The experience of colour underwent a significant change in the second half of the nineteenth century, as new coal tar-based synthetic dyes were devised for the expanding textile industry. These new, artificial colours were often despised in artistic circles who favoured ancient and more authentic forms of polychromy, whether antique, medieval, Renaissance or Japanese. However faded, ancient hues were embraced as rich, chromatic alternatives to the bleakness of industrial modernity, fostering fantasized recreations of an idealized past. The interdisciplinary essays in this collection focus on the complex reception of the colours of the past in the works of major Victorian writers and artists. Drawing on close analyses of artworks and literary texts, the contributors to this volume explore the multiple facets of the chromatic nostalgia of the Victorians, as well as the contrast between ancient colouring practices and the new sciences and techniques of colour.

Charlotte Ribeyrol is Associate Professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Oxford (2016-2018) and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France since 2015. Her main field of research is the influence of Ancient Greece on Victorian painting and literature, particularly in the works of A.C. Swinburne, J.A. Symonds and Walter Pater. Thanks to her interdisciplinary collaboration with chemists from the POLYRE programme (supported by Sorbonne Universities), she is now exploring the importance of the materiality of colour in the works of major Victorian writers and artists, notably William Morris.

Contents: Charlotte Ribeyrol: Introduction – Charlotte Ribeyrol/Philippe Walter: «A magic web with colours gay»: W.H. Hunt’s Chromatic Nostalgia – Caroline Arscott: Whistler and Whiteness – Stefano Evangelista: Symphonies in Haze and Blue: Lafcadio Hearn and the Colours of Japan – Isabelle Gadoin: The Orient in Chromolithography: Owen Jones and the Colours of Islamic Art – Michael Seymour: Colour and its Reconstruction in the Nineteenth-Century Rediscovery of Assyrian Art – Lene Østermark-Johansen: «Like fragments of the milky sky itself»: The Late Nineteenth-Century Revival of Luca della Robbia’s Coloured Terracottas – Marc Porée: ‘Popularity’ in Blue – Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière: Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater’s «Key to the Meanings of Colours» in (1901) – Claire Masurel-Murray: «White Alb and Scarlet Camail»: The Colours of Catholicism in Fin-de-Siècle Literature.