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Primary Sources
A Natural History of the Artist’s Palette
By Philip Ball
July 23, 2020

For all its transcendental appeals, art has always been inextricably grounded in the material realities of its production, an entwinement most evident in the intriguing history of artists’ colours. Focusing in on painting’s primary trio of red, yellow, and blue, Philip Ball explores the science and stories behind the pigments, from the red ochre of Lascaux to Yves Klein’s blue.

Having taken many centuries to figure out what the primary colours are, we are now in the process of abandoning them. The very notion of primaries can now spark furious arguments among colour specialists. Some point out that the trio many of us learnt at school — red, yellow and blue — applies only to mixing pigments; mix light, as in the pixels of television screens, and you need different primaries (roughly, red, blue, green). But if you print with inks, you use another “primary” system: yellow, cyan and magenta. And in the rainbow spectrum of visible light, there’s no hierarchy at all: no reason to promote yellow light above the slightly longer-wavelength orange.
What’s more, even though painters learn how to mix colours — blue and yellow to give a green, say — they quickly learn that the results can be disappointingly muddy compared to a “pure” pigment with the intended colour: it’s especially hard to get a rich purple from red and blue. As a result, artists often think of colour not so much as an abstract property but in terms of the substance that makes it: madder red, ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow. To truly understand what colour means to the artist, we need to think of its materiality. Or to put it another way, what the artist’s palette is capable of producing has always depended on the materials at his or her disposal, and the ingenuity that went into procuring them.
Red
That ingenuity has never been lacking. During the last Ice Age life was nasty, brutish and short, yet humans still found time for art. Tools dated to around one hundred thousand years ago have been found in Blombos Cave on the coast of South Africa: grindstones and hammer-stones for crushing a natural red ochre pigment, and abalone shells for mixing the powder with animal fat and urine to make a paint that would be used to decorate bodies, animal skins, and perhaps cave walls. The paintings made 15-35 millennia ago at Chauvet, Lascaux and Altamira attest to the genuine artistry that early humans achieved using the colours readily to hand: black charcoal, white chalk and ground bone, and the earthy reds and yellows of ochre, a mineral form of iron oxide.1
But the classic red pigments don’t rely on iron minerals, the hue of which is not the glorious red of a sunset or of blood, but of the earth. For many centuries, the primary red of the palette came from compounds of two other metals: lead and mercury. The pigment known as “red lead” was made by first corroding lead with vinegar fumes, turning the surface white, and then heating that material in air. It was used in ancient China and Egypt, Greece and Rome.
For the Roman author Pliny, any bright red was called minium — but by the Middle Ages that Latin term was more or less synonymous with red lead, which was used extensively in manuscript illumination. From the verb miniare (to paint in minium) we get the term “miniature”: nothing to do, then, with the Latin minimus, “smallest”. The association today with a diminutive scale comes simply from the constraints of fitting a miniature on the manuscript page.
Pliny’s best minium was a different red pigment, called cinnabar. This was a natural mineral: chemically, mercury sulfide. It was mined in the ancient world, partly for use as a red colourant but also because the liquid metal mercury could easily be extracted from it by heating. Mercury was thought to have almost miraculous properties: ancient Chinese alchemists in particular used it in medicines.
By the Middle Ages, alchemists and craftspeople knew how to make mercury sulfide artificially by combining liquid mercury and yellow, pungent sulfur (available in mineral form) in a sealed vessel and heating them. This process, which was described in the craftsman’s manual De diversis artibus (ca. 1122) by the German monk Theophilus, can give a finer-quality pigment than natural cinnabar. It was a procedure of great interest to alchemists too, as the Arabic scholars of the eighth and ninth centuries had claimed that mercury and sulfur were the basic ingredients of all metals — so that combining them might be a route to making gold. Theophilus had no such esoteric goal in mind; he just wanted a good red paint.
This “artificial cinnabar” became known by the name vermilion. The etymology is curious, and shows the confusing and treacherous flux of colour terms in an age when the hue of a substance seemed more significant than vague, pre-scientific notions of what its chemical identity was. It stems from the Latin vermiculum (“little worm”), since a bright red was once extracted from a species of crushed insect: not a paint pigment but a translucent dye of scarlet colour, arising from an organic (carbon-based) substance that the insects produce.
Such dyes were also known as kermes (from the Sanskrit kirmidja: “derived from a worm”), the etymological root of crimson. Because the insects that made it could be found on Mediterranean trees as clusters encrusted in a resin and resembling berries, the dyes might also be called granum, meaning grain. From this comes the term ingrained, implying a cloth dyed in grain: the dye was tenacious and did not wash out easily. “‘Tis in grain sir, ‘twill endure wind or weather”, Olivia assures Viola of a painting in Twelfth Night.2
Red dyes were associated with majesty, opulence, status and importance: they were the colours used for cardinals’ robes. Painters needed fine reds to render on board and canvas these dignitaries whose portraits they were increasingly commissioned to paint: Raphael’s Pope Julius II (1511-12) derives its aura of power partly from the brilliance of its reds.
Red lead and vermilion served well enough in the Middle Ages, but the increased demand for verisimilitude in the Renaissance meant that the orangeish hue of red lead or vermilion wasn’t adequate for depicting the purplish magnificence of these dyes on canvas. One alternative was to turn the dyes themselves into a paint pigment, by fixing their colourant molecules onto solid, colourless particles that could be dried and mixed with oils. This process involved some challenging chemistry, but even the ancient Egyptians knew how to do it. The basic idea is to precipitate a fine-grained white solid within a solution of the dye: the dye sticks to the particles, which dry to make a dark red powder. In the Middle Ages this process used the mineral alum, which can be converted to insoluble white aluminium hydroxide. The pigment made this way was called a lake, after the word (lac or lack) for a red resin exuded by insects indigenous to India and southeast Asia.
One of the best red lakes of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance was made from the dye extracted from the root of the madder plant. As lake manufacture was perfected, artists such as Titian and Tintoretto began to use these pigments mixed with oils, giving a slightly translucent paint that they would apply in many layers for a deep wine-red tint or wash over a blue to make purple.
Aside from the creation of red lakes, rather little about the painter’s reds changed from the Middle Ages until modern times. The Impressionists in the late nineteenth century made avid use of the new yellows, oranges, greens, purples, and blues that advances in chemistry had given them, yet their reds were not really any different to those of Raphael and Titian.
It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that a vibrant and reliable new red entered the repertoire. The discovery of the metal cadmium in 1817 immediately produced new yellow and orange pigments, but a deep red was made from this element only around the 1890s. The yellow and orange are both cadmium sulfide; but to get a red, some of the sulfur in this compound is replaced by the related element selenium. It wasn’t until 1910 that cadmium red became widely available as a commercial colour, and its production became more economical when the chemicals company Bayer modified the method in 1919.
Cadmium red is a rich, warm colour — and arguably the painter’s favourite red, except for the price. That was certainly true for Henri Matisse, for who red held a special valence — as his interiors in La Desserte (aka The Red Room, 1908), Red Studio (1911) and Large Red Interior (1948) attest. Of the second of these, the art critic John Russell said “It is a crucial moment in the history of painting: colour is on top, and making the most of it.”3
Yellow< ※※Indexed under…Yellowpaint, history of
The ochres used by the artists of prehistory offered them not just rusty reds but a kind of natural yellow too. This yellow ochre was, however, the hue of tawny hair and wood, and not at all the thing for tulips or an emperor’s satin robes.
Brighter yellows were, from antiquity, made from synthetic compounds of tin, antimony, and lead. The ancient Egyptians knew how to combine lead with antimony ore, and in fact a natural mineral form of that yellow compound (lead antimonate) was also used as an artists’ material. It could be found on the volcanic slopes of Mount Vesuvius, which is how it came to be associated with Naples: from the seventeenth century a yellow composed of tin, lead, and antimony was often called “Naples yellow”. Other recipes for a yellow of similar appearance specified mixing the oxides of lead and tin. The ingredients weren’t always too clear, actually: when Italian medieval painters refer to giallorino, you can’t be sure if they mean a lead-tin or lead-antimony material, and it is unlikely that the painters recognised much distinction. Before modern chemistry clarified matters from the late eighteenth century, names for pigments might refer to hue regardless of composition or origin, or vice versa. It could all be very confusing, and from a name alone you couldn’t always be sure quite what you were getting — or, for the historian today, quite what a painter of long ago was using or referring to.
In some respects that’s still true now. A tube of modern “Naples yellow” won’t contain lead (shunned for its toxicity) or antimony, but might be a mixture of titanium white and a chromium-based yellow, blended to mimic the colour of the traditional material. There’s no harm in that; on the contrary, the paint is likely to be not only less poisonous but more stable, not to mention cheaper. But examples like this show how wedded artists’ colours are to the traditions from which they emerged. When you’re talking about vermilion, Indian yellow, Vandyke brown, orpiment, the name is part of the allure, hinting at a deep and rich link to the Old Masters.
One thing is for sure: you won’t find the gorgeous orpiment yellow on the modern painter’s palette (unless perhaps they are consciously, and in this case rather hazardously, using archaic materials). It is a deep, golden yellow, finer than Naples and lead-tin yellows. The name simply means “pigment of gold”, and the material goes back to ancient times: the Egyptians made it by grinding up a rare yellow mineral. But by the Middle Ages, the dangers of orpiment were well known. The Italian artist Cennino Cennini says in his handbook Il libro ‘dell arte, written in the late fourteenth century, that it is “really poisonous”, and advises that you should “beware of soiling your mouth with it”.4 That’s because it consists of the chemical compound arsenic sulfide.
Orpiment was one of the gorgeous but costly pigments imported to Europe from the East, in this case from Asia Minor. (In the early nineteenth century there were also imports from China, so that orpiment was sold in Britain as Chinese yellow.) Such alluring imports often arrived through the great trading centre of Venice, and orpiment was hard to acquire up in Northern Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance — unless, like the German artist Lucas Cranach, who ran a pharmacy, you had specialist connections to exotic materials. Some orpiment was made not from the natural mineral but artificially by the chemical manipulations of alchemists. This type can be spotted on old paintings today by studying the pigment particles under the microscope: those made artificially tend to be more similar in size and have rounded grains. From the eighteenth century it was common to refer to this artificial orpiment as King’s yellow. Rembrandt evidently had a supplier of the stuff, which has been identified in his Portrait of a Couple as Isaac and Rebecca (often called The Jewish Bride), painted around 1665.
If Dutch painters wanted a golden yellow like orpiment without the risk of poisoning, the Age of Empire supplied another option. From the seventeenth century, Dutch paintings (including those of Jan Vermeer) begin to feature a pigment known as Indian yellow, brought from the subcontinent by the trading ships of Holland. It arrived in the form of balls of dirty yellowish-green, although bright and untarnished in the middle, which bore the acrid tang of urine. What could this stuff be? Might it truly be made from urine in some way? Lurid speculation abounded; some said the key ingredient was the urine of snakes or camels, others that it was made from the urine of animals fed on turmeric. ※※Indexed under…UrineGolden paint produced from cows’
The mystery seemed to be solved in the late nineteenth century by T. N. Mukharji, an author, civil servant, and curator at Kolkata’s Indian Museum. Making enquiries in Kolkata, Mukharji was directed to a village on the outskirts of the city of Monghyr in Bihar province, allegedly the sole source of the yellow material. Here, he reported, he found that a group of cattle owners would feed their livestock only on mango leaves. They collected the cows’ urine and heated it to precipitate a yellow solid which they pressed and dried into lumps.
The cows (so the story goes) were given no other source of nutrition and so were in poor health. (Mango leaves might also contain mildly toxic substances.) In India such lack of care for cattle was sacrilegious, and legislation effectively banned the production of Indian yellow from the 1890s.
There has been debate about how much of this story is true, but the basic outline seems to stand up — the pigment has a complicated chemical make-up but contains salts of compounds produced from substances in mango leaves when they are metabolized in the kidneys.
If deadly arsenic-laden powers or cows’ urine did not appeal to artists, the choice of yellows was decidedly lacklustre — literally. There were yellow plant extracts, such as weld or saffron, that faded easily, or compounds of tin, lead and antimony with a pale, insipid quality. It’s not hard, then, to imagine the excitement of the French chemist Nicolas Louis Vauquelin when at the start of the nineteenth century he found he could make a vibrant yellow material by chemical alteration of a mineral from Siberia called crocoite.
This stuff was itself red — it was popularly called Siberian red lead, since there was truly lead in it. But in 1797 Vauquelin found there was something else too: a metallic element that no one had seen before, and which he named after the Greek word for colour, chrome or chromium.
The name was aptly chosen, because Vauquelin soon discovered that chromium could produce compounds with various bright colours. Crocoite is a natural form of lead chromate, and when Vauquelin reconstituted this compound artificially in the laboratory, he found it could take on a bright yellow form. Depending on exactly how he made it, this material could range from a pale primrose yellow to a deeper hue, all the way through to orange. Vauquelin figured by 1804 that these compounds could be artists’ pigments, and they were being used that way even by the time the French chemist published his scientific report on them five years later.
The pigment was expensive, and remained so even when deposits of crocoite as a source of chromium were discovered also in France, Scotland, and the United States. Chromium could also supply greens, most notably the pigment that became known as viridian and which was used avidly by the Impressionists and by Paul Cézanne.
The chromium colours play a major role in the explosion of prismatic colour during the nineteenth century — evident not just in Impressionism and its progeny (Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism, and the work of Van Gogh) but also in the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites. After the muted and sometimes downright murky shades of the eighteenth century — think of Joshua Reynolds’ muddy portraits and the brownish foliage of Poussin and Watteau — it was as if the sun had come out and a rainbow arced across the sky. Sunlight itself, the post-Impressionist Georges Seurat declared, held a golden orange-yellow within it.
For their sun-kissed yellows, the Pre-Raphaelites and Impressionists did not need to rely on chromium alone. In 1817, the German chemist Friedrich Stromeyer noticed that zinc smelting produced a by-product with a yellow colour in which he discovered another new metallic element, named after the archaic term for zinc ore, cadmia: he called it cadmium. Two years later, while experimenting on the chemistry of this element, he found that it would combine with sulfur to make a particularly brilliant yellow — or, with some modification to the process, orange. By the mid-century, as zinc smelting expanded and more of the byproduct became available, these materials were offered for sale to artists as cadmium yellow and cadmium orange.
There’s a lesson in the cadmium pigments that applies to all colours, through all ages: they have often been byproducts of some other chemical process altogether, often discovered serendipitously as chemists and technologists pursue other goals — to make ointments, say, or soap, glass, or metals.
Or dyes. If you buy a tube labeled “Indian yellow” today, mangoes and cows had nothing to do with it. It probably contains a synthetic pigment that goes by the unromantic name of PY (pigment yellow) 139 — a carbon-based molecule that is one of the countless offshoots of the industry that arose in the nineteenth century to supply bright dyes for textiles. The first of these artificial dyes, discovered in 1856, was aniline mauve. A chemically related “aniline yellow” — a member of the important family of colorants called azo dyes — was sold commercially from 1863.
This manufacture of a galaxy of synthetic colours from petrochemicals seems a deeply unglamorous way to brighten the world today, compared to the age of King’s yellow, saffron, and Indian yellow. It could feel that what is saved in the purse is sacrificed in the romance. Maybe so. But artists are typically pragmatic people, as eager for novelty as they are attached to tradition. There has never been a time when they have not avidly seized on new sources of colour as soon as those appear, nor when they have not relied on chemistry to generate them. The collaboration of art and science, craft and commerce, chance and design, remains as vibrant as ever.
Blue
Blue has always spoken to something beyond ourselves: it is a colour that draws us into the void, the infinite sky. “Blue is the typical heavenly colour”, said Wassily Kandinsky in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912).5 And who would doubt it after seeing the ceiling of the Arena Chapel in Padua, painted by Giotto around 1305, a vault coloured like the last moments of a clear Italian twilight? Some cultures don’t even recognise the sky as having a hue at all, as if to acknowledge that no earthly spectrum can contain it. In the ancient Greek theory of colour, blue was a kind of darkness with just a little light added.
There’s a strong case to be made, then, that shades of midnight have always been the most treasured of artists’ colours. One of the earliest of the complex blue pigments made by chemistry was virtually an ancient industry in itself. The blue-glazed soapstone carvings known now as faience produced in the Middle East were traded throughout Europe by the second millennium BCE. Faience is typically now associated with ancient Egypt, but it was produced in Mesopotamia as long ago as 4500 BC, well before the time of the Pharaohs. It is a kind of glassy blue glaze, made by heating crushed quartz or sand with copper minerals and a small amount of lime or chalk and plant ash. The blue tint comes from copper — it is of the same family as the rich blue copper sulfate crystals of the school chemistry lab, although faience could range from turquoise-green to a deep dusk-blue. These minerals were typically those today called azurite and malachite, both of them forms of the compound copper carbonate. It’s not at all unlikely, although probably impossible to prove, that the manufacture of glass itself from sand and alkaline ash or mineral soda began in experiments with firing faience in a kiln somewhere in Mesopotamia.
Similar experimentation might have given rise to the discovery of the trademark blue pigment of the Egyptians, simply known as Egyptian blue or frit. The recipe, at any rate, is almost the same: sand, copper ore, and chalk or limestone. But unlike faience glaze, this material is not glassy but crystalline, meaning that the atoms comprising it form orderly arrays rather than a jumble. Producing the pigment requires some artisanal skill: both the composition and the kiln temperature must be just so, attesting to the fact that Egyptian chemists (as we’d call them today) knew their craft — and that the production of colours was seen as an important social task. After all, painting was far from frivolous: mostly it had a religious significance, and the artists were priests.
The minerals azurite and malachite make good pigments in their own right — the first more bluish, the second with a green tint. They just need to be ground and mixed with a liquid binder. In the Middle Ages that was generally egg yolk for painting on wooden panels, and egg white (called glair) for manuscript illumination. Good-quality azurite wasn’t cheap, but there were deposits of the mineral throughout Europe. To the English (who had no local sources) it was German blue; the Germans knew it as mountain blue (Bergblau).
A cheaper blue was the plant extract indigo, used as a dye since ancient times. Unlike most organic dyes — those extracted from plants and animals — it doesn’t dissolve in water, but can be dried and ground into a powder like a mineral pigment, and then mixed with standard binding agents (such as oils) to make a paint. It gives a dark, sometimes purplish blue, sometimes lightened with lead white; Cennino described a “sort of sky blue resembling azurite” made this way from “Baghdad indigo”.6 As the name suggests — the Latin indicum shares the same root as “India” — the main sources for a European medieval artist were in the East, although a form of indigo could also be extracted from the woad plant, grown in Europe.
But the artist who could find a patron with deep pockets would be inclined towards a finer blue than any of these. When the Italian traveller Marco Polo reached what is today Afghanistan around 1271, he visited a quarry on the remote headwaters of the Oxus River. “Here there is a high mountain”, he wrote, “out of which the best and finest blue is mined.”7 The region is now called Badakshan, and the blue stone is lapis lazuli, the source of the pigment ultramarine.
Cennino shows us how deeply ultramarine blue was revered in the Middle Ages, writing that it “is a colour illustrious, beautiful, and most perfect, beyond all other colours; one could not say anything about it, or do anything with it, that its quality would not still surpass”.8 As the name implies, it came from “beyond the seas” — imported, since around the thirteenth century, at great expense from the Badakshan mines.
Ultramarine was precious not just because it was a rare import, but because it was extremely laborious to make. Lapis lazuli is veined with the most gorgeous deep blue, but grinding it is typically disappointing: it turns greyish because of the impurities in the mineral. These impurities have to be separated from the blue material, which is done by kneading the powdered mineral with wax and washing the wax in water — the blue pigment flushes out into the water. This has to be done again and again to purify the pigment fully. The finest grades of ultramarine come out first, and the final flushes give only a low-quality, cheaper product, called ultramarine ash. The best ultramarine cost more than its weight in gold in the Middle Ages, and so it was usually used sparingly. To paint so extensively with the colour, as Giotto did in the Arena Chapel, was lavish in the extreme.
More often the medieval painter would use ultramarine only for the most precious components of a painting. That seems to be the real reason why most altarpieces of this period that depict the Virgin Mary show her with blue robes. For all that art theorists have attempted to explain the symbolic significance of the colour — the hue of humility or virtue, say — it was largely a question of economics. Or, you might say, of making precious materials a devotional offering to God.
You can compare azurite and ultramarine side by side in Titian’s explosion of Renaissance colour, Bacchus and Ariadne (1523). Here is that starry vault, turning to day before our eyes, and it is painted in ultramarine. So too is Ariadne’s robe, which dominates the scene. But the sea itself, on which we see Theseus’s boat receding from his abandoned lover, is azurite, with its greenish tint.
Over the centuries, artists accumulated a few other blues too. Around 1704 a colour-maker named Johann Jacob Diesbach, working in the Berlin laboratory of alchemist Johann Conrad Dippel, was attempting to make a red lake pigment when he found that he had produced something quite different: a deep blue material. He had used a batch of the alkali potash in his recipe, supplied by Dippel — but which was contaminated with animal oil allegedly prepared from blood. The iron used by Diesbach reacted with the material in the oil to make a compound that — unusually for iron — is blue in colour. By 1710 it was being made as an artist’s material, generally known as Prussian blue.
It wasn’t entirely clear what had gone into this mixture, and so for some years the recipe for making Prussian blue was surrounded by confusion and secrecy. In 1762 one French chemist declared that “Nothing is perhaps more peculiar than the process by which one obtains Prussian blue, and it must be owned that, if chance had not taken a hand, a profound theory would be necessary to invent it.”9 But chance was a constant companion in the history of making colours. At any rate, Prussian blue was both attractive and cheap — a tenth of the cost of ultramarine — and it was popular with artists including Thomas Gainsborough and Antoine Watteau. It comprises some of the rich blue Venetian skies of Canaletto.
Another blue from the Renaissance and Baroque periods went by the name of smalt, which is not so very different from the cobalt-blue glass of Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres, ground to a powder. Its origins are obscure, but may well come out of glass-making technology; one source attributes the invention to a Bohemian glassmaker of the mid-sixteenth century, although in fact smalt appears in earlier paintings. Cobalt minerals were found in silver mines, where their alleged toxicity (actually cobalt is only poisonous in high doses, and trace amounts are essential for human health) saw them named after “kobolds”, goblin-like creatures said to haunt these subterranean realms and torment miners. Natural cobalt ores such as smaltite were used since antiquity to give glass a rich blue colour, and smalt was produced simply by grinding it up — not too finely, because then the blue becomes too pale as more light is scattered by the particles. As a result of its coarse grains, smalt was a gritty material and not easy to use.
Some art historians make no distinctions between this “cobalt blue” and those that were given the name in the nineteenth century. But the latter were much finer, richer pigments, made artificially by systematic chemistry. In the late eighteenth century the French government asked the renowned chemist Louis-Jacques Thénard to look for a synthetic substitute for expensive ultramarine. After consulting potters, who used a cobalt-tinted glassy blue glaze, in 1802 Thénard devised a strongly coloured pigment with a similar chemical constitution: technically, the compound cobalt aluminate. Cobalt yielded several other colours besides deep blue. In the 1850s a cobalt-based yellow pigment called aureolin became available in France, followed soon after by a purple pigment called cobalt violet: the first ever pure purple pigment apart from a few rather unstable plant extracts. A sky blue pigment called cerulean blue, a compound of cobalt and tin, was a favourite of some of the post-Impressionists.
But what artists craved most of all was ultramarine itself — if only it wasn’t so expensive. Even by the mid-nineteenth century it remained costly, which is why the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti caused much dismay (not to mention added expense) when he upset a big pot of ultramarine paint while working on a mural for Oxford University.
By Rossetti’s time, however, artists did at last have an alternative — it’s just that several of them had not yet learnt to trust it. As chemical knowledge and prowess burgeoned in the early nineteenth century, bringing new pigments such as cobalt blue onto the market, it seemed within the realms of possibility to try to make ultramarine artificially.
It was a prize well worth striving for, because pigment manufacture had become big business. The manufacture of colours and paints wasn’t supplying artists; there was now a taste for colour in the world at large, in particular for interior decoration. Factories were set up in the nineteenth century to make and grind pigments. Some sold them in pure form to the artist’s suppliers, who would then mix up paints for their customers from pigment and oil. But some pigment manufacturers, such as Reeves and Winsor & Newton in England, began to provide oil paints ready-made; from the 1840s these were sold in collapsible tin tubes, which could be sealed to prevent paints from drying out and could be conveniently carried for painting out of doors.
Mindful of the importance of the pigment market, in 1824 the French Society for Encouragement of National Industry offered a prize for the first practical synthesis of ultramarine. It is a complicated compound to make — unusually for such inorganic pigments, the blue colour comes not from a metal but from the presence of the element sulphur in the mineral crystals. This composition of ultramarine was first deduced by two French chemists in 1806, offering clues about what needed to go into a recipe for making it. In 1828, an industrial chemist named Jean-Baptiste Guimet in Toulouse described a way to make the blue material from clay, soda, charcoal, sand and sulfur, and he was awarded the prize (despite a rival claim from Germany). In England this synthetic ultramarine was subsequently widely known as French ultramarine, and Guimet was able to sell it at a tenth of the cost of the natural pigment. By the 1830s there were factories making synthetic ultramarine throughout Europe.
Artists looked upon this substitute with considerable caution, however. Ultramarine still retained some of its old mystique and majesty, and painters were reluctant to believe that it could be turned out on an industrial scale. Perhaps the synthetic variety was inferior — might it fade or discolour? Actually synthetic ultramarine is (unlike some synthetic pigments) very stable and reliable, but J. M. W. Turner was evidently still wary of it when, in the mid-century, he was about to help himself to the ultramarine on another artist’s palette during one of the “finishing days” at the Royal Academy, where artists put their final touches to paintings already hung for display on the walls. Hearing the cry that this ultramarine was “French”, Turner declined to dab into it.
But by the end of the century, synthetic ultramarine was a standard ingredient of the palette: small wonder, given that it could be a hundred or even a thousand times cheaper than the natural variety. Synthetic ultramarine is the pigment in Yves Klein’s patented International Klein Blue, which he used for a series of monochrome paintings in the 1950s and early 60s. But ultramarine never looked like this before — at least, not on the canvas.
Klein noticed that pigments tend to look richer and more gorgeous as a dry powder than when mixed with a binder — another consequence of how light gets transmitted and refracted — and he sought to capture this appearance in a paint. In 1955 he found his answer in a synthetic fixative resin called Rhodopas M60A, made by the Rhone-Poulenc chemicals company, which could be thinned to act as a binder without impairing the chromatic strength of the pigment. This gave the paint surface a matt, velvety texture. Klein collaborated with Edouard Adam, a Parisian chemical manufacturer and retailer of artists’ materials, to develop a recipe for binding ultramarine in this resin, mixed with other solvents.
Even in the modern era, then, some artists were still depending on chemical assistance and expertise. Despite the profusion of new pigments with complicated and recondite chemical formulations, the intimate relationship of painters to their materials has not been entirely severed.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Philip Ball


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“Fevers of Curiosity”
Charles Baudelaire and the Convalescent Flâneur
By Matthew Beaumont
April 8, 2021

This month marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Baudelaire’s birth, the French poet famous for his descriptions of the flâneur: a man of the crowd, who thrived in the metropolis’ multitude. Following Baudelaire through 19th-century Paris, Matthew Beaumont discovers a parallel archetype — the convalescent hero of modernity — who emerges from the sickbed into city streets with a feverish curiosity.

We are used to thinking of Charles Baudelaire’s most famous archetype, the flâneur who saunters through the metropolitan city, as a supremely self-confident inhabitant of the mid-nineteenth century streets — a “passionate spectator” of their multifarious life-forms. The flâneur, after all, was a middle- or upper-middle class man who, fascinated by the multiplicity and variety of city life, freely resided “in the heart of the multitude”, as Baudelaire put it in “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), “amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite”.1 He could afford to savour its constant, contradictory stimuli not least because he stood, or strolled, at a slight distance from the hustle and bustle of its everyday life. Relishing its rhythms and rhymes, the Baudelairean flâneur read the metropolis as if it unfurled before him like an immense, complicated poem.
The role Baudelaire ascribed to his “passionate spectator” was to act as an exquisitely tuned instrument for monitoring but also conducting the contradictory energies of capitalist modernity. This phenomenon — capitalist modernity — was a state of permanent social and existential transformation. In Paris, its experience had been decisively shaped by the urban reforms that Emperor Bonaparte and his prefect Baron Haussmann forcibly introduced in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution. For, in “blasting a vast network of boulevards through the heart of the old medieval city”, as Marshall Berman puts it, they turned it into a theatre both of military pageant and — in the context of the arcades and, later, the department stores — of consumerism.2
But the flâneur glorified by Baudelaire was never in fact the comfortable, complacent bourgeois stroller that had been so fashionable in the 1840s in those illustrations and journalistic sketches known as the Physiologies. As late as 1867, the French historian and journalist Victor Fournel was presenting flânerie, which he sketched in terms of “drifting along, with your nose in the wind, with both hands in your pockets, and with an umbrella under your arm, as befits any open-minded spirit”, in positively seraphic terms.3
In “The Painter of Modern Life”, by contrast, Baudelaire was already emphasising the flâneur’s restless, unsettled experience both in the metropolitan street and in his own skin. Baudelaire’s often peripatetic life as a bohemian poet in Paris, shaped by privation, rebellion, and a taste for narcotic substances, lies behind his reconfiguration of the flâneur. This is neatly captured in a “Self-Portrait under the Influence of Hashish” that he sketched in the early 1840s — for there, standing in the nocturnal city, a scruffily dressed Baudelaire stares suspiciously at us from beneath a cloud of intoxicating black smoke.
Baudelaire’s famous metropolitan archetype, then, was far more haunted or even hunted than the one purveyed in the contemporary illustrated periodical press.4 This can be glimpsed in a poem like “Le Soleil”, from the Tableaux Parisiens section of the second edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1861). There, the impoverished poet describes venturing out alone (“Je vais m’exercer seul”) in search of the poetry of the city’s streets: “duelling in dark corners for a rhyme / and stumbling over words like cobblestones”.5 Like the French language, here the French capital is a distinctly hostile environment. So is the poet’s own body. By this point, racked by debt, Baudelaire was addicted to laudanum; mentally and physically ill. The writer as walker has become an embattled, almost tragi-comic figure.
It is those pedestrians who, like the struggling poet of “Le Soleil”, find themselves damaged and discomfited as they negotiate the city’s streets that interest me here. The frailer kind of flâneur, so to speak. . . In particular, I am concerned with one of those alternative archetypes useful for capturing the experience of metropolitan modernity with which Baudelaire complicates the flâneur — the convalescent. And my focus is on the moment when the urban convalescent, in spite of frail nerves, takes his first, reckless steps in the city from which he has been temporarily exiled, and experiences a sense of freedom at once tentative and abrupt. The streets — which he approaches cautiously, still a little feverishly, at first perhaps as an observer who must half-protect himself from the impact of the city — are the site of the convalescent’s groping re-engagement with everyday life.
This almost morbid state of sensitivity to the city, associated with the aftermath of a sustained illness, typifies the experience of what I want to characterise, in a deliberately Baudelairean formulation, as the convalescent as hero of modernity. The convalescent, and especially the male convalescent — who for social reasons to do with the restrictions imposed by patriarchal society, becomes less physically restricted than the female convalescent, less confined to the domestic domain — is in spite of his infirmity and decrepitude not necessarily confined to the sick room. He moves out into the world, albeit tentatively, and is temporarily free to relate to it in terms that are almost purely aesthetic.
The idea of convalescence as an aesthetic disposition probably originates in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817). There, the convalescent’s experience of his environment is often directly compared to that of the child, because the convalescent’s delicate receptiveness to life — a helpless openness to unexpected or half-forgotten sensations — has something of childhood’s brittle innocence. For Coleridge, convalescence also has an innate poetic intensity. In the first volume of the Biographia, he characterises genius as the capacity “to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day, for, perhaps, forty years, had rendered familiar [sic]”. The “prime merit” of genius, he continues, and “its most unequivocal mode of manifestation”, is “so to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily convalescence”.6
In convalescence, then, the whole world is made strange. In this state even the most ordinary individual relates to life like a Romantic poet. Coleridge — at times an almost full-time convalescent himself, especially when living in Highgate, outside London, in the final, drug-addicted decades of his life — captures precisely the state in which I am interested when he refers, rhapsodically, to “the voluptuous and joy-trembling nerves of convalescence”.7
For Baudelaire, with his focus on modernity, the convalescent is explicitly an urban poet, albeit one indebted to the rurally-inflected Romantic tradition. Convalescence, as he argues, “is like a return towards childhood”, for “the convalescent, like the child, is possessed in the highest degree of the faculty of keenly interesting himself in things, be they apparently of the most trivial”.8
Baudelaire primarily derives his interest in convalescence from Edgar Allan Poe, specifically his “The Man of the Crowd”, a short story first published in Graham’s Magazine in December 1840. This strange fantasia, set in London, where Poe had lived and been educated between 1815 and 1820, is the preeminent instance of urban convalescence in literature. Poe himself, incidentally, probably derived his theoretical interest in the convalescent from Coleridge, whom he read with passionate attention, and whose conception of convalescence he deliberately urbanises and modernises.
The narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” first recalls the convalescent state he has recently inhabited in the story’s second paragraph:
Not long ago, about the closing in of an evening in autumn, I sat at the large bow window of the D– Coffee-House in London. For some months I had been ill in health, but was now convalescent, and, with returning strength, found myself in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui – moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs [. . .] and the intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its every-day condition, as does the vivid yet candid reason of Leibnitz, the mad and flimsy rhetoric of Gorgias. Merely to breathe was enjoyment; and I derived positive pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain. I felt a calm but inquisitive interest in everything. With a cigar in my mouth and a newspaper in my lap, I had been amusing myself for the greater part of the afternoon, now in poring over advertisements, now in observing the promiscuous company in the room, and now in peering through the smoky panes into the street.9
This is an exact description of convalescence as an aesthetic; a state of unpredictable, half-repressed euphoria in which, because he is temporarily exempt from the routine demands of everyday life in the city, the individual’s “electrified” senses are preternaturally attuned to experience. The film has departed from his mental vision but he nonetheless peers at the street through “smoky panes”. His empty, appetitive mood is at once both the opposite of boredom and oddly characteristic of its restless calm: it is “the converse of ennui”; or its obverse. His consciousness processes the shocks of urban life, the traffic on the roads and pavements, as concussions that seem almost exquisite because he can remain detached and half-insulated from them.
Poe’s urban fable locates his convalescent on the margins of a mass of people. Detached from the “dense and continuous tides of population” that rush past the café as evening closes in, and from the rhythms of routine production they collectively embody, his convalescent describes his fascination with the people he sees commuting home. He is soon lost in contemplation of them: “At this particular period of the evening I had never before been in a similar situation, and the tumultuous sea of human heads filled me, therefore, with a delicious novelty of emotion”.10
Initially he examines in the abstract the mass of human forms that pass him. He is particularly interested in those that seem unconfident on the street, those that “were restless in their movements, had flushed faces, and talked and gesticulated to themselves, as if feeling in solitude on account of the very denseness of the company around”.11 These are the people for whom everyday life in the city is a kind of sickness or fever.
Then Poe’s convalescent examines the passersby in more concrete detail, as if they inhabit some grimy aquarium. Sliding down “the scale of what is termed gentility”, as the light thickens, he classifies their physiognomies, their clothes and step, carefully sifting through the aristocrats, businessmen, clerks, artisans, “exhausted labourers”, pie-men, dandies, conmen, pickpockets, beggars and prostitutes.12 From the café he sees innumerable drunkards — their countenances pale, their eyes a livid red — who clutch at passing objects “with quivering fingers” as they stride through the crowd.13
It is “thus occupied in scrutinizing the mob”, his forehead pressed against the glass beside his seat, that the convalescent glimpses the “decrepid old man” whose physiologie he is completely unable to taxonomise.14 He stumbles into the street, his curiosity heightened by the snatched sight of a diamond and a dagger beneath the old man’s cloak, resolving in a moment of heated decision to follow him. “For my own part I did not much regard the rain”, he notes, “the lurking of an old fever in my system rendering the moisture somewhat too dangerously pleasant”.15 Convalescence itself is a “dangerously pleasant” state.
Poe’s narrator then traces the man’s mysterious movements, throughout the night and into the day, as he roams the city, in an apparently futile attempt to understand what motivates him; but he finally only tracks him back, on the evening of the second day, to the coffee house from which he had first set out. The old man, who appears completely unconscious of the narrator, seems to be more than human — as if his labyrinthine path through the streets had traced not the arbitrary trajectory of an individual but the secret form or logic of the corrupt, decrepit metropolitan city itself. So, the convalescent abandons his pursuit, making this declaration of defeat: “He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds”.16
The old man incarnates the industrial capitalist city in its anti-heroic rather than heroic form. In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), composed exactly one hundred years after this short story was first published, Walter Benjamin decides that he cannot finally identify Poe’s “man of the crowd” as a flâneur, mainly because in him “composure has given way to manic behavior”. Instead, according to Benjamin, he exemplifies the destiny of the flâneur once this intrinsically urbane figure has been “deprived of the milieu to which he belonged” (a milieu, Benjamin implies, that London probably never provided).17
The same might be said of Poe’s convalescent, in whom composure must compete with a positively monomaniacal mood. Indeed, it can be argued that “The Man of the Crowd” allegorises the process by which, in the hectic conditions of a metropolis like London in the mid-nineteenth century, the flâneur splits apart and produces two further metropolitan archetypes, one almost pathologically peripatetic, the other static to the point of being a sort of cripple. The former is the nightwalker, a disreputable, indeterminately criminal type who embodies that half of the flâneur characterised by a state of restless mobility. The latter is the convalescent, who embodies the half of him characterised by a state of immobile curiosity. For Poe, these characters are spectral doubles.
What about Baudelaire? The French poet’s discussion of “The Man of the Crowd” is contained in the third section of “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), his encomium to the artist Constantin Guys, “a passionate lover of crowds and incognitos”.18 He portrays Guys there as someone whose genius resides in a childlike curiosity, which he characterises in terms of “the fixed and animally ecstatic gaze of a child confronted with something new, whatever it be”.19
Like the child, who actually “sees everything in a state of newness”, and who is consequently “always drunk”, Guys is exquisitely susceptible to impressions.20 For him, “sensibility is almost the whole being”.21 Ordinarily, Baudelaire emphasises, adults can only recover this spontaneously poetic disposition temporarily when they are in a state of convalescence. Guys, however, positively personifies this disposition, because he is “an eternal convalescent”.22 “Imagine an artist who was always, spiritually, in the condition of that convalescent”, Baudelaire concludes, “and you will have the key to the nature of Monsieur G”.23
It is implicitly Poe, however, and not Guys, who embodies in the end the spirit of convalescence in “The Painter of Modern Life”. Baudelaire identifies Poe’s convalescent as his inspiration for this claim:
Do you remember a picture (it really is a picture!), painted – or rather written – by the most powerful pen of our age, and entitled The Man of the Crowd? In the window of a coffee house there sits a convalescent, pleasurably absorbed in gazing at the crowd, and mingling, through the medium of thought, in the turmoil of thought that surrounds him. But lately returned from the valley of the shadow of death, he is rapturously breathing all the odours and essences of life; as he has been on the brink of total oblivion, he remembers, and fervently desires to remember, everything. Finally he hurls himself headlong into the midst of the throng, in pursuit of an unknown, half-glimpsed countenance, that has, on an instant, bewitched him. Curiosity had become a fatal, irresistible passion!24

It is immediately apparent from this paragraph that Baudelaire’s principal interest does not lie in the drama described by Poe’s narrative. Instead, he seems more interested in the scene in which the story is initially set. He insists on representing Poe’s narrative, in fact, as a relatively static picture, as if he is himself examining the convalescent through a frame.
Perhaps it is most accurate to state that Baudelaire reconstructs the story as a sort of diptych. In the first panel, the convalescent is passively seated in the coffee house. As he observes the street life through the glass, he simultaneously introjects the scenes outside, assimilating them to his consciousness, and projects his consciousness outward, assimilating his consciousness to them. He is “pleasurably absorbed in gazing at the crowd, and mingling, through the medium of thought, in the turmoil of thought that surrounds him”.25 The convalescent “rapturously breath[es] in all the odours and essences of life”, making the surface of his body seem absolutely porous, even as the solid pane of glass that he sits beside has apparently been rendered completely permeable.26
In the second panel, Baudelaire’s description captures Poe’s narrator, as if in a photograph, in the act of flinging himself into the street — like the Baudelairean protagonist who, according to Benjamin, “plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of energy”.27 He is freeze-framed, so to speak, as he “hurls himself headlong into the midst of the throng”.28 The convalescent thus metamorphoses into a nightwalker. It is in effect an image of the convalescent as hero, actively seeking to satisfy his feverish curiosity, even if it is finally fatal to do so.
Poe’s spectral convalescent, more spiritually decrepit than Baudelaire’s, and less rapturous, is not so deeply indebted to the Coleridgean tradition, in spite of the fact that Baudelaire probably encountered this tradition through the mediation of Poe. But, like Poe’s, Baudelaire’s convalescent remains terminally peripheral to the life of the street, in contrast to the flâneur. The flâneur, according to Baudelaire, in the same section of “The Painter of Modern Life”, is situated “at the centre of the world” even though he also “remain[s] hidden from the world”.29 In this respect, as in others, he is like the commodity, which is so pervasive as to be invisible. The convalescent, Baudelaire implies, by contrast resists the performative aspect of the flâneur’s life in the streets and refuses the spectacular logic of the marketplace.
Baudelaire had first referred to what he so evocatively describes as “convalescence, with its fevers of curiosity” in “Edgar Poe: His Life and Works” (1853).30 In this piece, which subsequently reappeared as the introduction to his translations in the Histoires extraordinaires (1856), Baudelaire locates the “single character” that populates Poe’s numerous narratives as “the man of razor-sharp perceptions and slackened nerves”. He concludes that “this man is Poe himself”.31
This description perfectly captures the constitution of the convalescent, who is acutely sensitive to the life of the streets but at the same time oddly anaesthetised to it. The poetics of convalescence that are perceptible in Poe, and which Baudelaire elaborated, make him absolutely central to the process by which Romanticism, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, became urbanised. Poe is for Baudelaire one of the patron saints of metropolitan modernity because, as “the writer of the nerves”, he too is a perpetual convalescent.32 In the urban sensorium described by both authors, the sick are too sensitive to cope with the shocks of everyday life, and the healthy are constitutionally insensitive to its secret aesthetics.
Paul de Man grasps the importance of the convalescent for Baudelaire when, in a discussion of him and Nietzsche in “Literary History and Literary Modernity”, he offers this compelling claim:
The human figures that epitomise modernity are defined by experiences such as childhood or convalescence, a freshness of perception that results from a slate wiped clear, from the absence of a past that has not yet had time to tarnish the immediacy of perception (although what is thus freshly discovered prefigures the end of this very freshness), of a past that, in the case of convalescence, is so threatening that it has to be forgotten.33
The convalescent is not necessarily confined to the sick room, or to some bucolic scene of refuge, in spite of their infirmity and decrepitude. They embody the experience of modernity. Indeed, it might be said that, in order to be absolutely modern, as Rimbaud demanded, one must be convalescent.
But what about those citizens less able to roam the metropolis in a state of rapturous, febrile curiosity? If the convalescent’s power comes from a unique experience of modernity — being at once immersed, with refreshed senses, in the spectacle of the modern city and cautiously set off from its events, as though behind a pane of glass — it was a power and position not accessible to all. Like the flâneur, the convalescent relied on a certain invisibility in the streets, one afforded by a kind of visibility within the social order. On the boulevards of Baudelaire’s Paris, this was very much the privilege of the bourgeois white male, and the leisure time afforded by his class position.
As Erika Diane Rappaport reminds us, there is no denying that, as distinct from a man’s, “a woman’s freedom to ‘walk alone’ in the city was constrained by physical inconveniences and dangers as well as by social conventions that deemed it entirely improper for a bourgeois lady to roam alone out-of-doors”.34 The flâneuse — as distinct from women who, for professional or social reasons, simply in order to travel from here to there, passed through the streets of the metropolis — is not a common phenomenon. But her painful, paradoxical sense of simultaneously being both too invisible and too visible in the city streets was characteristic of all women in these fundamental circumstances.
It must be added, though, that the male territory to which Rappaport refers is by no means homogeneous or socially uniform — except, no doubt, in so far as it marginalises female pedestrians. Many male pedestrians of the period, far from feeling entitled in the streets, find them distinctly hostile, for a range of different reasons. They are the city’s internal exiles, even if their sense of unbelonging is from the start far less fraught, far less freighted with histories of exploitation and oppression, than that of women, or of men and women of colour. Numerous residents of the city could not afford to function, in Baudelaire’s beautiful description of the flâneur, as “a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness”.35
The female convalescent is for the most part denied Baudelaire’s privileged re-engagement with the public sphere. In Bleak House (1853), for example, Dickens’ heroine Esther Summerson records that, in recovering from what is probably a case of smallpox, she “became useful to [her]self, and interested, and attached to life again”; but the role she assumes is confined to the private sphere and her re-attachment to life is conceived in terms of utility rather than some form of gratification.36
“The body after long illness is languid, passive, receptive of sweetness, but too weak to contain it”, wrote Virginia Woolf in Jacob’s Room (1922).37 Woolf was of course supremely sensitive to the aesthetics of convalescence, but she was also acutely conscious of the extent to which, historically, women have been excluded from leisurely enjoyment of the city’s public spaces. It is no accident that, in “Street Haunting” (1927), her delightful celebration of “rambling the streets of London”, she pretends to need to purchase a pencil in order to justify what is in effect a purposeless stroll through the city.38 If Woolf was “the greatest flâneuse of twentieth-century literature”, as Lauren Elkin writes, then she was nonetheless not as free to practice flânerie as her confrères.39
In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), a novel that celebrates the comparative freedom afforded to its eponymous heroine in the metropolis by the business of shopping, Woolf offers a systematic critique of the patriarchal politics of the Baudelairean flâneur. There, Mrs. Dalloway’s old friend Peter Walsh at one point follows a young woman, to whom he momentarily feels attracted, through the streets of central London. Woolf uses Peter’s predatory mode of walking to demonstrate, in Benjamin’s compelling formulation from his essay on “The Return of the Flâneur” (1929), “how easy it is for the flâneur to depart from the ideal of the philosopher out for a stroll, and to assume the features of the werewolf at large in the social jungle”.40
Peter is Baudelaire’s “passionate spectator” — exploiting his freedom as a middle-class man to treat the life of the metropolis as a form of spectacle — as a raptor or stalker. He is one of those “wild beasts, our fellow men”, comfortably inhabiting “the heart of the forest” that is the city, to whom Woolf refers in “Street Haunting”.41 For Woolf, as a feminist, the Baudelairean flâneur is, in the end, the “werewolf at large in the social jungle” that Benjamin feared it might become.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Matthew Beaumont

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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text:
The Art of Making Debts
Accounting for an Obsession in 19th-Century France
By Erika Vause
May 12, 2021

Being in debt was once an artful promenade — the process of eluding creditors through disguise and deceit. Erika Vause explores a forgotten financial history: the pervasive humor that once accompanied the literature and visual culture of debt.

“Tell me what you borrow, and I’ll tell you who you are. . .”1— Physiologie de l’argent par un débiteur
“The art of making debts and not paying them back”, wrote French humorist Emile Marco de Saint-Hilaire, “is one of the bases of the social order”.2 This opening aphorism served as the guiding argument for Saint-Hilaire’s 1827 L’Art de payer ses dettes et de satisfaire ses créanciers sans débourser un sou [The art of paying debts and satisfying creditors without spending a dime]. Presented as the deathbed advice of a crafty aristocratic uncle who had survived the tumults of the 1789 Revolution while elegantly dodging his debts, Saint-Hilaire’s book preached the virtues of perennial indebtedness for individuals and nation-states alike. “The more debts one has”, Saint-Hilaire explained, “the more credit. The more creditors, the more resources”.3 Unfortunately, many creditors remained stubbornly unenlightened about the benefits of never receiving their money back. Hence, in his book, Saint-Hilaire encouraged debtors to mobilize an arsenal of techniques and tricks, ranging from mastery of disguise to an exacting knowledge of every legal loophole, to ensure the credit economy continued to function as it should.
Saint-Hilaire was not alone in his debt-shirking evangelism. The “art of making debts”, as Saint-Hilaire and others referred to it, spawned an entire genre of tongue-in-cheek how-to guides and occupied a central place in the whimsical illustrations of awkward encounters between creditors and debtors sketched by some of the era’s most famous artists. Even in our finance-obsessed present, it is difficult to understand just how fascinating, and how occasionally hilarious, nineteenth-century French society seemed to find debt. The most familiar reflection of this absorption lies in the era’s literature. In the novels of Balzac, Flaubert, and Dumas, debt served as a central plot device, and one almost inevitably associated with tragedy: it revealed secret appetites, ruined ancient families, and subjected the virtuous poor to the depredations of usurers. Yet the art of making debts, embodied in works like Saint-Hilaire’s, treated the relationship between creditors and debtors not as innately devastating but rather as a cat-and-mouse game at once humorous and deeply revealing of the contradictory nature of the democratic and industrial revolutions.
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, France was a country held together by chains of credit and debt that bound workers to employers and producers to consumers. Peasants strained under hefty mortgages. Merchants relied on promissory notes and bills of exchange to buy and sell. Aristocrats ran up bills with their tailors and booters. Workers hocked their meager possessions at municipal pawnshops. Thousands of people were incarcerated each year when they couldn’t pay up, held at the private request of their creditors. Thousands more filed for bankruptcy before the nation’s commercial courts, undergoing a process fraught with social and legal dishonor.
Historians of credit have argued that its logic was not entirely, or even primarily, financial. Laurence Fontaine, for instance, has described early modern credit as a “moral economy”, meaning that it relied on highly personal judgements of character.4 Relations of credit were relations of power. In French eighteenth-century aristocratic culture, as historian Clare Crowston has argued, credit operated according to an “economy of regard” in which the very word “credit” more frequently referred to status or reputation than it did to a monetary transaction.5 This meaning did not disappear with the dawn of the nineteenth century. By the middle of the century, Marx and Engels would famously describe capitalism in The Communist Manifesto as having “pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’”, to leave “no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’”.6 Yet, on the cusp of finance capitalism’s transformation into a complex system of almost staggering abstraction, debt and credit were vividly personal, and the reduction of relationships to monetary exchange was something still quite tangible.
The French Revolution of 1789 had represented a seismic shift in understandings of wealth. In what historian Rafe Blaufarb has termed “the Great Demarcation”, the revolutionaries had carved out of the incredibly complicated patchwork of feudal traditions of ownership a more or less coherent understanding of liberal private property based on notions of possessive individualism.7 Napoleon’s 1804 Civil Code placed the inalienable right to private property at the foundation of French society. Under such rigid notions of property, those who owed — rather than owned — could easily be regarded as criminals. Indeed, not only were Napoleonic laws infamously punitive to debtors, but popular prints like the much-reproduced “Crédit est mort – les mauvais payeurs l’ont tué” (Credit is dead – the bad payers killed him) testify to this attitude. In the various versions of this image that circulated across the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the murdered body of Credit, the “good fellow”, lies surrounded by an artist, musician, and soldiers armed with swords. In the background, an industrious knife-grinder toils away, unaffected by Credit’s demise because he, unlike these foppish debtors, paid with his hard-earned cash.
This insistence on contractual agreements and punctuality in paying debts did not mean that the “economy of regard” had vanished. Moreover, the tumultuous events of the French Revolution itself — which had included the confiscation of land from aristocrats and the Catholic Church, protracted war, a disastrous experiment with paper money that spiraled into inflation, and national bankruptcy — had revealed the fragile bases of private fortunes. Simultaneously instructed in the virtues of a new socioeconomic paradigm and presented with dramatic evidence of its arbitrary and even absurd character, French people eagerly sought guidance, and perhaps also comic relief.
The “art of making debts” grew out of attempts to make the new post-revolutionary financial world more legible. In early nineteenth-century French cities, an emerging culture of print and press democratized aristocratic savoir-faire and produced guides for navigating a newly mobile social order. Panoramic literature, including “tableaux” and “physiologies”, offered readers accessible knowledge of the various urban “types” with which the public could navigate a bewildering new world where traditional wisdom might be of little help. Saint-Hilaire’s book, as well as Jacques-Gilbert Ymbert’s L’art de faire des dettes and L’art de promener ses créanciers (The art of making debts and The art of giving creditors the run-around), Maurice Alhoy’s Physiologie du débiteur et du créancier (Physiology of the debtor and creditor) and the anonymously-written Physiologie de l’argent par un débiteur (Physiology of money by a debtor) provided humorous guides to the people, places, and practices of the post-Revolutionary financial system. Authors and illustrators also illuminated a country torn between an older aristocratic culture of extravagance, where the payment of debts to one’s social inferiors was considered at best unimportant and at worst taboo, and a new bourgeois society based on contractual obligation and legal equality.
Fundamental to this “art of making debts” was mastery of the “promenade” or “run around”. As Jacques-Gilbert Ymbert explained in his 1824 L’art de promener ses créanciers,  “the goal of the promenade is to bore the creditor, to bring him to such a state of fatigue and annoyance that, out of breath, spent, and under pressure, he at last despairs of his repayment and renounces the pursuit”.8 The full run-around often took years, and the process entailed careful preparation on the part of debtors. They were encouraged to rent top-floor apartments with windows facing the street (“a creditor who has breached five flights of stairs arrives at your door tired, out of breath: it’s not money he needs, it’s a chair”) and to furnish their living quarters with strange and eccentric devices, preferably new technologies, that would divert the attention of a visiting creditor away from financial matters.9 More drastically, the manuals proposed changes of physical appearance. Recommendations included wigs, beards, fake noses, various forms of disfigurement, extreme weight gain and weight loss, even diseases.
Patience was the true secret to a successful “promenade”. Ymbert drew up a helpful table, for debtors to memorize “like the Pythagorean theorem”, that provided a scientific estimate of how long a promenade would have to be (in years and in distance) to satisfy a given creditor, as well as how many pairs of shoes a creditor would wear out in the process.10
Writers cautioned debtors to avoid chance encounters with their creditors at all costs. As Ymbert explained, the result of meeting a creditor in the street could be catastrophic:
It erases the effects of six months of promenade and gives the debt all the freshness that it had lost . . . Naked, exposed to the reproaches of your creditor . . . you stutter, you make promises. Your creditor’s strength grows from your weakness, and he is reborn, throwing himself at you with all the energy he had lost.11
Illustrators, meanwhile, seized on such meetings as fodder for their sketches. Whether on the street, in a house, or seated alongside each other on the omnibus, interactions between debtors and creditors were apparently deemed hilarious. Honoré Daumier drew several iterations of a “creditor’s visit” where a shabby creditor approaches a half-awake young man in luxurious pajamas demanding his money.
Meanwhile, Frédéric Bouchot’s 1842 series “Les Débiteurs et les Créanciers” portrayed interactions between twelve different creditors and their debtors, each labeled with the profession of the creditor, from clockmaker and furniture merchant to jeweler and innkeeper. In “le tapissier” (the upholsterer), the creditor kicks down a debtor’s door. In another, “le bottier” (the bootmaker), an elegant but only half-dressed young man fights over a shoe with a much shabbier-looking bootmaker.
The French public must have delighted in depictions of these awkward and all-too-familiar encounters, but these satires resonated more deeply as well, reflecting a keen awareness of the absurdities of wealth and inequality. Debtors’ manuals were avowedly designed not for the “general population who makes debts left and right”, but rather for the “proper gentleman” (an homme comme il faut).12 In L’art de faire des dettes, Ymbert described this figure as a dispossessed aristocrat. As victims of the nation’s turbulent decades, they were entitled to a certain standard of luxury as their birthright. “You were brought up to occupy a certain position in society”, Ymbert assured his readers, “unforeseeable circumstances have knocked you out of it. But your parents still invested a lot in you to prepare you for the state of a proper gentlemen . . . your person remains your capital”. Such pesky problems as utter insolvency should not keep a gentleman from the lifestyle that “society and civilization owe [him]”.13
Ymbert’s attitude towards the gentleman-debtor is not straightforward. On one hand, there is obvious mockery of his entitled air. Ymbert was writing shortly before the restored Bourbon government finally granted monetary indemnities to émigré nobles for their confiscated lands, following years of aristocratic complaints. Yet the ruined aristocrat also reflected a nearly universal predicament. As Saint-Hilaire rhetorically asked in a discordant moment of sincerity:
Who, has been so fortunate that after thirty years, after assignats, mandats [both forms of paper money that ended in massive inflation] and after the bankruptcy of the State . . . after emigrations, confiscations, requisitions, arrests, and invasions which have reversed every fortune, to always have been able to say ‘I owe nothing’? And which people, sitting on a pile of gold today, could say, ‘We will never be debtors?’14
The homme comme il faut, in other words, could be anyone.
Justifying the gentlemanly birthright to generate debts, however, required offering an alternative definition of property which, according to Ymbert, had “until now been very badly defined in our laws”.15 Instead of resting on land or currency, property derived principally from the individual himself. Every gentleman possessed, by birth and breeding, an innate capital constituted by his refined person, and which the world justly had to acknowledge and compensate. In certain respects, this understanding of Ymbert’s insistence on the superiority of cultural and social status over alienable properties belongs to an old-fashioned economy of regard.
Yet, juxtaposed with the persistence of this intangible economy of prestige and appearance, the manuals attempted to attach an exact monetary value to specific, allegedly interchangeable “assets”. Ymbert assessed the worth of “thirty-two very white teeth” at 1600 francs and a “calf six inches in diameter” at 2400 francs.16 A gentleman’s total worth, independent of any money or land, amounted to some two hundred thousand francs, on which society owed him interest. The humor of Ymbert’s approach lay in his attempt to commodify the crucial but immeasurable traits upon which lending depended. It is here that Ymbert and other writers reveal the full complexity of their satire. Not merely do they poke fun at fashionable dandies seeking to prolong aristocratic culture into a bourgeois age, but these authors also use these figures to demonstrate the absurdity of emergent financial capitalism.
Other iterations of this “balance sheet” took this critique even further. Maurice Alhoy’s Physiologie du créancier et débiteur provided the following calculation of the worth of a debtor by the time he reached his early 20s:
My mother carries me for nine months in her womb, during this time she has expensive tastes, and, in assessing them at the lowest I can evaluate at                . . .        3000 francsI enter the world: the expenses of childbirth, care, baptism, etc etc                . . .        500 francsThe wetnurse for two years, including the cost of soap, sugar and first teeth                . . .        2500 francsFor 6 years I grow up and develop in my father’s house: I am spoiled, it’s not too much to put my caprices at 500 fr a year . Thus                . . .        3000 francsI am put in a boarding school; I stay 8 years. The university house costs 1200 francs per year                . . .        9600 francsThe so-called “polishing” teachers come. . . for 1,500 a year. All for nothing:                . . .        9000 francsI go to law school: the price of my registration, the purchase of indispensable books, the living expenses that my age and social position demand, 2400 francs per year, for three years:                . . .        7200 francsTotal of my capital:                . . .        34,800 francs17
Yet, despite the immense monetary investment into the young debtor, he would find to his shock that his “man capital, or capital-man” entitled him to nothing in the eyes of lenders and bankers. “It does not inspire the least amount of trust in him and nobody will lend to him on the basis of its value”. Faced with such manifest injustice, the humorist wryly noted, what choice did the proper gentleman have but to rely on the art of making debts to get by?
A parody of early political economy accompanied this heterodox interpretation of property. Paraphrasing economist Jean-Baptiste Say, Ymbert maintained that any modern society was comprised of two fundamentally opposed classes: “producers” and “consumers”. Rather than being at war, however, these classes were inextricably interlinked through debt — “producers”, as Saint-Hilaire explained it, “are none other than creditors; consumers are none other than debtors”.18 Since each relied on the other to survive, paying off one’s creditor severed ties between them and thereby “paralyzed the economy”.  As proof of their economic analyses, the manuals presented comparisons between personal debt and national debt. “The grandeur of a nation is always in proportion to its deficit”, opined Saint-Hilaire, “so you should reason by analogy”.19 The most prominent example of this maxim was Great Britain, France’s inveterate enemy, whose long-pursued victory over Napoleon was largely attributed to its use of a Sinking Fund. Ymbert even included a chapter in which prime minister William Pitt the Younger, the Fund’s architect, learns the “art of making debts” from a Swiss banker named Schneider, who pays off his creditors with wisdom on his deathbed. If never-ending deficits worked for the world’s most powerful country, why shouldn’t they work for you?
The economy of debt-making was nevertheless a circumscribed one. As Ymbert stated, “Running up debts to those who don’t have enough is to increase disorder and multiple misfortune. On the other hand, running up debts with those who have too much is to make up for misfortunes and reach towards reestablishing the equilibrium”.20 Debtors were encouraged to consistently patronize the finest jewelers, tailors, cobblers, and restaurants. Not only was the quality of their goods superior, Ymbert claimed, but in taking from those “who already had” one helped “restore equilibrium” between those who had “too much” and those who had “not enough”. Above all, however, at such places the fashionable gentleman would in fact reimburse his debt several times over by inspiring others, through his example, to pay for the products that he himself consumed on credit. He would “tie his cravat like an angel and thus push our muslin industry to its highest degree”.21 And, taking breakfast at a café, he would make it fashionable by his very presence, inspiring a desire to spend money on exotic delicacies by “eating with contagious grace”. The debtor was, in short, an early nineteenth-century influencer who would use his charisma to increase consumption and satisfy his debts without “spending a dime”.
What happened to the art of making debts? Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, parodists believed it to be a vanishing craft. In 1827, Saint-Hilaire noted that his deceased uncle’s wisdom about dodging creditors was quickly fading into obsolescence. “Every day in Paris”, he remarked, “it becomes harder to make a revenue from one’s debts as one did before: the merchants are less gullible, the workers less patient, the usurers less numerous, relatives, mistresses and friends are less generous and the courts more severe”.22
Yet, in another sense, the art of making debts is timelier than ever. We live today in a world where our creditors are largely faceless and impersonal forces of capital rather than people we can bump into on the street, yet the humor still resonates. After all, it is easy enough to transpose the early nineteenth-century homme comme il faut, “unjustly” deprived of the social position to which he felt entitled by revolutionary upheaval, onto the caricature of the overeducated, underemployed twenty- or thirty-something of today, burdened by student loan debt yet unable to find a job befitting their unique talents. Criticized for frittering away their savings on avocado toast and dreaming of YouTube stardom, the millennial and Gen Z predicament instead reveals many of the same discrepancies between ideologies of responsibility and property and the realities of credit so adeptly satirized by the art of making debts. At a time when states and multinational companies alike seem to take on tremendous debt without suffering the consequences, yet ordinary citizens find themselves unable to emerge from under the weight of bills, credit remains as mysterious and omnipotent as it was in post-revolutionary France.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Erika Vause


text:
Lord of Misrule
Thomas Morton’s American Subversions
By Ed Simon
November 24, 2020

When we think of early New England, we tend to picture stern-faced Puritans and black-hatted Pilgrims, but in the same decade that these more famous settlers arrived, a man called Thomas Morton founded a very different kind of colony — a neo-pagan experiment he named Merrymount. Ed Simon explores the colony’s brief existence and the alternate vision of America it represents.

“With proclamation that the first of MayAt Merrymount shall be kept holy day.” — Thomas Morton, The New English Canaan (1637)1
“It was the tongue in your cheek that they hated most,The last flare of Old England, the reckless mirth.” — Steven Vincent Benet, Western Star (1943)2
In 1620 the Mayflower shepherded in the founders of Plymouth Plantation, and in 1630 the Arbela brought John Winthrop with his sermons about the “city on a hill”, but during the decade that separates these canonical arrivals a very different sort of English colonist would establish a very different sort of colony on the South Shore of Massachusetts. Merrymount — founded as Mount Wollaston in 1624 near present-day Quincy, Massachusetts — was the brainchild of the Devonshire-born lawyer, raconteur, libertine, rake, and crypto-pagan Thomas Morton (1579–1647). His ideas for colonizing the New World were distinct from either the Plymouth or the Massachusetts Bay Colony. While generations of historians have claimed that Americans are intellectually the descendants of stern Calvinist Puritans and Pilgrims, Morton (who stood in opposition to both groups) had his own ideas. The utopian Merrymount, it has long been argued, was a society built upon privileging art and poetry over industriousness and labor, and pursued a policy of intercultural harmony rather than white supremacy. The site where it stood — now an industrial area across the road from a Dunkin’ Donuts3 — once bore witness to a strange and beautiful alternative dream of what America could have been.
Morton had first arrived in Massachusetts in 1622, only two years after the Mayflower had made its landing, but he returned to England after expressing dissatisfaction with Puritan governance. A year later he returned and helped to establish a colony with his associate Captain Richard Wollaston, a notorious pirate and distinctly un-Puritan figure who named the settlement after himself. Mount Wollaston would come to an end shortly after its founding, when Morton discovered to his horror that the titular leader of the colony was selling its settlers into Virginian slavery. As a result, at some point in 1626, he encouraged an uprising against Wollaston, and upon the captain’s exile Morton became the new leader, renaming the colony variously “Mount Ma-Re” or “Merrymount”, a play on the Latin for sea, the Mother of God, and an emotion not associated with the Puritans — joy.
As Morton recounts, it was decided to mark, on May 1, 1627,  this new naming of the colony with a party of “Revels and merriment after the old English custome”. For the occasion Morton set up a gigantic maypole,  a “goodly pine tree of eighty feet long . . . with a pair of buck’s horns nailed on somewhat near unto the top of it, where it stood as a fair sea mark for directions on how to find the way”. Settlers and local Massachusett alike were encouraged to join in the revelry for which there was “brewed a barrell of excellent beare and provided a case of bottles, to be spent, with other good cheare, for all commers of that day.”4  Such mixing with Native Americans and drunken carousing around a maypole, with its pagan associations, was a direct affront to Morton’s Puritan neighbours. A repeat celebration the following year, after a further twelve months of Merrymount subverting Puritan norms, saw the Plymouth commander Myles Standish (a short man later slurred by Morton as “Captain Shrimp”) march a garrison into the idolatrous settlement, cut down the maypole, and have Morton sent off back to England in fetters.
Bernard Bailyn, in The Barbarous Years, describes Morton as “one of the strangest, most flamboyant, and most belligerently impious people ever to wander into the coastal scene” — a “nature lover, pleasure seeker, and a Rabelaisian celebrant of secular rites” who seems almost the diametrical opposite of the Puritans and Pilgrims who would exile him from America.5 Morton’s English background was “vague”, as Bailyn puts it, and his reputation “was said to be rather shady.”6 Such was the Plymouth leaders’ perception of the Renaissance man who sold arms to the Native Americans and encouraged liquor-fuelled carousing and cohabitation between the natives and his colonists; the classically trained barrister who saw himself as loyal to King and country, but who also invented his own syncretic folk culture born from the merging of Algonquin and Celtic traditions. He appeared to them as a threat to both the souls and fortunes of the Plymouth colonists. Leader of the Plymouth colony, William Bradford, in Of Plymouth Plantation (1651), would ragefully sputter about Morton’s maypole celebrants, whom he saw as “consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies, or furies, rather and worse practices . . . . Of the mad Bacchanalians.”7
Fortunately we don’t have to rely on Morton’s dour detractors for an account of Merrymount. We also have the colonist’s own impious, cheeky, and intelligent observations in The New English Canaan (1637), a work that is part ethnography of the native Algonquin, part geographic study of Massachusetts, part handbook on agriculture and husbandry, part philosophical tract on the values of toleration and religious melding, part political argument for the revocation of his enemies’ royal charters, and part ribald anti-Puritan diatribe. While it certainly helps shed light on Merrymount, it is important to remember that Morton wrote The New English Canaan nearly a decade after he had been exiled, in an England on the verge of civil war between High Church Anglican royalists like himself and the Puritan sympathizers of Parliament. The book was, Andrew Delbanco observes, “clearly intended as propaganda”8 — a ploy, as Gilles Gunn puts it, to “get the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company revoked by portraying the Puritans as anti-Anglican.”9 He would fail in that task, however, just as his side would fail in the upcoming civil wars.
Morton’s declared ambition for The New English Canaan was to “present to the public view an abstract of New England, which I have undertaken to compose by the encouragement of such genius spirits as have been studious of the enlargement of his majesty’s territories”,10 though today the book is probably better remembered for its inclusion of two enigmatic lyric poems which Morton had supposedly “affixed to . . . [the] idol” of the buck-horned Maypole for the edification of the revelers.11 Bradford found nothing to admire about what is arguably the first American poetry to be written in English, calling it merely “sundry rhymes and verses, some tending to lasciviousness, and others to the detraction and scandal of some persons.”12 Yet it’s possible to see in these sundry rhymes and verses an alternative vision of America to the one put forward by his Puritan adversaries.
The ribald joviality of Morton’s poem simply entitled “The Song” is clear. The black-clad men and women who settled in Massachusetts are often (not entirely fairly) envisioned as dour, austere, life-denying prigs who permanently bequeathed to their American intellectual descendants a hypocritical zealotry. Morton’s “song” offers an opposite vision, urging the colonists of Merrymount to “Make green garlands, bring bottles out / And fill sweet Nectar freely about . . . Then drink and be merry.”13 Morton (un)soberly records that the song was performed in a chorus with “every man bearing his part, which they performed in a dance, hand in hand about the Maypole”, knowing full well how indecent it would sound to any Puritan listeners.14
Merrymount can be seen as an anomaly, an attempt to reestablish “Merrie Olde England” in the New World, free of the encroaching threats of positivism, capitalism, and puritanism which increasingly defined modernity. Indeed, Morton himself is often seen as an “old-fashioned Englishman”, as Delbanco writes — an “emblem of the Elizabethan jollity threshed out of the American grain by a stern-visaged and iron-willed Puritanism.”15
If this risks reducing Morton to an allegorical figure, it is still certainly true that The New English Canaan’s conception of the land itself was steadfastly opposed to the Puritan “errand into the wilderness” which saw America as a howling wasteland — a frightening, demon-haunted void. If Puritans like Bradford and Winthrop saw their American mission as an exile (albeit one that involved the establishment of a New Israel), Morton harbored no such apprehensions about the natural world. To him, “the land... seemed paradise”,16 a sentiment common among Spanish colonists in South America and English colonists in Virginia, but anathema to his fellow New Englanders. Morton’s affection for America was uncomplicated: “The more I looked, the more I liked it.”17 Decades later, the memories still endured for Morton; he described the Massachusetts countryside in The New English Canaan by recourse to its “goodly groves of trees, dainty fine round rising hillocks, delicate fair large plains, sweet crystal fountains, and clear running streams.”  The new continent, he adds with a flourish, “was Nature’s masterpiece, her chiefest magazine of all where lives her store. If this land be not rich, then is the whole world poor.”18
This is the vocabulary of paradise, the rhetoric of Eden. For Morton, America promised to sustain the pre-Reformation culture which was his inheritance and at the same time return humanity to prelapsarian innocence. Of course, it is possible to see Morton’s language as partaking in the same consumptive logic that motivated other colonial missions, or to view his valorization of Native Americans as a form of infantilizing condescension. His conflation of the land and its people with a virginity to be ravished is evident in the words of “The Song”:
Drink and be merry, merry, merry boys;Let all your delight be in the Hymens joys;So to the Hymen, now the day is come,About the merry Maypole take a room.19
However, unlike other New England colonists, Morton does truly seem to revere the land and wish to incorporate the local Massachusett people into the social fabric of Merrymount. In singing about Hymen — the Roman god of marriage as well as the female anatomy — Morton is also encouraging (as he did at Merrymount and elsewhere in the pages of The New English Canaan) English settlers to join with Native American partners in the hopeful forging of a new American society. This was what so offended the Puritans and Pilgrims; not only that Morton engaged fairly with Native Americans as business partners, and was even willing to sell them guns, but that he had no prohibition on marital relationships between settlers and natives. While we must not forget that Morton was, at heart, still a colonialist — with all the exploitation of land and people this implies — he was certainly a different kind of colonialist. With the exception of figures like Rhode Island founder Roger Williams or the missionary John Elliot, New English rhetoric about Native Americans was often explicitly genocidal.
The encouragement of discourse between the colonists and Native Americans — along with Morton’s trading guns with them, his cornering of the lucrative beaver market, and his valorization of native ways of social organization, whereby he could claim that “Plato’s Commonwealth is so much practiced by these people”20 — enraged the fathers of Plymouth Plantation. Morton saw Merrymount, Richard Slotkin argues,  “as the fountainhead of that erotic energy to which all the new and old worlds might have recourse”, believing that “the Englishman must withhold nothing of himself from the wilderness and the Indian but merge thoroughly with them and refresh himself at the sources of human passion and affection.”21 Affection was not, obviously, bound to dictate the course of the American experiment.
Though Morton may have wished for a harmonious merging of English and Native American cultures, he soon found his experiment curtailed and his utopia abolished. The Pilgrims, he writes in the third person, “made up a party against him and mustered up what aid they could, accounting of him as of a great monster.”22 Despite that failure, however, we can find  something redemptive in Morton’s iconoclasm. His rhetorical campaign against the Puritans and Pilgrims emphasized that they had denied the beauties of the American landscape and the Native American peoples. Though Morton’s task was deeply traditional, based as it was on a fantasy of “Merrie Olde England”, it was still rooted in an understanding of humanity’s relationship with nature that is not outright antagonistic.  ※※Indexed under…UtopiaFailed
Again and again, Morton has emerged as an undercurrent in American culture since the seventeenth century. Condemned by John Adams, celebrated by Nathaniel Hawthorne, but more often than not a historical footnote, Morton can be regarded as part of a Manichean battle, where he and the Puritans grapple for control of national self-definition. Indeed, the clashes between Morton and his enemies provide a convenient metaphor for those warring dichotomies in the American spirit — puritanism and licentiousness, staidness and carnival, piety and irreverence. With the Puritans come the Protestant work ethic and self-loathing prudery, with Morton, sensuality and leisure; with the Puritans come cold theology and nascent capitalism, with Morton emotive poetry and ecstatic revels. While one could argue such oppositions to be over-simplistic, Morton remains a powerful disruptive presence in the common founding myth of American identity. What Morton promises us is that things need not be done as they always have been, for things have not always been done this way at all.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 24, 2020

author: Ed Simon