Blue

Making Blue

There are seemingly as many ways to make blue as there are shades of blue. Some blues in the museum’s collections use naturally colored materials, such as stones that were mined, cut, and polished before being used, or ground to make pigments. Others are made through combinations of materials and production techniques.

Azurite, a blue mineral containing copper, is unusual because it becomes paler in color the more finely it is ground. Chinese painters used this to their advantage when painting ancestor portraits, rendering a lovely gradation of blues in the decoration of dragon robes, all made with azurite ground to finer and finer particles.

Copper-based blues are some of the first man-made colorants. In ancient Egypt, blue pigments were originally made from lapis lazuli, which had to be imported from Afghanistan and was therefore expensive, or cobalt or azurite, which were unstable. In the predynastic period (ca. 3250 BCE), Egyptians began to produce so-called Egyptian blue, which is considered the one of the earliest man-made pigments. It is made by combining quartz with calcium and copper sources and heating the mixture for an extended period.

Cobalt is another element that has been used to make blue, but it is believed it was first used to color glass and enamel inlay in Egypt and throughout the Middle East. Cobalt pigments that have been dissolved in a clear glaze give blue-on-white ware, discussed in the following section, its distinctive blue shades. Cobalt glass can also be ground to use as a painting pigment called smalt.   

A few blue colors come from plants. Dayflower flowers can be extracted to make a blue dye that has been used in Japanese woodblock prints. A much more common blue dye is indigo, which is made when the leafy green parts of certain plants are fermented. Indigo can be used as both a paint pigment and a textile dye. The practice of farming indigo in Japan dates to around the seventh century, when the plant was first imported from China. Soon after, indigo became a pigment in painting and papermaking, resulting in paper of the highest quality whose dark blue color remains vibrant for virtually a thousand years. Indigo-dyed paper was rare and expensive, and it gained popularity for aristocratic commissions of sutras, texts that capture the teachings of the Buddha or commentary on those teachings. The dark blue worked particularly well with scriptures inscribed in gold, a color with numinous associations. In later centuries and in the modern era, indigo became more widely available when it was used as a dye in textile making for everything from kimono to blue jeans. 

Blue and White

The aesthetic for blue-on-white ceramics originated in ninth-century Iraq, where local potters used cobalt to decorate earthenware that had been covered with white slip. Chinese potters later applied their advanced ceramic technology and artistic vision to create a new technique and new styles of blue-and-white porcelain, which became a globally coveted commodity.

Trade and cultural interactions “color” the history of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, only China could produce these dazzling works because of their access to kaolin clay. These wares found a strong market in the Islamic world. To create the gemlike blue designs, potters applied the metallic pigment cobalt oxide beneath a colorless glaze. At the time, most cobalt was imported to China from West Asia.

Go in depth with one of these blue-and-white Chinese porcelain works with curator Jan Stuart:

Blue-and-white ceramics captured Western imaginations as well. Blue-and-white Delft ware, developed in the Netherlands in the 1600s, was an attempt to recreate the distinctive decorative motif of the porcelain that was such a popular and valuable import from China. When shipping magnate Frederick Leyland (1831–1892) hired the gifted architect Thomas Jeckyll (1827–1881) to redesign the dining room in his new home—today known as the Peacock Room—Jeckyll incorporated gilded antique leather wall hangings and latticework shelving to showcase Leyland’s prized collection of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. Jeckyll and Leyland conceived of the room as an Orientalist pastiche of Western conventions and Eastern forms. The long windows on the east side overlooked a private park, and the décor was meant to evoke a European notion of a Chinese garden pavilion. When Leyland ultimately hired James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) to repaint the room, Whistler was inspired by the delicate patterns and vivid colors of the Chinese porcelain and the blue-and-gold motif of a peacock feather. He covered the entire room—including the ceiling and antique leather wall panels—in a deep blue green with gold detailing.

Associations of Blue

Hsbd, “blue” in ancient Egypt, was a rare and expensive color. Its value, rarity, and close connections with the colors of the sky and the water gave it a particular significance in Egyptian culture. Gods were painted in blue, and the pharaoh wore blue in his crown because he was god on earth. He was represented in blue after death because he became deified.

Blue’s symbolic association with water is a widespread and enduring one. Water is essential to human life, the cultivation of crops, and the development of civilizations. When used in artistic representations of water, blue therefore often conjures concepts of life, fertility, and rebirth.

Among the most iconic depictions of water in the museum’s collections are Katsushika Hokusai’s (1760–1849) depictions of crashing waves. Dive into one of these works with curator Frank Feltens:

The color blue does not always carry positive connotations. Today, having “the blues” connotes sadness and melancholy. In Japanese kabuki theater, blue is used as stage makeup to depict the dead and dying.

Perception of color is inherently subjective. Dividing lines between colors are ambiguous and shift depending on cultural context. The distinctions between the colors of blue and green, for instance, were historically less pronounced in China and Japan than in the West. The blue-and-green style of painting, which originated in the late seventh century among artists at the Tang dynasty (618–907) imperial court in China, made seamless use of this color continuum and was associated with luxury and grandeur.