Rainbow's Gravity

This book follows the technical development of colour in Britain, from Victorian advances in synthesising pigments to the BBC's move into colour broadcasting. Its central claim is that this story cannot be separated from the wider modernisation that reshaped the country.

The author examines how new colour technologies fed into ideas of national identity during a period of industrial upheaval, the decolonisation of the Empire, and shifting attitudes to race and gender. Using colour as a lens, the book offers a fresh account of modern British visual culture. It argues that colour sits at the heart of the period's artistic directions and political alignments, and it proposes a new way of reading the era's visual landscape and the colourful objects it produced.

The sources range widely, from canvases by leading Victorian painters and colourful print advertisements to interwar fashion photography, Technicolor cinema and the early colour television programmes of the BBC. The book's core argument is that Britain modernised colour, and colour in turn modernised Britain. It is distributed on behalf of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.