follow some of the dye trails I discovered when researching a nineteenth century industrial archive. If you follow my blog you’ll know I became particularly intrigued by the dye trade in lichen, historically used for making a purple dye called orchil. My findings very unexpectedly linked two other famous purple dyes: Imperial or Tyrian Purple, and Perkin’s Mauve.
The Natural Dye Symposium is on June 26th and will offer a day of talks by four specialist natural dye speakers. It was decided to hold the event online this year but in the future there will be dye-related workshops and events at The Loom Shed itself, which is located in East Devon. There is also a varied programme of speakers and courses and you can look at their Events page to see the latest listings.
On June 10th at 12.45 pm I will be doing an Instagram Live with Liz Croft. You can Insta-follow me on @whitworthisabella, and The Loom Shed at @the_loom_shed
The Loom Shed Online Natural Dye SymposiumProgramme
Aviva Leigh 10.00 am – 11.00 am Strips, Stripes and Satins – Exploring 18th Century Norwich Textiles
Isabella Whitworth 11.30 am – 12.30 pm Pursuing Purple: Shellfish, Lichen and Mauve
Luisa Aribe 1.30 pm – 2.30 pm An Indigo Journey
Susan Dye 3.00 pm – 4.00 pm Growing and Using your own Dye Garden
There is an ‘all day’ ticket for all four talks, or you can book in for individual speakers here
Top: blue-purple samples: mauveine-dyed using a shibori technique; lower pair of silks: orchil-dyed in redder shades; threads on orchil-dyed silks: dyed with Tyrian Purple
Here is an image showing an extraordinary trio of historic, and historical, purple dyes. Two are the natural dyes Tyrian Purple and orchil, whose histories are so ancient their origins are unknown. The other dye is a recreated mauveine, the first synthetic dye to be commercially developed, after synthesis in 1856.
All three dyes play a part in an archive I have been researching, which relates to a dye manufacturer based in Leeds. The company began when a young chemist called James Bedford started making orchil and cudbear, later forming a company named Wood & Bedford in around 1850. Through various changes of names and expansions, the company became a major international dye and chemical manufacturer, finally folding in 2004 under the name Yorkshire Chemicals. You can read more about the history by following links below.
Orchil was the natural, lichen sourced dyestuff on which the company’s fortunes were founded by James Bedford. But by the late nineteenth century, William Henry Perkin had discovered and patented his synthetic dye mauveine, signalling the gradual demise of natural dyes in commercial use and the beginning of chemical manufacturing. There was a family connection between the Bedford family and the Perkins’: WH Perkin’s son Arthur G. Perkin married a Bedford daughter. The Leeds company managed to weather the transition from natural to synthetic products and its archives are a fascinating record of how they achieved their success.
As to the Tyrian Purple, perhaps the most unexpected items from the archive are the genuine shellfish-dyed thread samples found in a small envelope. You can see one of the two samples in the image above. Again, please read their story by following links below.
Mauveine dyeings
I was contacted earlier this year by Dr John Plater, a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at the University of Aberdeen. John has made a study of mauveine and has come to several interesting conclusions about Perkin’s dye. It seems that not all mauveines were / are the same. To read about John’s research, please follow the links below. John had read about my studies in orchil and was curious to know something of the versatility of mauveine in working practice. I sent him shibori-tied silks so that he could experiment with dyeing them, suggesting he try an immersion method on one set of samples, and separately apply dyes with an eyedropper. I find the eyedropper method very successful with synthetic dyes as it gives great control of the dye, and is very economical. You can judge which you think most effective from the page below. Immersion dyed are on the left.
The archive’s new home
Later this week I will be presenting a paper at the DHA (Dyes in History and Archaeology) Conference at the Royal School of Needlework, Hampton Court. It will describe the entirety of the Leeds archive, part of which I have been studying. It is now available for public study through the West Yorkshire Joint Services (WYJS) facility at Morley, near Leeds. I will write a separate blog about this after the Conference.
Part One of this research story can be found in the previous blog, or just click here
The Bedford family of Leeds The Bedford family first started manufacturing orchil, a purple dye made from varieties of lichen, in around 1820. Orchil-making was a skilful process relying on fermentation, and dye vats could be expensively spoiled through inattention or inexperience.
Pre 1842 visiting card
Colophon from after 1850
Invoice header, post 1857
Printed matter from early days of manufacturing. The name ‘Wood’ was retained after the death of Edward Wood, a sales partner from around 1850
Three successive generations of enterprising Bedfords steered the expanding manufacturing company into the 20th century, with achievements stemming from knowledge of new research and techniques, coupled with their inventive outlook. This period saw them incorporate synthetic dyes into their manufacturing, but their use of natural products for tanning and dyeing continued into the mid 20th century. The company changed names several times, but there was never a takeover. As ‘Yorkshire Chemicals’ the business finally folded in the early 2000s: by then there were no Bedfords in the company.
Charles Samuel Bedford (1865 – 1945) In 1880 – 81, Charles Samuel Bedford, grandson of founder James Bedford, attended the Yorkshire College to study chemistry. There was one other student: Arthur George Perkin, the second son of Sir William Henry Perkin whose 1865 discovery of a synthesised purple dye known as mauveine had revolutionised the dye and chemical industry. The meeting of these two young students developed to a lifelong connection when Arthur married Charles’ sister Annie. Arthur and Annie spent their lives in Leeds where Arthur worked at what became the University of Leeds. Strong social ties existed between both families.
Annie Perkin, née Bedford
Arthur G Perkin, second son of Sir William Henry Perkin
Charles Samuel Bedford
Connections Family, scientific, and working connections of the Bedfords may explain why samples of genuine Tyrian Purple arrived in the archive. There was no commercial or industrial potential in shellfish dye so one can assume there was a purely academic interest in dyeing and retaining them.
What did the dyer of the Tyrian Purple need to know? Zvi’s photomicrographic images of the purple threads confirmed that the samples were evenly and homogeneously dyed, meaning that they were dyed, not smeared by direct application. Therefore, two key pieces of knowledge had to be in place to vat dye the cotton threads. The dyer needed to know that the shellfish pigment was an indigoid molecule, and that a reduction vat was required.
Knowledge of the hydrosulphite reduction vat was first presented in 1873 by Schützenberger and Lalande. Paul Friedländer’s work in 1909 Vienna determined that the main component of purple pigment from shellfish was an indigoid, namely dibromoindigo.
Scientific connections to the Bedfords were strong, coming from the wider Perkin family, and the Yorkshire College (later the University of Leeds) where Arthur worked. Latest research would have been quickly accessible.
The envelope containing the two small skeins of shellfish dyed cotton: labelled in Charles Bedford’s handwriting
Dating the dyeing and the identity of the dyer The relevant part of the Leeds archive was assembled from around 1914. By considering the timeline, we arrived at a possible dyeing date of 1910 – 1913. The identity of the dyer remains unknown since no explanatory notes have been found, but the writing on the envelope containing the threads is that of Charles S. Bedford. So it’s quite possible he dyed it himself, had it dyed by a colleague well-versed in the chemistry of the time, or it was given to him by someone whose work he trusted. In Zvi’s words, this century-old Tyrian Purple sample is the most modern historic sample yet found: a true historic treasure.
Tyrian Purple, known as the ‘Purple of the Ancients’ was a well-discussed subject and appears in 19th century literature associated, as ever, with wealth and status. The Bedford and Perkin families already represented two historic purples – orchil and mauveine – and one can imagine their curiosity about the dye chemistry of this exotic third.
The demise of Yorkshire Chemicals The Bedford family’s original business changed names several times over its lifetime, but there was never a takeover. It went into receivership in around 2004 styled as Yorkshire Chemicals. The factory on Kirkstall Road, first occupied by the Bedfords in 1850, was abandoned. I visited the demolition site in 2008 and felt unexpectedly emotional. Rising smoke, derelict buildings and heaps of twisted metal seemed the only legacy of a proud family’s early endeavours.
The Phoenix But there is now an upside. The envelope of purple threads falling from hinges of an upturned rusty trunk has restored to us genuine samples of fabled Tyrian Purple. They are the first ‘modern’ dyeings known since the 15th century, which illustrate scientific connections of the time as well as the curiosity, inventiveness, and the achievements of a Leeds family. To use Zvi’s words once more, the samples are like a ‘Phoenician rising from the rubble’, serving as a testament to past working and family lives of the Bedfords – and so many like them. They are, quite simply, Tyrian Treasure.
If you are interested in knowing more about any aspect of this research please write to me via the blog contact page.
Thanks
Many thanks to colleague and friend Zvi Koren for his knowledge, his diligence and his support, and for his comments and additions to this pair of blogs. And for not forgetting to see the punny side of things.
Links and bibliography
Whitworth and Koren paper published in Ambix. Available from Taylor & Francis Online here.
Ancient shellfish used for purple dye vanishes from eastern MedGuardian article , December 5th 2016
John Edmonds’ book: Tyrian or Imperial Purple Dye: The Mystery of Imperial Purple Dye, Historic Dye series no. 7, Little Chalfont, 2000. Published by the author.
‘The shellfish that was one of the main sources of Tyrian purple – one of the most storied and valuable trading products in the ancient world – has disappeared from the eastern Mediterranean coast, amid warnings of an ongoing multi-species collapse blamed on global rises in sea temperatures.’
Historical cessation of shellfish dyeing The word ‘Tyrian’ derives from the city of Tyre on the north African coast, an area long associated with the Phoenicians and the shellfish dyeing industry. Tyrian Purple has already ‘disappeared’ once. Although an article linked from the Guardian states ‘snail-fueled purple persisted until chemists learned to make synthetic dyes,’ this is quite untrue.
It’s well known (in the dye world, at least) that shellfish dyeing largely ceased around the time of the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, after which the last dyers seemed to have disappeared. And in the eastern Mediterranean, purple dyeing ceased almost a millennium earlier as a result of the Arab conquest at the beginning of the 7th century. Analysis of historic textiles continues to confirm this. The biochemical method of shellfish dyeing was complex, relying on processes which were not understood chemically, and were probably only passed down within families. Basically, when the dyers ‘disappeared’ they took the method with them. Any contemporaneous written records of the dye process are incomplete or ambiguous, and cannot be used to make a vat.
Recovery of the dyeing method Shellfish pigment must first be made soluble, (as with any dye), and this only occurs in alkaline conditions of around pH 8 and higher. An additional requirement for dissolution of the pigment is that it must undergo ‘reduction’. In reduction the pigment’s molecules are converted to a slightly altered, but more soluble, molecular structure. This reduction process is achieved by removing oxygen from the pigment molecules, or by adding hydrogen to them. The vat turns a yellowy colour and fibre, threads or fabric are introduced. Colour will return to dyed items as they re-oxygenate on removal into the air. Readers who are indigo dyers will be familiar with this process.
The lost dyeing method Until the painstaking work in the 1990s of a retired engineer, the late John Edmonds, the exact method for creating a true shellfish purple reduction vat was lost. (Note that a reduction vat is entirely different from a direct application process performed by smearing the pre-pigment secretions). Edmonds used his knowledge of woad fermentation to recreate the ancient shellfish dye method. He knew, from the early 20th century work of Paul Friedländer, that shellfish dye was an indigoid and would need a reduction process to work. Edmonds used shellfish pigment extract for colour, and the rotting flesh of tinned cockles to start the required fermentation. In subsequent years, chemist Zvi Koren (more about Zvi later) and artist Inge Boesken-Kanold separately explored and perfected more authentic historical procedures for dyeing and painting using shellfish purple.
The purple threads The earliest known historically accurate shellfish dyeings since the 15th century were, until recently, the initial samples produced by Edmonds. But in 2008 I discovered a small envelope containing purple cotton threads in a nineteenth / early twentieth century archive. They were labelled in as having been dyed with ‘the bodies of shellfish’. Could they be genuine?
Zvi Koren In 2011 I wandered around an exhibition in the company of Zvi Koren. Zvi is an internationally known and respected authority on shellfish purple and his lively presentations on the subject make him a unique and entertaining conference speaker. He showed interest in my presentations on orchil research, and we discovered a mutual obsession for appallingly groanworthy puns.
I tentatively mentioned the envelope of shellfish dyed threads I had found. Zvi was clearly sceptical, as rightly befitted an analytical chemist, and was fairly certain the threads would be fake. He told me that only a scientific analysis, rather than visual inspection, would prove or disprove the claim. In his work, Zvi has analysed archaeological dyeings previously claimed by analysts to be shellfish dyed. Zvi’s precise analyses on these same artefacts showed that the ‘real purple’ was in fact an overdye produced from madder and indigo. He reminded me that prior to the work of Edmonds and others I’d have to go back nearly 600 years to find a true dyeing supported by chemical analysis. Paul Friedländer, who first identified the chemistry of shellfish purple in 1909, left no known samples. But Zvi’s a good sport and was clearly intrigued. He suggested I send a small sample of the threads to him for analysis at the Edelstein Center for the Analysis of Ancient Artifacts, in Israel. So I did.
The research Zvi has described his astonishment when his analysis found the dyeing to be genuine shellfish purple, and he suggested we write a paper together. The work we undertook mapped a possible scenario for how the dyeing came about, why, and at what date. It involved parallel investigations based on Zvi’s scientific analysis of the threads through photomicrographic images and instrumental chromatography. We also studied classical and biblical texts; 19th century literature; the history of science and scientific connections; and the remarkable Bedford family of Leeds. Zvi was extremely patient with my lack of chemical knowledge and I continue to be grateful for his clear explanations, and the general good humour which illuminated the science I frequently failed to grasp.
Significance of our research So is this a big deal? We definitely think so. It’s huge! Firstly, before the Tyrian Purple dyed threads I found, no other dyeings have been confirmed since around the 15th century. That’s of considerable interest to researchers. Additionally, their very existence superbly illustrates the activities, interests and connections of an industrious Leeds family in the late 19th and early 20th century. More of that in Part Two – which will follow in the next fortnight.
If you are interested in knowing more about any aspect of this research please contact me through the blog.
Thanks Many thanks to colleague and friend Zvi Koren for his knowledge, diligence and support, and for his comments and additions to this and the following blog. And not forgetting the puns.
Links and bibliography
Whitworth and Koren paper published in Ambix. Available from Taylor & Francis Online here.
Ancient shellfish used for purple dye vanishes from eastern MedGuardian article , December 5th 2016
John Edmonds’ book: Tyrian or Imperial Purple Dye: The Mystery of Imperial Purple Dye, Historic Dye series no. 7, Little Chalfont, 2000. Published by the author.
In early 2008 a small hand-labelled envelope fell from the hinges of a rusty trunk. In it were two knotted twists of purple-dyed threads.
A co-authored paper I’ve written with Professor Zvi Koren about these extraordinary threads was finally published yesterday, after several years’ research. Their existence offers a fascinating insight into the scientific connections and achievements of the people of nineteenth and twentieth century Leeds. You can read the abstract of the paper here
I will write more about it in a week or so. If you can’t wait to read the paper, there is a limited number of free downloads available. If you want one, contact me through this website or on Twitter, and I can send a link.
Until I am back with more, here are some thanks
To Ambix for publishing our work and for the exceptional quality of their editing
To Professor Koren who set out on this purple adventure with me after a chance conversation at La Rochelle during ISEND
To the owner of the Leeds archive, who allowed us to analyse the threads and the ink on the envelope
In my last blog A Purple Pursuit, I wrote about Browning’s Popularity, in which he referred to shellfish dye in a complex poem on inspiration, skill and genius. What I didn’t say, but others wisely pointed out, was the oddity of Browning referring to the dye as blue throughout the poem. Shellfish dye (from the ‘Tyrian shells’) is quite definitely purple and the colour, history and source of Imperial Purple were well known in Browning’s time. So, why blue?
Who has not heard how Tyrian shells
Enclosed the blue, that dye of dyes Whereof one drop worked miracles, And coloured like Astarte’s eyes Raw silk the merchant sells?
I scratched around many sources but failed to find a historical reference, or image, defining Astarte’s eyes as blue. Maybe I have missed something. But the Resident Poetry Advisor says that Browning was more than capable of implying non-existent references, or even inventing them. This seems most perverse, but Browning was a poet and that’s the kind of thing poets do.
Author’s indigo-dyed wool yarn, using increasing vat strength
Putting Browning firmly aside, I happened across a reference to William Gladstone’s Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age. Gladstone (1809 – 1908) was a British Liberal politician, three times Prime Minister, living at a time when politicians digested more than soundbites.
Gladstone studied the Iliad page by page, and as he did so he recorded the occurrence of words for colour. What he noticed was rather remarkable. He came across much mention of black, some white, less red, very little yellow, tiny amounts of green…but no blue. Was Homer ‘colourblind’, or unable to perceive colours? Were all Greeks the same, and their perception of colours (and the words to describe them) inherited, building over several generations? It left me wondering whether Astarte’s eyes could have been blue if there wasn’t yet a word for it, which was a head-spinning prospect.
Lazarus Geiger (1829-1870), a philosopher and philologist, took Gladstone’s research further and studied other ancient texts (for instance, Icelandic sagas, Vedic literature, and the original Hebrew version of the Bible) finding that none of them contained a word for blue. Geiger concluded that across ancient cultures, words for colour developed in an oddly consistent order. Black was always first, followed by white, red, yellow, green. Blue came next, eventually.
If this intrigues you, I suggest you listen to the Radiolab broadcast linked below. It makes more sense of it than I can here, but still left me wondering what exactly was being said. One of the programme’s guests is linguist Guy Deutscher. Listen, particularly, to the account of his little daughter trying to name the colour of the sky.
Author’s watercolour from sketchbook, 1995, recording the many dyed colours and fading shades of Buddhist monks’ robes in Sikkim and North India
My head can’t get itself round the concept that without an object to attach it to, a colour didn’t ‘exist’ and didn’t acquire a name. But that’s partly what is being said and it leads me to dyeing, and the need to name colours. I was dyeing felt last week, trying to achieve a good range of reds. I used different amounts of mordant, varied the percentages of weld, cochineal and madder and overdyed in different sequences. Small variations occurred in the reds and I sought to describe these to a client in words. Colours need adjectives like ‘bright’, ‘dark’, ‘dull’ etc but one inevitably ends up with a comparison to a universally understood coloured object, such as a poppy, a pillarbox, a brick, a patch of rust, a rose. We take this for granted but it’s very sophisticated, relying on a well-established set of understandings. We often need an object when we describe colour.
In her book Tintes y Tintoreros de América, Ana Roquero records the many changes that took place in Central and South American textile practice during the Spanish colonial period. One of the imports from Spain to the New World was an entire vocabulary for textiles. As well as words for machinery, tools, technical terms and cloth and fabric, this included words for colour. These colour words are still alive in parts of Latin America amongst mestizo weavers and dyers, when their use in today’s Spain is long lost.
In this case it’s the itinerant word that has preserved the colour, and I find that fascinating.
The Himba and the perception of colour Anthropology and the Human Condition: here
Books:
Roquero, Ana, 2006, Tintes y tintoreros de América: catálogo de materias primas y registro etnográfico de México, Centro América, Andes Centrales y Selva Amazónica, Ministerio de Cultura, España
Deutscher, Guy, 2010, Through the Language Glass, Heinemann
Comments
Please also check out the very interesting links offered in comments for this page. Many thanks to those who have written and included them
I’m just home after a fortnight in Scotland, which started at the annual DHA (Dyes in History and Archaeology) conference at the University of Glasgow. I tend to know people by their research – and that’s how they know me. Someone at DHA greeted me as Mrs Orchil: she could also have hailed a Dr Indigo, a Ms Madder and Professor Purple. It’s a friendly conference attended by many world experts in the fields of dyes and pigments, but it welcomes independent scholars like me as well as dyers and textile makers.
I wasn’t giving a paper this year so it was an entirely stress-free conference and I sat back and enjoyed it, or at least, all the bits I understood. There are always some technical papers at DHA concerning dye analysis; the ones packed with acronyms, graphs and molecular structures streak comet-like above my head. But factual gems can lurk amongst figures and statistics, so it’s worth not totally tuning out.
I took a small ‘suitcase’ exhibition with me about orchil and my research studies; most delegates came to look at it and talk to me, and as a result I learned new things about orchil from new perspectives.
The conference tour, after two packed days of papers, took us to Glengoyne Distillery for a fortifying wee dram preceding a tour of the plant, and thence to Stirling Castle where we visited the Tapestry Studios to see the final piece in the Unicorn Series nearing completion.
Sherry and tannins
The Glengoyne tour outlined the lengthy procedure for ageing whisky in casks. Casks are made from different types of oak, but have once held sherry (and some, if I remember correctly, Bourbon). The ageing whisky gradually absorbs colour and flavour from the sherry, and the tannins in the oak cask. The two images above illustrate ageing over thirty years in two different types of cask, with coloration intensifying every year. Evaporation is also evident, with around half the liquid being lost over the period. This lost alcohol is called ‘The Angels’ Share’.
Textile Tweets
Lobaria pulmonaria, or lungwort. This lichen is endangered and should not be used for dyeing
Workers’ cottages at Alexandria, Levenside, near old Turkey Red works
Explanation of ‘crotal’ from Dwelly’s Gaelic dictionary. Note the old name for lungwort ‘Stricta pulmonacea’
The Plaiden Ell at Dornoch. Two metal pegs set apart in the slab created the standard measurement for cloth
Ochrolechia tartarea, or the cudbear lichen, on the banks of Loch Ewe
Visit to Stirling Castle on DHA tour to see the last of the Unicorn tapestry series being woven
Explanation of ‘corcur’ from Dwelly’s Gaelic Dictionary
About the pictures
Above is a small selection of textile-related images from Scotland, most of which I tweeted during our trip. My obsession with dye lichens was rewarded by finding Ochrolechia tartarea alongside Loch Ewe, and Lobaria pulmonaria at Oban; Parmelia saxatilis and P. omphalodes were growing at many locations. Note: I was looking, not collecting. A Gaelic-English Dictionary in a hotel room confirmed that in Gaelic crotal refers to boiling water method lichens, but corcur to orchil lichens. If you want to know what orchil is, or read more about my research and views on dyeing with lichens, please visit this page.
Turkey Red
I spent a week with Deb Bamford (aka The Mulberry Dyer) learning how to dye Turkey Red at a Summer School in 2013. Read about it from this blog post forwards. In Scotland I found remnants of the Turkey Red industry buildings at Alexandria, on Levenside. There is a great website about the Turkey Red industry here. And read this wonderful book:
Colouring the Nation: The Turkey Red Printed Cotton Industry in Scotland c1840-1940 by Stana Nenadic and Sally Tuckett. Published by National Museums Scotland. From Amazon here.
Unicorn Series: Stirling Castle and West Dean Tapestries
For more on the Unicorn Series, go here for the Stirling Castle story, and here for West Dean’s version.
I’m back from a trip to the DHA (Dyes in History and Archaeology) Conference in La Rochelle. La Rochelle hosted the ISEND Conference in 2011 and so I was already familiar with the conference venue – a former fishmarket, now the exhibition and conference centre L’espace Encan.
This is a text-heavy post, so here’s a picture of La Rochelle to keep you going.
La Rochelle
A DHA conference annually attracts a wide variety of delegates from various disciplines. This year there were about 90 of us. Our number included chemists, conservators, artists, historians, researchers working with natural dyes, and students at various academic levels. At a DHA conference you can find yourself sitting next to someone from the British Museum, the Louvre or the Rijksmuseum, or an independent scholar who is simply passionate about parchment. It is a friendly assembly and all are welcome. Even if, as a non-chemist, you sometimes sit boggle-eyed through muscular technical papers full of graphs, analysis and molecular data, there is always something to be learned. I’m told that in early DHA days (this was the 32nd meeting!) there was a heavy bias towards these more scientific analytical papers but that nowadays the balance is more even, with a good mix of historic /scientific presentations. The selection committee who choose proposed papers must have an intensely hard job. Of the 24 or so papers accepted, several intrigued me but as none have yet been published this handful of comments remains general.
Purple Parchments
One paper involved the analysis of purple-dyed parchments. Very little work has been done to analyse the source of the purple colour in such codices and as far as I understand, there is currently no scientific evidence that shellfish dyes were used on the parchments. Non-invasive methods are normally used in their analysis, essential if precious manuscripts are to be studied without damage, and these methods can make it more difficult to identify dyestuffs. (With a parchment it isn’t so easy to remove a physical sample as it can be from a textile, where a loose fibre may be available).
There was a mention of dyeing parchment with orchil, and my ears twitched. Last year I was asked to dye some parchment samples with orchil – and dye they certainly did. But it was apparent that the temperatures and immersion involved in dyeing with orchil stiffened and damaged the parchment quality. I felt that this method wasn’t viable. Cold-dyeing seemed to yield a more sympathetic result but I have no idea to what extent the parchment quality was affected as I was only sent miniscule pieces of parchment to dye.
In the post-presentation question session it emerged that the term ‘dyeing’ means different things to different people. Some delegates considered ‘dyeing’ could be the layered painting on of dye and not dyeing by immersion, as working dyers think of it. Now, I should say that I tried painting orchil on too, but soon lost the will to live. It would be immensely protracted to paint on sufficient orchil to build up a good colour. That’s not to say it would be impossible, I just didn’t have the time or the resources to continue.
It will be interesting to learn more about this research. Maybe at Glasgow and DHA 33 next year? The dates are October 30th – 31st 2014.
Shearings and Clippings
Magnified images had been studied by the presenters which showed lumpy-looking particles in the red lake used in several medieval paintings. These indicated that they were reclaimed dyes from red-dyed wool, made into lakes for painting. The reclaiming of red lake pigment dyestuffs from clippings of dyed wool revealed that it made good economic sense to extract the dyes and to reuse them as painting materials. The dyeing of red, from whichever dye source, was expensive and thus waste material might be reprocessed. Again, I encountered problems with a mutual understanding. Initially I was confused by the words ‘shearings and clippings’ which were used by the presenters. I associate these words primarily with sheep-shearing! In the paper the words referred to waste dyed cloth after cutting woven material – or yarn.
The finding of these ‘reclaimed reds’ isn’t in itself new. A 1996 paper by Jo Kirby and Raymond White goes into great detail (find it here) and also lists a number of paintings in which red lake pigment dyestuffs have been found. Have a look. You may be amazed.
Networking
A couple of years ago, at DHA in Lisbon, I presented a paper about the trade in dye lichens from Angola through Lisbon. I have yet to publish this, for several complicated reasons. But I had an interesting conversation with another delegate which led me to sending a very small quantity of dye lichen and a recipe to the University of Évora. I heard no more, and forgot all about it. At La Rochelle my Portuguese colleague and her team presented a paper in which they had measured and tracked the breakdown of the depsides and depsidones (the dye precursors) in the orchil preparation process until purple chromophores formed. Chromophores are the part of the molecule responsible for colour. The chemistry was patiently explained to me in a coffee break and I now understand rather more about the process that before – although I wouldn’t like to take an exam just yet. DHA is great for this kind of contact and co-operation.
DHA=GFZ: A Gremlin Free Zone
If you read the previous post you will now that I was co-presenting a paper at DHA 32 and I wrote about the snaggly-toothed IT gremlins that lurk for unprepared presenters. I am pleased to report that my eminent co-author, Zvi Koren, had done an admirable job on gremlin-bashing (he’s ace at puns too) and everything loaded and presented totally as expected. So did everyone else’s, and we all benefited from calm, unobtrusive technical expertise delivered by Florent Glatard of ARRDH- CRITT Horticole. Our presentation was really well-received but I will not be writing about it until formal publication.
Thanks to DHA 32 organisers Anne de la Sayette and Dominique Cardon
Anne de la Sayette is the Directrice of ARRDHOR – CRITT Horticole, a ‘centre of research, innovation and technology transfer in horticulture’. Dominique Cardon is well known to most natural dyers as author of Natural Dyes: Sources, Tradition, Technology andScience. She is also Emerita Senior Researcher at CNRS, the French national centre of scientific research. CIHAM UMR 5648 CNRS (an institution, not a mathematical equation..) is one of the most important research centres in France for history, literature and archaeology of the Middle Ages. A new book by Dominique is about to be published but I don’t have the details: as soon as I do I will add them to a post.
Carnac
If you have got this far you deserve a pictorial prize. Using photos from DHA is tricky as I feel I should ask people’s permission before posting their images on a blog, so here is something rather special from the trip home.
Orchil lichen on stone at Carnac
One of the Carnac alignments
Viewpoint over Kerlescan alignments
I had never been to Carnac in Brittany until last week and I had no idea of the scale and breadth of the entire site. But it seemed most serendipitous to discover, on some stones of the alignments, a quantity of orchil lichen. Naturally, I did not touch it. But here are some images to reward stalwart readers. The orchil lichen is in the left hand image only.
I’m halfway between two presentations. The first was for the 6 Guilds of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers at Stratford where I spoke about orchil and how the trade in lichen dyestuff reached global proportions in the late nineteenth century. I thoroughly enjoyed my day at Stratford which included a talk by co-speaker Joan Baxter on the way the East Sutherland landscape influences her tapestries. Her recent collaborative work with dancers Between the Web and the Loom was interesting and she showed some video clips. But I can’t find any images on the internet to provide a link beyond this one (about the dance) and this one (about the tapestry she wove).
The second presentation is for the Dyes in History and Archaeology Conference (DHA) in La Rochelle, France. That’s later this week, is about something else entirely, and it’s going to be rather sensational.
Friday 4th October
11:45 Treasures from a Leeds Dye Chemist: A Century-Old “Tyrian Purple”?
Isabella Whitworth, Zvi C. Koren
If you want to know more about the sensational, come to La Rochelle. Otherwise, I’m sorry, you may have to wait a little. To download the whole DHA La Rochelle programme, visit this page and follow the links at the bottom.
For the moment, here is a taster in the form of some images. You will see two men, both chemists. There is a brother and a sister, and the son of a famous father.
Charles Samuel Bedford
Annie Perkin, née Bedford
Arthur G Perkin, second son of Sir William Henry Perkin
Lectures and technology
Those who are of ‘a certain age’ will remember that one of the worst things that could happen when giving a lecture was that you dropped all the slides just prior to going on stage then reloaded them upside down, in the wrong order and back to front.
Technology wasn’t satisfied with such piffling levels of stress. So it created Macs and PCs and system updates; memory sticks and SD cards and PowerPoint and embedding. It now arranges that hosts provide an ancient laptop unable to read anything post 1910; it organises missing leads, the wrong leads, deflating batteries, clickers that die, videos that won’t load and projectors which will have nothing to do with your laptop.
I have watched entirely respectable speakers show a presentation devoid of images because they haven’t checked their Mac presentation on a PC – or haven’t embedded their photos.
As a result I am obsessive about options. At the 6 Guilds event I took my own Mac laptop, own projector, requisite leads plus a boggling array of memory sticks and SD cards correctly formatted and checked out on a neighbour’s PC. In fact, the options proved unnecessary as the 6 Guilds laptop was up-to-date, the memory stick loaded, and two super-calm techies were in control.
For DHA, all presentations have to be sent in advance of the Conference which is good sense – in theory. You will be informed that something has arrived, but you still don’t know if the presentation shows exactly the way you designed it. So, when you get there, you need to check – and have some options up your sleeve. I didn’t do the DHA PowerPoint: my co-author did, for which I am deeply grateful. It can all be his fault.
Lichens in a Canterbury graveyard: from my 1960s sketchbook
In my last post I started to write about orchil, and how I became fascinated by its story through my researches on an eighteenth / nineteenth century Wood & Bedford / Yorkshire Chemicals archive.
To start at the beginning, orchil (pronounced or-kil) comes from lichens. It has been used for millennia to dye wool and silk a purple colour. There is some confusion over ancient recipes for purple. It isn’t always possible to decipher which recipes refer to lichen and which to shellfish dyes. Both dyestuffs produce a remarkably similar colour, were to be found in the same areas (e.g. the Mediterranean coast) and descriptions of lichen are often a little vague. For instance, dyestuff might be referred to as a plant, or a moss, or a seaweed.
There is evidence (Pliny, Theophrastus, Dioscorides) that orchil was used in conjunction with shellfish purple and it’s a ready assumption that this was done to defraud – which of course it may have been. The processing of orchil would have been significantly cheaper than for shellfish dye. But the combination was also undertaken to produce a legitimately cheaper alternative to pure shellfish-dyed cloth. Nevertheless, orchil and shellfish-dyed cloth seems regarded with disdain because of the great and unique reputation of shellfish purple, and orchil’s tendency to fade.
The beauty of fresh orchil on woollen yarn
Orchil dye is extremely beautiful in its first, fresh bloom of colour but it normally proceeds to fade fast. It is therefore interesting to read a 2012 paper (link below) in which Casselman and Terada demonstrated that a combination of orchil and shellfish dye may in certain circumstances, stabilise the orchil. They also reported that the use of orchil as a base dye would to some extent neutralise the intensely unpleasant odour of shellfish-dyed cloth. Those facts cast an entirely different light on the historic combination of orchil and shellfish dye.
It occurs to me that in more recent days, far from being ‘poor man’s purple’, orchil could have been considered a great luxury. If you could afford the rich glories of orchil-dyed silk, and these would be obvious to all by the colour, it might indicate one’s financial indifference to fading and the realities of a soon-spoiled garment.
Dye lichens
Not all lichens will dye, not all dye lichens will make orchil. Orchil-producing lichens (and there are innumerable species) contain precursors of the dye and to make this available the dyestuff must be crushed in ammonia or stale urine and water and then kept well-oxygenated. It undergoes a type of fermentation, and the purple colour develops over several weeks.
Orchil is very sensitive to changes in pH and by adjusting vat strength and acidity, a wide variety of colours can be achieved, ranging from browny reds to reds, pinks and purples.
Crotal / crottles
There are lichens that will dye rusty reds, browns and golds. They are often referred to as ‘crotal’, (a Gaelic word) or crottle, lichen. These require no fermentation and are normally boiled up together with fibre, yarn or cloth. They have been in traditional use in Scotland for centuries and the warm, earthy smell of crotal-dyed yarn is also a moth deterrent. But crotals are not orchils!
Mordants
Neither orchil nor crotal requires a mordant although some historical recipes recommend an alum mordant for orchil.
Lichen dyes on wool. Note the use of Evernia prunastri which can make a soft pink
Once you start an orchil vat it needs regular attention
Parmelia saxatilis: a crotal dye
Yarns showing colour affected by vat strength and pH
Parmelia omphalodes: a crotal dye
Orchil dyed silk and wool samples
The Wood & Bedford Orchil Story
I found a vast number of items in the archive which related to the nineteenth and twentieth century trade in orchil. A couple of them can be seen in the previous post. The records defined several sources of orchil lichen. Around 1830 these included Scandinavia, Sardinia, the Azores, Madeira, the Canary Islands and Cape Verde. Political changes and colonial interests affected trading in the later 1800s, as did the slave trade and, eventually, its abolition. A picture emerged of a voracious trade that reached an industrial and even global scale by the mid nineteenth century. There is a certain irony in the fact that stocks of what, in effect, is a non-renewable product were saved by the synthesis of mauveine by Perkin in 1856. The demand for lichen then dropped. Nevertheless, Wood & Bedford, later the Yorkshire Dyeware and Chemical Company, continued to buy and process orchil lichen well into the twentieth century. I understand that the last unused lichen stocks went to Johnsons of Hendon who presumably used lichen to make their indicator papers.
Lichen ethics
You will see that I have learned to make orchil and to dye samples for research purposes but I don’t use it in my studio work. You can read some of my thoughts on lichen use here. I am extremely grateful to all those who taught me about making orchil and how to dye with it.
Pronunciation
How do you pronounce lichens? I say it to rhyme with kitchens. Most people and academics (ok, sorry, academics are also people) say ‘likens’. The OED pronunciation makes it official: you can say it either way:
/ˈlʌɪk(ə)n, ˈlɪtʃ(ə)n/
The Guardian: Monday 5th December 2016.
Isabella Whitworth 