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A fusty clump of so-called “Indian Yellow”, clenched roughly into a ping-pong-ball sized sphere, just the way Turner himself would have acquired the colour, is among the many hues to feature in an intriguing new book from Atelier Éditions, An Atlas of Rare & Familiar Colour, devoted to the vast cache of colours held by Harvard University in its extraordinary Forbes Pigment Collection. Harvard’s laboratory, a rich resource for scholars seeking to trace the DNA of every hue out of which the vibrancy of world culture has been constructed, houses nearly 4,000 unique specimens.

Waste of talent

The unique laboratory is the legacy of Edward Waldo Forbes (1879-1969), former director of the university’s Fogg Art Museum. A keen collector and art historian, Forbes embarked on a global search for far-flung pigments in order to better appreciate the raw materials that make up the masterpieces we see and to guard against the counterfeit allure of forgery. The cornerstone of the Forbes Pigment Collection is the countless phials filled and labelled by Forbes himself. Taken together, the assembled samples of subtle shades, which filtered their way into the studios of art history’s greatest geniuses, comprise a forensic workshop in which the mystery of the rainbow is endlessly unwoven.