It was used extensively in painting, wallpaper, flags, postage stamps, and became the official uniform colour of the Prussian Army. Within a few short years, the recipe had gone into factory production. Dippel, suddenly forced to flee legal action in Berlin for his controversial theological positions, failed to commercialise the newly named “Prussian blue”, but his dazzling co-invention was a secret too big to keep. The discovery sparked “blue fever” in Europe. Adding further worth, the pigment could be blended to produce entirely new colours, a process that the costly lapis lazuli did not allow. So the discovery of a stable blue colour was literally more valuable than gold. Its substitute, lapis lazuli, consisting of crushed Afghan gemstones, sold at astronomical rates. The recipe for Egyptian blue used by the Romans had been lost to history some time in the middle ages.
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The immense value of the substance was immediately clear. The following morning the pair found not the expected red, but a deep blue. One fateful evening around 1705, when Diesbach was preparing a batch of crushed insects, iron sulphate and potash in a reliable recipe for a deep red pigment, he accidentally used one of Dippel’s implements infected by the noxious oil. To cut costs in his Berlin laboratory, Dippel lab-shared with the Swiss pigment maker Johann Jacob Diesbach, a fellow scientist engaged in the lucrative business of producing colours. The consequence was Dippel’s oil, a compound so toxic that two centuries later it would be deployed as a chemical weapon in World War II. He instead settled on the apparently easier task of inventing an elixir of immortality. In his thirties, Dippel had become captivated by the proto-science of alchemy, but like so many in the profession, had failed to convert base metals into gold. Born in the actual “Castle Frankenstein” in Germany in 1673, the enigmatic theologian and passionate dissector believed the souls of the living could be funnelled from one corpse to another, thus becoming the rumoured inspiration for Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, Frankenstein. In truth, it had been invented half a world away, 130 years before Hokusai’s wave broke, in an accident involving one of Europe’s most colourful figures: Johann Conrad Dippel. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Felton Bequest, 1909 (426-2) Colourful figures The vibrant hue, long considered to be quintessentially Japanese, was actually a European innovation.ĭetail from Katsushika Hokusai, The great wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki namiura), (1830–34), from the Thirty-six views of Mt Fuji (Fugaku-sanjū-rokkei). The story of this blue pigment highlights the role of cultural exchange at the heart of creative discovery and ranks among the more contradictory tales in the history of art.
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The astounding power of the work belies its restrictive palette – it’s essentially a study in blue. At 70 years old, Hokusai was a master and created the image using four printing blocks. The most immediate and attractive aspect of Hokusai’s wave is its colour. As such, this small print exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria from July provides a valuable link to the gallery’s recent Van Gogh exhibition. The work profoundly motivated the French Impressionist movement, which in-turn shaped the course of European Modernism, the artistic and philosophical movement that would define the early 20th century. With the intense drama unfolding in the foreground, the central image of the work - the white-capped Mount Fuji - is easily missed, or mistaken for another ocean crest.Īlthough diminutive in scale, the importance of Hokusai’s “Great Wave” cannot be overstated. The boat’s occupants toil uncaring or unaware of the hovering deluge - the curve of their vessel matching the lines of the heaving sea around them. The print depicts a giant wave with unmistakable frothing tentacles poised to smash a boat below. Hokusai’s The great wave off Kanagawa remains the enduring image of Japanese art.