‘Crimson Lake’ sounds like a waterfront beauty spot at sunset.
But it’s not.
It’s the name of one of the tubes of colour paint used by artists.
‘Cadmium Yellow’ sounds like a metallic element that has developed a golden glow—but it’s just another tube of paint on the artist’s palette.
How did they end up with such dramatic sounding names?
I assume because they are being named by artists.
The name ‘Cadmium Yellow’, for example, is recorded from 1879 in a book called Modern Chromatics.
Recently I came across another of these odd artists’ names for colours that I had never encountered before— ‘Leather Lake.’
It does paint much of a picture in the mind’s eye, does it?
A lake made out of leather?
It is described as ‘a brownish orange that is deeper and slightly redder than leather, yellower and deeper than spice, and yellower and deeper than gold pheasant.’ (I’m not sure that helps me picture it, actually.)
And when you think that a painter is choosing use blue you could be wrong—they could be picking up a tube of ‘Ultramarine.’
This is described as being a complex combination of alumina, silica, soda and sulphur.
The process was made viable by a Frenchman, named Guimet, in 1828.
But the name of the colour had been around long before that— ‘Ultramarine’ (meaning ‘blue’) is recorded from 1686.
And if blue is your thing, there is also ‘Prussian Blue.’
This is a deep blue pigment consisting chiefly of ferric ferrocyanide—which means this is not just about art, it is also chemistry.
And it was by doing chemistry that back in 1650 someone invented a reddish brown and called it ‘Burnt Umber.’
There is clearly as much creativity in the names of the colours as there is on the canvas!
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BY THE WAY...
If you'd like to see my A-Z list of Aussie slang, you'll find it here in the Australian Geographic website -- A-Z list of Aussie slang. Here’s the link: The A-Z of Aussie slang - Australian Geographic
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