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Coquelicot is a shade of red. The term was originally a French vernacular name for the wild corn poppy, Papaver rhoeas, which is distinguished by its bright red color, and orange tint. It eventually passed into English usage as the name of a color based upon that of the flower. The first recorded use of this usage was in the year 1795.

Claude Monet painted Les Coquelicots or Poppies Blooming in 1873.

Color coordinates

Hex triplet #FF3800

RGB (r, g, b) (255, 56, 0)

CMYK (c, m, y, k) (0, 78, 100, 0)

HSV (h, s, v) (13°, 100%, 100%)

Poppy flower (Papaver rhoeas)

Ponceau is a color name that indicates the dark red hue of the poppy flower, derived in the seventeenth century from poncel (twelfth century) or culvert, another name of the poppy in old French. The term culvert in its dark red sense, was noted at the end of the seventeenth century by Furetière, which illustrates the name of color by a reference to fashion: “The most expensive ribbon is the ribbon culvert, dyed in color of fire . “.

Red poppy can be considered a newer synonym, less literary. Both are used mainly in the context of fashion and decoration. Coquelicot coexists with Ponceau in 1787 in the order book of Mme Eloffe, seamstress. The two terms are never in the same note, and we can not know if they are two names for the same color, or two different colors. Sixty years later, Chevreul notes that M. Guignon’s silk poppy is red-orange and not red.

Ponceau is the commercial name of several azo dyes, patented in 1878 by Meister, Lucius and Brüning. At the same time, another dye, or perhaps the same, by another firm, is proposed under the name of poppy. These dyes are followed by a certain amount of others suitable for various uses (RC). These dyes, and some time later, azo pigments, have replaced, much cheaper, the cochineal red for textile dyeing (PRV).

The shade of the red culvert is that of cochineal scarlet; however, culverts can be distinguished in several shades, including that of the flower. The cochineal-colored culvert silk color came to life with a sharp change to acidulated water. In the nineteenth century, Chevreul undertook to identify the colors between them and with respect to the lines of Fraunhofer.

Canson offers a mid-tone 506 poppy paper that pulls more on orange than its bright red 50511. At Letraset the 093 poppy is carmine.