I am in a class on gothic literature and have noticed the particular emphasis given to
certain colors in certain texts.
However, outside of occcuring in nature weren’t colors that were combinatorial, such as pink, orange, and other " secondary" colors unavailble until the early 20th century?
Is there a place I can go to tlook this up? I tried various string combinations on google and checked the archives.
People have been mixing colors using natural dyes and other substances since the dawn of history. Just look at some of the paintings of the Renaissance (sp?) artists if you think secondary colors have only been available this century.
The O.P. is perfectly correct. Amazing as it may seem today, the colour orange did not exist until 1849. The method of mixing red and yellow was invented by Elijah Smallwood, and put on public display for the first time in the Great Exhibition of 1851 to the amazement of the British public. Smallwood’s invention was generally considered the most popular exhibit in the show, and earned him a vast fortune - over twenty million pounds.
So what colour were oranges before orange was “invented”?
Nonsense! Orange may be a combination of red and yellow pigments, but it also occurs naturally centuries ago. Have a look at carrots, for example. More likely substances used would have been madder, blood root and sunflower. These were being used at least as far back as the 1500s.
What didn’t exist (for the most part) were colors of the strong and shocking variety. Back then, things were, for the most part, what we might call washed-out or faded today.
Cecil Adams on Could early man only see three colors? and What came first, orange or oranges?.
The latter column spawned a long thread in the Comments on Cecil’s Columns forum about what orange was called before it was called orange: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=244189
Until 1849 people were so hungry they did not let them ripen before eating them. Only in 1849 was the color orange discovered when a very rich man Orange O’Toole decided to let an orange ripen before eating it and, to his amazement, discovered the fruit turned to a hue never seen by man before. That is why the fruit was named after him. 
All right, then, what did they call that color in the rainbow or in a sunset that was reddish-yellow?
Th O.P. wrote “However, outside of occcuring in nature weren’t colors that were combinatorial, such as pink, orange, and other " secondary” colors unavailble until the early 20th century?"
He has got it exactly right. Sure, natural orange existed, in rainbows and carrots, its just that nobody could produce anything artificially orange. Nobody in the whole of human history had thought of combining colours until Smallwood invented the “mixing two colours” process. The concept was totally revolutionary. Forget the steam engine or the spinning jenny, the colour orange was the real cornerstone of the industrial revolution. Why, without orange, there would never have been any pink, let alone turquoise.
Wait until you see a really clear rainbow, and then look closely (as I did a week ago, while another thread discussing this was busy on this board). There’s no definite band, just a smudge from red to yellow. ‘Reddish-yellow’ seems to sum it up pretty well, even if that’s not how the ancients refered to it.
Smallwood tragically lost his life in an attempt to develop a shade of purplish-green in 1863.
So all those paintings hanging in museums. all those frescoes, they are all modern fakes? Or maybe they were painted in black and white and then colored when “color painting” was invented?
Since we’re talking about the English language, it seems worthwhile mentioning that there are actually very few naturally-occurring orange objects native to Britain (apart from sunsets). There is only one native orange-coloured flower - and the name?.. Scarlet Pimpernel - there are a few orange-coloured berries, most of which are poisonous or inedible. Oranges are native to Asia, so they weren’t around when the English language was in its infancy.
The colour pink is named after a type of Dianthus (carnation flowers) that are often pink, but they in turn are so named because the edges of the petals are ‘pinked’, which means frilled or frayed. Until the adoption of ‘pink’ as a colour, people used to say ‘white flecked with red’ or ‘cream flushed with scarlet’ (there are examples of this in various old herbals).
Like any other color, orange has always existed, even before we had a name for it. There are many blends, tints, shades and various saturations of colors that we still don’t have names for (we’d need an infininte number of names). That doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
For the record, pink is not a secondary color, in that it isn’t produced by combining two primary colors. Pink is a tint of red – produced by adding white to red.
The OP may find Pigments through the Ages helpful.
As far as mixing colors go, my understanding (and I claim no expertise at all in this area) is it wasn’t that, say, pink or orange didn’t exist, but that mixing pigments to achieve new colors was a dodgy process, and you can’t always get the exact shade you want. It does seem to me, though, that the palettes of paintings made before and after the Industrial Revolution are different, but that may be due more to stylistic shifts than to the availability of certain pigments.
The use of pigments derived from salts of lead, chrome,copper and others is relatively recent. Ancient painters used primerily clay as the source of pigments. This is why the works of this painters use mainly black, white, red, yellow, green and several shades of brown. There is no blue clay, so it is very rare to see blues in Renaissance paintings. One possible source of blue pigment was lapis lazuli, a precious stone, too expensive to use, except in paintings destined to the nobility.
Of course, there are blue or orange vegetal pigments, but these deteriorate with time, mainly by the action of light, and cannot be used in a painting destined to last.
Holy crap do you guys ever rock.
I am checking the links in Cecils thread and pigments through the ages, my specific question stemmed from " Young Goodman Brown" in which it is noted a girl has pink ribbons, using that the idea that pink was not available, I sought to prove that this entire story was a dream, without getting bogged down into that argument, I simply wished to know if the color pink was availble.
From what people have written it could be in that it’s a simple combination of Red and White. I guess further research is needed and that’s what I’ll do but thanks to all who linked and responded, and thanks to pete morris for clarifying my statements so that I did not have to.
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Specifically in America. At the time of the mid 1800’s
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As what? Dye for fabric? Paint for houses?
The dye question can be answered by leaving the fabric in red dye for less time, or diluting the dye. Water = “white” here.
For paint, in that era, you didn’t just pop over to Home Depot to pick up a gallon of Satin Flat Peppermint Patty Pink Latex Enamel. You’d have a container of white paint, and tubes/cans of pigment. Much like the big turret things at paint stores today, but done by hand. A dab of red in the white, a good stir, and you’ve got pink. Even today, the paint stores don’t have pink pigment. All of those hundreds of colors come from roughly ten basic pigments mixed into white.
Artists did the same thing, but on a rather smaller scale on their mixing palette.
Can anyone suggest where I can read about Elijah Smallwood, his “invention” of orange, and the sensation it supposedly created at The Great Exhibition of 1851?
A Google seach using “Elijah Smallwood” and “orange” provided three hits, all of them geneological data referring to an Orange County.
Searches using “Smallwood” with “Great Exhibition of 1851” and “Great Exhibition of 1851” with “orange” were similarly unsuccessful.
At first I thought peter morris might be thinking of the color mauve. The invention of mauve dye is considered to be one of the groundbreaking events in industrial chemisty. But that was done by William Perkin in 1856.