"Blue is the color of the sky and water, symbolizing peace and serenity. The Ancient Egyptians created the first blue pigment around 2,200 B.C. They heated a mixture of sand, ground limestone and copper-containing minerals like malachite or azurite at a high temperature. This process created an opaque blue glass that was crushed and combined with a thickening agent to make glaze and paint.
Ultramarine was usually reserved for only the most important commissions, such as the blue robes of the Virgin Mary in Gérard David’s Virgin and Child with Female Saints. Supposedly, Baroque master Johannes Vermeer loved the color so much that he pushed his family into debt. It remained extremely expensive until a synthetic ultramarine was invented in 1826, by a French chemist, which was then aptly named “French Ultramarine.”
Cobalt blue dates back to the 8th and 9th centuries, and was then used to color ceramics and jewelry. This was especially the case in China, where it was used in distinctive blue and white patterned porcelain. A purer alumina-based version was later discovered by French chemist Louis Jacques Thénard in 1802, and commercial production began in France in 1807. Painters,such as J. M. W. Turner, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Vincent Van Gogh,started using the new pigment as an alternative to expensive ultramarine.
Originally composed of cobalt magnesium stannate, the sky-colored cerulean blue was perfected by Andreas Höpfner in Germany in 1805 by roasting cobalt and tin oxides. However, the color was not available as an artistic pigment until 1860 when it was sold by Rowney and Company under the name of coeruleum. Artist Berthe Morisot used cerulean along with ultramarine and cobalt blue to paint the blue coat of the woman in A Summer's Day, 1887."
i can't remember if i posted this to my old blog but it’s important so either way i am going to post it here as well: hallie rubenhold (historian who covers sex work, author of ‘the five’ and ‘the covent garden ladies’ — which was adapted into the show ‘harlots’) follows julie bindel, a radical feminist journalist from the uk, who is sex-work exclusionary, and one of the Big Names™️ in mainstream british transphobia.
Period dramas dresses tournament: Red dresses Round 1- Group B: Seymour Worsley, The scandalous lady W (gifset) vs Mrs. Steerforth, The personal history of David Copperfield (full dress in the 23th gif in this gifset)