#paris green

[outofeverythingthisnamewasleft]

Effects of a toxic pigment called Paris green that contained arsenic.

[pomegranateteeth]

It’s just me and Paris Green against the world!🌿🧪🦗

I have contracted a mysterious illness...

I've been making you all green with envy at all my secret arsenic pigment knowledge, but now my dark work is complete, and I can finally share the fruits of my labor with you!

[twitcheerec]

paris green

[sparklywaistcoat]

Shape and Color in the Set Design of "Crimson Peak" (2015): A Bloglet

Today I watched Guillermo del Toro's 2015 film Crimson Peak, and noticed some really cool things happening in the set design. One of these things has to do with the use of shape in the design of rooms and passages, and the other is the use of color, in particular a specific shade of green.

Crimson Peak is a gothic horror film set in the late nineteenth century. The story follows Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), a young aspiring author who is the daughter of a successful and wealthy builder (Jim Beaver) in Buffalo, New York. One day, impoverished English aristocrat Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) shows up and tries to get Mr. Cushing to invest in his new invention, a type of steam-powered excavator. Sharpe is accompanied on this journey by his sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain). Thomas woos Edith, but when her father objects, he is murdered. After her father's death, Edith marries Thomas and returns to England with him and his sister, and that's when things start to unravel.

Shape

Allerdale Hall, the ancestral home of the Sharpes, is a rotting Victorian hulk situated on a hill in the middle of nowhere. The roof has decayed in many places, the walls are dank, and the corridors are dark and forbidding. It's wintertime, so the front hall has a dusting of snow and decaying leaves inside where the ceiling is open to the sky. When Edith arrives with Thomas and Lucille, Thomas suggests that Edith take a bath to warm herself up. He tells Edith not to be alarmed if the water runs red at first; there's a lot of red clay silt in the pipes. The red water is of course a foreshadowing of the bloodshed that is to follow, but what I want to concentrate on here is the shape of the bathroom.

Instead of having straight walls that are perpendicular to the floor and ceiling, the walls are angled. The angle recalls the shape of the coffins used to bury Edith's mother and father.

Edith is thus already metaphorically entombed, and the design of the room suggests that her fate is sealed.

The other use of shape comes in the connection between the statue that stands over the Cushing family's mausoleum and one of the interior corridors of Allerdale Hall. The corridor and the mausoleum statue have rounded tops and a tapering main column, and each of these shapes subtly references the iron maiden. Both the iron maiden and the mausoleum structure reference death, and the iron maiden further references torture, references that are fitting for a horror film.

Color

Green is one of the main colors used in the set design inside Allerdale Hall, in particular Scheele's green and Paris green, along with a variety of closely related shades. Scheele's green was first developed in 1775 by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, and it was used to color wallpaper and textiles. The color gradually went out of fashion starting in the 1860s when its toxicity was discovered: Scheele's green is made with arsenic, and under certain conditions items dyed with this color can release the arsenic and poison the people who come into contact with it.

Paris green is similarly toxic because of its own arsenic content. Paris green was first developed in 1814, and it likewise went out of fashion in part because of its toxicity. One important use for Paris green was in the cloth for book bindings. Some libraries still have these arsenical books in their collections, but they are usually kept under lock and key in special containers. Both Scheele's green and Paris green were used as insecticides for a time in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The use of these shades of green in Crimson Peak thus refers both to Edith's aspirations to be a published author and also to the toxic, deadly atmosphere of Allerdale Hall. The walls of several rooms and other spaces inside Allerdale Hall are either Scheele's green or Paris green or an adjacent shade, and the final image of the ending credits is of Edith's book, which has been bound in Paris green and is printed with the title Crimson Peak. The examples both here and above of interiors that use these shades of green are only a few of the many that occur throughout the second and third acts of the film.

[werewolfadmirer]

ever wondered how some paint colours were made back before synthetic paint existed? Well, it’s your lucky day because I’m going to explain a few!

Paris green/emerald green:

back in the late 1800s and the early 1900s, there was a major surge in the popularity of a colour called ‘Paris green’. The pigment, which was used in paints and dyes, was made from toxic substances called Arsenic and Mercury. The paint was popular with artists like Claude Monet and Van Gogh, who used it frequently in their paintings (you can see it being used heavily in Monet’s ‘Japanese footbridge’ which contains his famous water lilies.) People who had the colour within a close vicinity of them for an extended period of time — whether it was in wallpaper or clothing — would get incredibly sick and eventually die. Some reports state that the chemical would tint their skin a greenish colour.

Mummy Brown:

Yep, you read that right, ‘mummy brown’. This ghastly paint was made by crushing up and grinding down mummies that were decades of years old, and then mixing them up into an oil paint. What made the paint as special was the texture of the mixture. Due to the nature of the mummies being ground into a powder, small shards of mummies were left behind, making the powder slightly gritty. This is actually what made the paint rather popular among artists. The grittiness of the paint provided a textured finish to the painted surface, making it like no other paints.

Royal Purple:

It was quite hard to attain the colour purple back then as it wasn’t largely available. Due to the rare nature of the product, the colour was only used for royals! It was typically used as dyes for garments, which the deep richness of the purple signified that the person donning the garments was a member of the higher class, usually those who were royalty. But, how was the paint made? It was made from snail mucus! People would harvest the mucus of hundreds of sea snails and then mixed into a dye. The whole process to collect the mucus was laborious and tedious, the harvesters had to boil hundreds of the snails, and even then, they’d only produce enough to make a small patch of dye.

Realgar:

This paint is, yet again, made with Arsenic! The formula for the toxic mixture was made by crushing up arsenic sulphide, then adding it to an oil paint base. Despite containing similar chemicals to Paris green, this paint is a rich orange colour, as opposed to the greenish hue of Paris green. The chemical has a sinister history; firstly being that it was commonly used as an explosive, and secondly being that the chemical is that powerful, it can remove hair from your skin (and to this day, there are tutorials on how to use realgar to remove bodily hair).

Manganese Blue:

In 1907, a chemist melted different sorts of chemicals with magnesium at a high temperature and created what that called ‘Manganese Blue’! Unlike the other examples of usage that I’ve mentioned in this thread, this colour was commonly used on construction sites. It was used to dye cement a sea-like blue, and then used to line swimming pools to create the effect of blue water. There a three reasons why this saturated blue wqs discontinued. Firstly, it eventually costed too much to make. Sending miners down into the pits to collect each and every substance used in the process of producing the colour, proved to be far too expensive and would overwork miners. Secondly, a small percentage of if the substance could be a carcinogenic. Although no fatalities or injury has been recorded, the mixture of chemicals and substances may have a significant impact on health. Thirdly, as the years progressed, deeper and much richer blues were made more frequently, evidently pushing the manganese blue into retirement.

Sheeeeesh that’s a lot!! I hope whoever reads this, I hope you liked your spot of history :) I have much more to write about if anyone is interested!

[zephyr-zephyr]

The feeling when your niche interest intersects with another interest is incredible.

I’m reading Thirteen Storeys by Jonathan Sims and he mentioned Paris Green aka Emerald Green (one of the more deadly pigments and one of Van Gogh’s favorites, it’s the background color in one of his self portraits) and i am SO happy about it. Didn’t even need it to be mentioned by name i just saw the words “green” and “arsenic” and i got incredibly excited.

[random-chaotic-bitch]

help!!

so i need some help for a project. i’m writing a murder mystery screenplay, and the victim is a college art major killed by a rival art history major after she gets a particular grant. that’s not what i need help with, though.

what i need help with is the murder weapon. because the killer is an art history major, i want the murder weapon to be paris green paint, known for its incredibly high levels of arsenic. so, to the art history people: how much arsenic from the paris green paint would it take to kill someone, and how long would it take? the shorter the time period, the better, but i’d rather work with factual accuracy than a quick and dramatic death. also, what’s the best way for the victim to ingest/be exposed to the arsenic?

i swear i’m not a murderer!! this is purely for factual accuracy, and i’m running short on time to get this done.

thank you for whatever help you can give, and if you have more information that i might not have asked for, please share it!!

much love,

maddi 🩷🩵

[rapscallion-rumble]

Art Nerd Paul Zielinski

He's very avid about historical paints.