ABSTRACT
In 2001, I visited the Prado Art Gallery in Madrid, having a spare morning break from my meeting on science facilities in Europe where I was representing the United Kingdom. A quite large number of paintings by Goya were on display. It was very striking how those from his later years were painted in brown colours versus the balance of colours in the earlier works. I thought this was very odd, of course, and imagined it was an eye defect that had developed with his advancing years. I learned that this was explained as due to his depressions from unexpectedly becoming deaf in middle age. This is an example of how our emotions are very much linked to our perceptions of colour in the world. A beautifully explained and illustrated book about the use of colours in painting by Marcia Hall has been recently published by Yale University Press [1]. It caught my eye that it was Yale University Press. I had visited Yale University in the mid-1990s to present a lecture at the retirement symposium of a colleague, Dr Arvid Herzenberg. In a spare afternoon I visited the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, which I confess I was surprised to find, and a beautiful collection of art it indeed had, and has today (https://britishart.yale.edu/collections">https://britishart.yale.edu/collections). My favourite artist is the French painter, George Seurat, who uses the pointillist technique. His painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, painted between 1884 and 1886, which I saw at the Art Institute of Chicago, is my favourite painting; a framed copy of it is in our dining room at home. That painting is a wonderful balance of colours and technique, and superbly conveys to me the mood of relaxation on a Sunday afternoon. Interestingly, the Art Institute describes the painting as having a busy energy…
