5 of the best uses of colour in art and culture
Published on 17 September 2024
We asked contributors to the RA Magazine about their favourite uses of colour in art and culture. Here's what they told us.
1. William John Leech’s parasol
"The viridian parasol in The Sunshade involves me completely. In the poet Andrew Marvell’s words:
‘Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade’"
Claire-Louise Bennet is a writer and critic.
2. A house fit for a postmodern Pharaoh
"Sphinx Hill, near Wallingford, is a unique, now Grade II-listed, polychromatic house built in 1999 for two Egyptologists by the architect John Outram."
Hugh Pearman is an architectural writer.
3. Singer Sargent's blood red gown
"I have always admired his suggestive use of bright scarlet for the sweeping robe of a Parisian society gynaecologist in his 1881 painting Dr Pozzi at Home – brilliant deployment of the most vibrant and elemental of colours."
Anne Chisholm is a biographer and critic.
4. A Florentine Fresco
"Forget the sizzle and explosion of primary colours. For me the delicate, dreamy pastels in Jacopo Pontormo’s Annunciation in the church of Santa Felicita in Florence, endow both the Virgin Mary and the archangel with a levitating lightness which simply takes my breath away."
Sarah Dunant is a novelist and journalist.
5. A simple still life
"I have always loved the bloated mauve of the fig painted by Georgia O’Keeffe in 1923."
Izabella Scott is a writer and critic.
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