HMS Victory - Pretty in Pink?

It was reported in the weekend papers that HMS Victory, Admiral Lord Nelson’s flagship, has had a historically accurate repaint and is now pink, which was the colour it was at the time of the Battle of Trafalgar. Previously the ship had been a mustard colour, which I thought was the standard Royal Navy paint colour for 18^th century warships, but apparently not. When Victory was first built in 1765 it was plain varnished timber but later in the century, captains were permitted to paint their ships whatever colour they chose.

Whilst richer captains chose more ornate and expensive colours, Thomas Hardy, captain of the Victory, could not afford to customise his ship and so opted for one of the free pigments that the Royal Navy offered.  These would typically have included black, yellow ochre and red ochre. It was only after Trafalgar that Nelson’s famous yellow and black checkerboard design became standard. Earlier ships also had lots of decoration; The Royal George, for example, had a bust of King George II on its stern, and figures of Britannia, Neptune, Ceres, Mercury and Hercules. It also had rich interior decoration with mother of pearl handles on the cabin doors.

It was whilst conservationists were working on restoring Victory that they examined all the layers of paint on the ship – 72 – and discovered it’s original pink hue. Some have called the colour smoked trout, others pale terracotta. Ships like the Hermione, pictured right, were bright blue. Personally I see nothing wrong in pink. It was good enough for Nelson. What do you think?

Colours

I've been researching pigments used by artists in the C18th. The glorious colour in the picture is called smalt. I'd never heard of it before. Originally developed in Saxony in the 1600s, it was an improved version of a colour called Blue Frit used by the ancient Egyptians both for painting and as a glaze. That had used copper as a colourant, whereas smalt mixed cobalt ore heated with silica (sand) to produce saffre, or zaffre. The zaffre was then sold to glass makers who mixed it with potash, put the blend into a furnace for twelve hours and stirred it every so often. Once it had dissolved and formed glass it was plunged into cold water to make it brittle, then ground, sieved, washed, and graded according to colour. The best and most expensive was a deep violet-blue, the cheapest a pale sky-blue.

Important in European oil painting during the 1500 and 1600s, smalt was the only pigment made from cobalt for 200 years. The miners digging out the ore believed there were spirits in the mines which they called "Kobalds". It was these spirits that gave cobalt its name.

The most expensive blue pigment ever created was the original Ultramarine. This was extracted from the stone lapis lazuli and was even more expensive than gold. In the Middle Ages the only source of lapis lazuli, which means simply 'blue stone', was Badakshan, now part of Afghanistan.

Prussian blue was discovered purely by accident in 1704/5. Heinrich Diesbach was working in his laboratory in Berlin trying to make a cochineal red lake. (Cochineal was originally obtained by grinding up the bodies of cochineal lice!) He mixed the necessary ingredients of iron sulphate and potash, but instead of the strong red he expected, the result was a very pale one. When he tried to concentrate it he got purple then a deep blue. Because the potash he'd used was contaminated with animal oil, (he'd bought it cheap to save money) Diesbach had managed to invent the world's first synthetic blue pigment.

Next time - Orpiment and massicote!

Jane Jackson.