Colour, the painter Patrick Heron once proclaimed, is a continent that artists have yet to explore. The mammoth two-volume The Book of Colour Concepts (Taschen, £150) catalogues numerous attempts to map this mysterious chromatic domain, from the late 17th century to the mid 20th. It quickly becomes clear that this area is infinitely vast. One only has to glance at the plates of the ‘Viennese Colour Cabinet’ (1794) – a whole column of blue-greens – to realise that.
The effect of these technical diagrams is beautiful in the manner of abstract art. The illustrations from Goethe’s On Colour Theory (1810-12) could easily have been produced at the Bauhaus, while the delicate colour ‘blots’ that accompanied the Georgian flower painter Mary Gartside’s ‘Essay on Light and Shade’ (1810) look positively Abstract Expressionist.
Almost 70 years ago, Niklaus Pevsner called his book The Englishness of English Art a contribution to ‘the geography of art’ (rather than its history). The same could be said of Bendor Grosvenor’s The Invention of British Art (Elliott & Thompson, £40). This is difficult terrain. National schools and characters are out of intellectual fashion. But Grosvenor makes an eloquent and entertaining case that ‘a distinctly British form of art’ was ‘invented’ by the landscape painters of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The process, he notes wryly, took ‘a few thousand years’.
Accordingly, Grosvenor begins his account with a horse’s head engraved on a piece of bone around 13,000 years ago, found in a Derbyshire cave (into which he suggests George Stubbs might have peeked). En route, he discusses many works by artists of dubious Britishness, including Holbein and Van Dyck, and attributes the ‘Wilton Diptych’ – sometimes seen as the greatest painting produced in late medieval England – to André Beauneveu, a Netherlandish artist working in France.
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