The
whites
[Translation:
Anne Clerget]
French text
[Recommended readings :
White in the French language, Pourpre.com
The white colour, Pourpre.com]
Long before we used well
identified white pigments, corresponding to precise standards, humankind has
been taking advantage of numerous products. Different kinds of researches
emerged over the centuries : research for a
hiding
white and for a true bright white.
All these quests
encountered significant difficulties. Totally satisfactory solutions are
very recent.
Human beings from the ancient times started with an imperfectly white
material and tried to bleach it. The commercial stakes were conditioned by
the processes. Mediterranean Antiquity used
Sardinian clay and Gallic saponaria (see
glucosides). This type of process has been employed, massively, until
the Renaissance. The work of leather-scratching or stretching still exists
in different places of the world to obtain a "white" which is actually more
of an ecru.
The first really hiding white
discovered in human history is lead
white
(Antiquity), which is unfortunately toxic. Then, a lot, lot later, came
titanium (see picture above), which solved a thousand-year-old problem:
how to combine opaqueness, innocuousness and stability in blends. From then,
transparency cannot be considered as a flaw, but as a specificity.
Ancient (sometimes prehistoric) recourse to materials such as white sheep
(or other animals) wool, seashells, white buffalo (or other animals)
leather, Japanese processed silk, fabric sulphurization in Celtic or
medieval Europe, sun bleaching in Central America or dew bleaching in Europe
(until the XVIIIth century), etc., took consequently another
value.
See
Gesso.
White is
an abstraction. It has been defined by Newton as the
addition of equal intensity spectrums (read
passage in the article about black body). In fact, there is not only one
white but a lot of matters relatively not very selective regarding the
spectrum. Each of them has a personnality resulting from its components.
For
ages, the recourse to purplish or blueish elements has made possible the
impression of brightness for whites that were naturally a bit yellow:
balancing a too obvious natural selectivity with another one produces an
effective illusion. The eye sees
a white
whereas the colour is actually a genuine grey obtained by colour synthesis!
Currently,
two main categories of white are usually accepted :
*
Whites known as natural
(see picture: Meudon white). See
White earths.
*
Synthetic whites, are oddly called
"mineral whites" (see also
lead white).
And one
exception :
*
Lithopone white, composed both of barium
white (which is more or less natural in the sense that it derives directly
from white earths) and of zinc white which is a synthetic white.
All are from
"mineral origin". The term "mineral white", which is relatively redundant,
has maybe no reason to be as long as we don't mention the white of teeth,
eyes, sandalwood, lily, etc., organic, of course, but pictorially little
usable.
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