Orange (colour)

• 1. Introduction

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  Orange is the colour that sits between yellow and red on the spectrum of visible light, and human eyes register it when light strikes them at a dominant wavelength between roughly 585 and 620 nanometres. That precise band of the spectrum has shaped the fates of royal houses, toppled governments, and sent Buddhist monks to the hills of Thailand in ochre robes dyed from jackfruit heartwood. What makes orange worth a documentary? Almost no colour in the human palette carries as many contradictions. It signals danger on highways and enlightenment in temples. It dresses prisoners and astronauts alike. It was the rallying banner of a Ukrainian revolution in 2004. And for Vincent van Gogh, writing to his brother Theo, it was the very substance of Provencal sunlight. Long before English even had a word for it, people saw this colour everywhere: in tomb paintings in ancient Egypt, in the saffron robes of wandering holy men in India, in the autumn leaves outside every door. How did one band of wavelengths come to carry so much meaning, across so many centuries and continents? That is the question this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Word From the Fruit

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  The earliest known recorded use of orange as a colour name in English dates to 1502, in a description of clothing bought for Margaret Tudor. Another written record of the word follows in 1512, in a will now filed with the Public Record Office. Before that, English speakers had no single name for this colour. They called it yellow-red, or ġeolurēad, or sometimes simply red, a word that once covered a wider range of hues, which is why red deer, red hair, and the robin redbreast all kept their names even as the language shifted. The word orange itself traces a long path: from the Sanskrit nāraṅga, through the Persian nārang, then Arabic, then Italian arancia, then the old French pomme d'orange, and finally into English and French as orange. The fruit arrived in northern Europe via Portuguese merchants in the late 15th and early 16th century, and the Sanskrit root word travelled with it. Even the name of the Spanish carrot, naranja, carries this ancient lineage. When the colour was occasionally used in heraldry before the word existed, heralds called it tawny or brusk. By the 17th century, the fruit was familiar enough that orange-coloured simply became orange as an adjective, the word absorbing the colour it once only described.

• 3. Pigments and Poison

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  In ancient Egypt, artists ground a mineral called realgar to produce orange paint for tomb walls. In the Indus Valley Civilisation, orange carnelians mined by the people of Kutch, in Gujarat, India, were widely worked into objects. Medieval manuscript painters used a mineral called orpiment, a yellow-orange substance that was a significant trade good across the Roman Empire and a medicine in ancient China, despite containing arsenic and being highly toxic. Alchemists in both China and the West prized it for its gold-like colour, believing it might hold the secret to making gold. It also served as fly poison and was applied to arrows. In 1797, the French scientist Louis Vauquelin discovered the mineral crocoite, or lead chromate, and that discovery led in 1809 to the first synthetic orange pigment: chrome orange. Other synthetic pigments followed in the same century, including cadmium orange, made from cadmium sulphide plus cadmium selenide. The invention of the metal paint tube in 1841 allowed artists to take these new pigments outdoors for the first time, and to paint natural light directly rather than from memory. Later in the catalogue of orange pigments came quinacridone orange, first identified in 1896 and manufactured commercially in 1935, and Diketopyrrolopyrrole orange, first commercialised in 1986, which is used to colour plastics, fibres, and paints to this day.

• 4. The House of Orange

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  The Principality of Orange, a feudal state of 108 square miles north of Avignon in southern France, was founded in 36 or 35 BC as a Roman-Celtic settlement named after the Celtic water god Arausio. It lent its name to a royal family whose influence would remake European history. The family of the Prince of Orange adopted the colour formally in the 1570s, and orange became associated with Protestantism through the family's role in the French Wars of Religion. William I of Orange organised eighty years of resistance against Spanish rule until the Netherlands won its independence. William III of Orange became King of England in 1689 following the downfall of the Catholic James II in the Glorious Revolution. That Protestant succession meant orange embedded itself in Irish politics as well. William III defended the Protestant minority in Ireland against the Catholic majority, and the Protestants of Ireland came to be called Orangemen. Orange eventually became one of the two colours of the Irish flag, representing that Protestant heritage. William's orange, white, and blue rebel flag became the direct forerunner of the modern flag of the Netherlands. When Dutch settlers left the Cape Colony and moved into the southern African interior in the 19th century, they named their new republic the Orange Free State. In the United States, the flag of New York City carries an orange stripe to acknowledge the Dutch colonists who built the settlement that became New York. William of Orange is also credited as the founder of the College of William and Mary, and Nassau County in New York is named for his royal house.

• 5. Painters and Light

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  In 1872, Claude Monet painted Impression, Sunrise, placing a tiny orange sun at the centre of a haze of blue, with orange light reflected on the water beneath it. That small painting gave the Impressionist movement its name. Monet and his contemporaries had read the current books on colour theory, and they understood that orange placed directly next to azure blue made both colours vibrate more intensely. Auguste Renoir applied chrome orange straight from the tube in stripes across the hulls of boats. Paul Cézanne avoided orange pigment entirely but produced his own warm oranges from touches of yellow, red, and ochre against blue backgrounds. Toulouse-Lautrec reached for orange in the skirts of dancers and the gowns of women in the Paris cafes and theatres he painted, treating it as the colour of festivity. The Pre-Raphaelites in Britain took a different approach: the flowing red-orange hair of Elizabeth Siddal, model and wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, became a defining symbol of that movement. Lord Leighton, president of the Royal Academy, painted Flaming June, a sleeping figure in a bright orange dress, which won wide acclaim. Among all these painters, Vincent van Gogh used orange most insistently. He wrote to Theo of searching for the oppositions of blue with orange, red with green, and yellow with violet, trying to make colours intense rather than a harmony of grey. In another letter he wrote simply: "There is no orange without blue." He put an orange moon and stars in a cobalt blue sky, and built his southern French light from mixtures of yellow, ochre, and red laid against slashes of sienna red and bottle green.

• 6. Sacred Saffron

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  In Buddhism, saffron orange is the colour of illumination, representing the highest state of perfection. The Buddhist texts themselves define which shades of saffron robes monks are permitted to wear. A candidate monk appears before the assembled monks of a monastery in his own clothes, carrying his new robe under his arm, and asks to enter the order. After taking his vows and putting on the robe, he takes a begging bowl and goes out into the world, spending his mornings begging and his afternoons in contemplation. The robe dye, according to the texts, may be obtained from six substances: roots and tubers, plants, bark, leaves, flowers, and fruits. The robes must be boiled in water for a long time to achieve the appropriately sober colour. Saffron and ochre, most commonly produced from the curcuma longa plant or the heartwood of the jackfruit tree, are the dominant shades. Forest monks tend to wear ochre; city monks wear saffron, though the distinction is not an official rule. The shade varies across Buddhist traditions by country and by school. Monks in the strict Vajrayana tradition of Tibet wear the most vivid saffron and red. Mahayana monks in Japan, China, and Korea wear lighter yellow or saffron, often combined with white or black. Forest-tradition monks in Thailand wear a brownish ochre dyed from jackfruit wood. In Hinduism, deep saffron is the most sacred colour of the faith. Krishna is traditionally portrayed in yellow or yellow-orange. Turmeric, which produces similar colours, contains the pigments known as curcuminoids, and has long been used to dye the robes of monks. The same curcuminoids are now used across Europe and the United States to colour canned beverages, ice cream, yoghurt, and breakfast cereals, listed as food colour E100.

• 7. Visibility, Danger, and Politics

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  During World War II, US Navy pilots flying over the Pacific began wearing orange inflatable life jackets, chosen because the colour is the easiest to spot in dim light or against open water. After the war, orange life jackets became standard on civilian and naval vessels of all sizes. The Golden Gate Bridge at the entrance of San Francisco Bay is painted international orange specifically to make it visible through fog. An aircraft's flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, both widely called black boxes, are in fact bright orange so crash investigators can locate them. Agent Orange, the herbicide sprayed from aircraft by the Royal Air Force during the Malayan Emergency and by the US Air Force during the Vietnam War, was not itself orange in colour; it took its name from the orange steel drums in which it was stored. The chemical was later linked to birth defects and other health problems. In November and December 2004, orange became the colour of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, a popular movement that carried Viktor Yushchenko into the presidency. Christian democratic political parties across Europe and the Americas adopted orange as their colour after World War II, grounding their ideology in Catholic social teaching and Neo-Calvinist theology. In Canada, the New Democratic Party's sweep of seats in Quebec in the 2011 federal election became known as the Orange Wave. In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security's threat-level system places orange second only to red. Orange ribbons are used to promote awareness and prevention of self-injury. The colour's meaning continues to expand: on the 14th of September 2017, North America's United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism adopted orange as part of a new outreach effort.