Colour matters: New approaches to chromatic materiality: the ERC project CHROMOTOPE (2019-2024)

The ERC project CHROMOTOPE focuses on the changes that took place in attitudes to colour in the second half of the 19th century, particularly in Victorian England, then in the vanguard of the industrial revolution. Britain’s industrial supremacy is often perceived through a black-and-white filter, as the ‘funereal’ age of coal pollution and bleak, working-class slums reflected in the dark, supposedly ‘gothic’, tones of the films, T.V. series, and video-games set in that period. And yet, the industrial revolution totally transformed colour and notably the chemical composition of colouring materials. Interweaving visual culture, literature and chemistry, this presentation will draw on the pioneering analyses carried out by the CHROMOTOPE team to provide new insight into how major Victorian chromophiles, such as William Morris, William Holman Hunt or William Burges, related to the scientific culture of their time and how this in turn fuelled their artistic imagination and practice. This lecture will also offer a unique preview of the forthcoming exhibition Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and Design which will open at the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford) on 21 September 2023 and which is one of the main outcomes of CHROMOTOPE.

Charlotte Ribeyrol is Professor of English Literature at Sorbonne Université in Paris, Junior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France and Honorary Curator at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Her main field of research is Victorian Hellenism and the reception of the colours of the past in 19^th-century painting and literature. She has published extensively on these related topics. Her first monograph entitled ‘Etrangeté, passion, couleur’, L’hellénisme de Swinburne, Pater et Symonds came out in 2013. In 2014-2016 she co-directed a major interdisciplinary project on chromatic materiality (POLYRE, IDEX Sorbonne Universités) with chemists and archeologists, which led to the publication of a collection of essays entitled The Colours of the Past in Victorian England (Peterlang, Oxford, 2016). Following her Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellowship at Trinity College, Oxford (2016-2018), she was awarded an ERC consolidator grant for her project CHROMOTOPE (2019-2024) which explores the 19^th century ‘chromatic turn’. Her monograph on the Victorian architect and chromophile William Burges entitled William Burges’s Great Bookcase (1859-62) and the Victorian Colour Revolution will be published by Yale University Press in June 2023. As part of this research project, she is also the lead curator of the forthcoming major exhibition Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and Design (Ashmolean Museum, Sept. 2023-Feb. 2024)

Please find the video registration of the event on our VIMEO CHANNEL: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/821195853

Scientific Organization: Wenyi Qian and Érika Wicky