21 Mar Colour Group (GB) Presents: 2024 International Colour Day
Pigments, the usual suspects – or not? Newly discovered materials in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum
Image source: stock image of Victoria and Albert Museum; Sky edited with Adobe Photoshop AI Generator.
Since 2009, International Colour Day has been celebrated on 21st March every year in over thirty countries. In 2012, the International Colour Day logo competition was held in Taipei, Taiwan. Hosanna Yau of Hong Kong was the winning designer. The briefing for the design reads, “Two circles form an eye, with an equal half of rainbow colour and black representing light and darkness, day and night, everyone feasts one’s eye on the international colour day.”
The schedule
2:15pm – 2:30pm Gathering within the reception area
2:30pm – 3:30pm Guided Tour
3:30pm – 4:30pm Halstead-Granville Tea at Victoria & Albert Museum
A Coromandel Screen; Image source: Victoria and Albert Museum Collections
The Colour Group (GB) will mark International Colour Day by returning to the Victoria and Albert Museum this year. Dr Lucia Burgio will lead a tour around the Museum, introducing the participants to the intriguing colour history of selected objects from the collection. Amongst those will be:
• A Coromandel Screen (above).
• A engraved multi-coloured lacquered wood cabinet example of “Bantam work” (below).
• Some late 16th-century portrait miniatures (example below).
This event has a limited capacity of 20 attendees. Tickets are issued on a first come, first serve basis. Once the event capacity has been reached, registrants will be put on waiting list.
A engraved multi-coloured lacquered wood cabinet example of “Bantam work” (below; Image source: Victoria and Albert Museum Collections).
Dr Lucia Burgio is Lead Conservation Scientist at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, where she heads the Science laboratory and guides the scientific analysis of museum objects. She assists the Museum’s curators and conservators in examining and understanding the collections, providing information on materials and techniques, construction methods, date and provenance. She has published extensively on her special interests (historical pigments and American and Asian lacquer).
She obtained her Master’s equivalent degree in Chemistry from the University of Palermo, Italy, and her PhD in Chemistry from University College London. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Chemistry, UCL; she is the chair of the AMC Heritage Science Expert Working Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry, using her position to promote the role and importance of analytical science in the cultural heritage sector and disseminate heritage science to various audiences.
• Some late 16th-century portrait miniatures (below; Image source: Victoria and Albert Museum Collections).