Colour matters: Exploring Chromatic Materialities in the Long Nineteenth Century (1798-1914)

Colour Matters provides a fresh investigation of colour in the long nineteenth century. Across fourteen richly researched essays, the book explores the materiality, politics, and sensory experience of colour-from synthetic dyes and chrome pigments to the role of colour in medicine, gender, empire, and identity. By weaving together art history, literature, anthropology, science, and conservation, the contributors reveal a dynamic world where chromatic experimentation shaped aesthetics, technology, and social life. Colour Matters offers an essential contribution to colour studies and the humanities' material turn, showing how pigment and perception illuminate both past and present.

This book will appeal to scholars and students of art history, literature, cultural studies, and the history of science in the long eighteenth-century, as well as curators, conservators, and readers fascinated by the histories of colour and material culture.

Stefano Evangelista is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Oxford University and Fellow of Trinity College. He works on nineteenth-century literature and is especially interested in Aestheticism and Decadence, the relationship between literary and visual cultures, and the reception of Japanese and European classical culture. His latest monograph is Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle: Citizens of Nowhere (OUP, 2021). His edited volumes include The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe (2010), A. C. Swinburne: Unofficial Laureate (2013, together with Catherine Maxwell), and Literature and Sculpture in the Fin de Siècle (2018, together with Luisa Calè). Together with Catherine Maxwell, he is general editor of the Jewelled Tortoise series published by the MHRA. He currently holds an Einstein Visiting Fellowship (2023-26) at the Humboldt University, Berlin, where he is also a fellow of the Centre for British Studies.

Charlotte Ribeyrol is Professor of 19th-century British Literature at Sorbonne Université in Paris and honorary curator at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Her main field of research is Victorian Hellenism and the reception of the colours of the past in 19th-century painting and literature. Her first monograph entitled "Etrangeté, passion, couleur", L'hellénisme de Swinburne, Pater et Symonds came out in 2013. In 2014-2016 she co-directed a major interdisciplinary project on chromatic materiality with chemists and archeologists, which led to the publication of a collection of essays entitled The Colours of the Past in Victorian England (Peterlang, Oxford, 2016). Following her Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellowship at Trinity College, Oxford (2016-2018), she was awarded a major ERC grant for her project CHROMOTOPE (2019-2025) which explores the 19th-century 'chromatic turn'. As part of this research programme she co-curated with Matthew Winterbottom the exhibition Colour Revolution, Victorian Art, Fashion and Design at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (21 September 2023-18 February 2024). She is also the author of William Burges's Great Bookcase and the Victorian Colour Revolution (Yale University Press) which came out in June 2023.

Matthew Winterbottom is Curator of Western Art Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He has over 35 years' experience working with and researching European decorative arts. His research interests cover a wide range of European decorative arts from the late medieval to the early twentieth centuries. He has extensive knowledge of metalwork, furniture, ceramics, glass and textiles and sculpture. He is committed to exploring ways of making this material more engaging and accessible to museum visitors. Most recently, Matthew co-curated the exhibition Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and Design at the Ashmolean Museum.