In a nod to the accelerating vogue of Impressionist technique then gaining ground in France, Sargent worked out-of-doors en plein air but struggled to capture convincingly the crepuscular half-light of dusk as it gloamed against the lit lanterns’ incandescent. Mesmerised in 1885 by the sight of little girls lighting lanterns at twilight in an English garden on a late summer boating holiday, Sargent was determined to rekindle the fleeting magic of the moment with the help of a friend’s two young daughters as his models. It rather takes the shine off such an enchanting portrait to think that its naive subject, who became a symbol of purity, could be marinating in a puddle of cow pee.Īn unsettling spectre of Indian Yellow troubles too the innocence of John Singer Sargent’s apotheosis of childhood, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885-86), painted a century after Reynolds’ beatific portrait. Reynolds is thought to have acquired a sample of the pigment from the little-known Scottish artist Charles Smith, who had recently returned from India. The girl’s engaging glow and her immaculate white dress, vivified by an under-stratum of Indian Yellow, rely for their ironic allure on a rumoured unkindness unfolding half a world away in a Bengalese mango grove. Seemingly sculpted from the squeeze of desiccated urine, the jaundiced canvases of Turner (which one critic alleged suffered from 'yellow fever') are the unlikely forebear of American artist Andres Serrano’s provocative 1987 Cibachrome print, Immersion (Piss Christ), controversially capturing a crucifix submerged in a beaker of the photographer’s own urine. Turner’s painting portends, after all, a spiritual sloughing off of the paltriness of this world, a release: a long and lustrous letting go. But is there a more appropriate aura for a work that envisions the final throes of a sullied world to exude than one extracted from bodily excretions? Some admirers of Turner’s work may balk at a reading that douses its interpretation unnecessarily in excreta. Yet Turner’s apocalyptic painting, Angel Standing in the Sun – a masterclass in conjugations of yellow and seemingly drenched in the egregious pigment – appears to do precisely that.
It is something else entirely to soak biblical luminaries, such Adam, Eve, and the Archangel Michael – whose flaming sword heralds the arrival of the Day of Judgement – in a humid atmosphere of urine. To see the stars, glimpsed in the wee hours, as it were, tinged with excretion is one thing. No longer merely a metaphor for inner unrest, Van Gogh’s whorling stars, painted a month after the artist admitted himself to the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in May 1889, become gritty and real in their aching yellow glister. When seen in such unsettling light, masterpieces such as Turner’s The Angel Standing in the Sun (1846) and Van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889) take on a different sheen, appearing to be steeped in the enduring residue of bygone brutality. Believed to be filtered, dried, and clenched into pigment clumps called ‘piuri’ that were then sold to artists, the chalky spheres were crumbled onto the palettes of every artist from Turner to Van Gogh, who in turn smeared their lurid lemony luminescence across the surfaces of their iconic canvases and into cultural consciousness.Īllegedly born of abuse, surviving vestiges of so-called 'Indian Yellow' glisten with an obscene poignancy from the walls of museums all around the world. The waste of wasting beasts that had been force-fed nothing other than mango leaves in the Bengalese city of Monghyr was reputedly caught in terracotta pots and clarified to a syrup over an open flame. The colour that means both life and death The disgusting origins of the colour purple If legend is to be believed, some of the most memorable instances of yellow in art history – from the transcendent shimmers of JMW Turner’s lucent landscapes to the troubled music of Vincent van Gogh’s whorling constellations – are caked in cruelty, said to be fashioned from the sickly urine of malnourished cows.