Ben Stephens is impressed by the Ashmolean’s exhibition on Victorian fashion.
About a third of the way through the Ashmolean Museum’s latest exhibition, Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design, there’s a wall with the legend: “Colour for the Masses”. Great, I thought – this is where the Church gets a look-in. And it does, shortly and briefly, through a small, ancient and odd-looking book. Made in Rheims at some point in the 9th century, it is a rare “purple codex”; which is to say that its pages are coloured purple and its lettering done in gold.
It is so arresting that it looks as though it should be a prop in some blockbuster-budget film, but the text is clear and the Latin correct; it is very much the real deal. A curatorial caption starts excitingly by telling us that “purple codices were precious medieval parchment books that were long believed to have been coloured using Tyrian purple dye made from murex snails”, but shudders to a halt by revealing that “recent research suggests many were dyed using vegetable dyes made from lichens”.
It was a bit deflating: who doesn’t want their purples made from ground-up gastropods? So, it transpired, was “Colour for the Masses” – which in this case referred to the opening up of options in clothing for the less well off, through the story of William Perkins and his accidental discovery of synthetic mauve in 1856. Perkins was 18, and supposed to be looking for a cure for malaria, but – typical student – got distracted in the laboratory and ended up a millionaire instead. Nice work, if you can get it.
Before I start sounding too grumpy, it’s worth saying that this is a really interesting exhibition. It starts with one of Queen Victoria’s mourning dresses, and makes a point of trying to dispel the idea that 19th-century Britain was all doom and gloom, sick children, polluted rivers and dirty gasworks. This the curators do very effectively, pointing out that “nothing could be further from the truth”. They argue, in fact, that the Victorian era was more colourful than any that preceded it, and then show visitors how.
The catalogue is colourful, too – not only in its contents but on the cover, the spine and even the edges of the pages. Xa Sturgis, the Director of the Ashmolean, notes that the exhibition “seeks to recapture the excitement and anxiety … as artists, makers and writers embraced, responded to and resisted the new chromatic possibilities”. Which is to say that despite the Widow of Windsor, the Victorians were in fact pioneers in their uses of colour – in some cases even daring by today’s standards – and changed the fashion world forever.
They were pioneers in other directions as well, of course. The main exhibition space is done up to look like the Crystal Palace, home of “The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations”, to give it its full title. Filled with jewels, statues and paintings – and also a fountain at the centre, which alas is dry – it hints at the Victorian taste for the bold and the bright. Meanwhile shades of Empire fall, but are treated sensibly – which isn’t to say that tensions and complications aren’t acknowledged.
It’s startling to think of the changes that had taken place by the end of Victoria’s reign; the last rooms are full of things that we’d not give a second look today, and the whole thing culminates with a video of “The Electric Fairy”, Loïe Fuller: all colour and movement, lights and dance, legs and skirts. It really was a Colour Revolution, then; what a contrast with that short (and wide) black dress at the opening end. It had never really occurred to me before how clothes carry most of the changing colours that we ourselves see, day by day.
Which brings me back to the Church. The Catholic Augustus Welby Pugin is represented, but mainly through his secular work in the Houses of Parliament; so is William Burges, the architect of choice of the convert Marquess of Bute. Religion isn’t entirely absent from this exhibition, then, but perhaps should be a little nearer the front.
The Victorians were obsessed with religion: but the religion of the British Establishment in 1837 was a version of Protestantism that had bleached the worship of God into black and white and shades of grey. One place that colour flourished was in Catholic liturgies – resurgent after Emancipation in 1829, and growing in confidence thereafter.
More controversially, it also abounded in the Ritualist movement in the Church of England from a few decades later. In the 1870s Parliament passed legislation to try to stop that happening, which would have made for an interesting reflection on how far certain Victorians were prepared to go to shut down the “Colour Revolution” in at least one of its conduits.
It’s a fairly niche gripe, I know – and the exhibition really is an enjoyable few hours spent in the company of experts who are evidently in full control of their brief. I think what I mean is that I’d like to have seen a case full of lovely Victorian vestments – but then I’m writing this for the Catholic Herald, so what did you expect?
Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design is at the Ashmolean Museum until February 18, 2024
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