Weld or Dyers RocketReseda luteola
botanical print
ca. 1863
O
ne page in Leslie’s Natural Dye Book especially caught
my eye. The beautiful bright, clear yellow dye weld reminded
me of the yellow garment in Orazio Gentileschi’s Lute Player
and, for the first time I began to wonder, not what pigments the
artist used, but how would the model’s gown have been dyed?
I started looking for books on natural dyeing and it turns
out there are now quite a few of them. Whole natural dyes,
extracts, mordants, etc. can be obtained from a number of
sources, one of which even has genuine Tyrian purple! (It’s
still really expensive: $4,280.00 for one gram.) 7 The nonprofit
Natural Dyes International website, naturaldyes.org, has links
to online instructions and organizations that offer classes, for
example the Handweavers Guild of America, the International
Mushroom Dye Institute, and the Center for Traditional Textiles
of Cusco. I had no idea there was such a large network.
The craft of natural dyeing has indeed been undergoing a
renaissance, hand in hand with spinning, knitting, and weaving.
Just after a family heirloom came my way, a New England
flax spinning wheel, c. 1790-1830, I happened upon a group of
spinners who meet regularly at the public library. They took a
lively interest in my artifact and helped me better understand
how it goes together, what parts it was missing, and who might
help get it back in working order.
There’s more to this than hobby crafts. Something is wrong
when the detritus of rampant mass-market industrialization
pollutes the oceans. You used to find kelp whips, sand crabs,
driftwood, and sometimes agates and beach glass on the
seashores. Now the tides wash up plastic. No wonder more
people long for a simpler life more in tune with nature.
Facing the unstoppable advance of industrial “progress,”
William Morris had this much right. There is an internal
satisfaction found in making necessary and beautiful things by
hand, that cannot be found in a mind-numbing assembly line.
True craftsmanship isn’t easy and requires moxie in the face
of failure. The craftsman is wholly responsible for the quality
of the work but also is in total control of his materials. When it
comes out right there is intrinsic reward.
In daily life we are glutted, jaded with too much color. The
commercial strip boulevards we like to avoid but drive through
by necessity, present a gaudy cacophony of billboards, car lots,
and fast food joints, all competing for attention. “Stop here and
buy,” they cry, and it’s wearisome to the eye and soul.
38
ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE
A page from the Leslie Stamoolis’s Natural Dye Book
showing several samples dyed with weld extract.
The Lute Player Burgoyne
Orazio Gentileschi (1563-1639)
c. 1612-1615
oil on canvas
56 1/4 x 50 1/4”
National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Mellon Bruce Fund, 1962.8.1
While the real garment must have been a yellow dye, likely weld or possibly
young fustic, the artist’s yellow pigments have been identified as Naples
yellow (lead antimonate) and possibly lead-tin yellow.
The natural world isn’t like this. The orange California poppies
and the Texas bluebonnets blanket the fields each spring. Even
these have sense enough to leave the stage until they are needed
the following year. The return to natural dyeing represents a
return to nature’s harmony.
Endnotes
1. John Seymour (1914-2004) was a prolific author and advocate of traditional craftsmanship and self-sufficiency.
His introduction to The Forgotten Crafts begins with, “Practically every artifact that a person uses nowadays can be
made from oil-derived plastic, in a large factory, by machine-minders whose chief quality is their ability to survive
lives of intense boredom. Even the machine-minders are being replaced rapidly by robots who …don’t get bored at
all.” The book describes a variety of once timeless crafts, from thatching to coopering, dry stone walling, basketry,
and brick making.
2. Rayon and viscose are made from processed cellulose and are not technically considered synthetic fibers. The first
true synthetic was nylon, introduced by DuPont in 1938.
3. A curiously intriguing article from 2016 claims that a cloth fragment from an ancient archaeological site on the
Peruvian coast reveals the use of cultivated cotton and indigo dye around 7800 years ago, predating the earliest
reported use, in Egypt, by some 1500 years. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/9/e1501623/tab-pdf
4. A Manual of the Art of Dyeing by James Napier, published in Glasgow in 1853, deals with natural dyes, though on
a much more scientific basis than the Plictho.
5. Tyrian purple is named for its association with the Phoenician city of Tyre. The dye came from a small gland in
a species of mollusk found in the Mediterranean Sea, which yielded the celebrated dye. It takes thousands of these
organisms to dye even a small portion of a garment.
6. The film can be found as a DVD and on YouTube.