Grayness - Grey in History and Art - Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Grey became a highly fashionable color in the 18th century, both for women's dresses and for men's waistcoats and coats. It looked particularly luminous coloring the silk and satin fabrics worn by the nobility and wealthy.

Women's fashion in the 19th century was dominated by Paris, while men's fashion was set by London. The grey business suit appeared in the mid-19th century in London; light grey in summer, dark grey in winter; replacing the more colorful palette of men's clothing early in the century.

The clothing of women working in the factories and workshops of Paris in the 19th century was usually grey. This gave them the name of grisettes. "Gris" or grey also meant drunk, and the name "grisette" was also given to the lower class of Parisian prostitutes.

Grey also became a common color for military uniforms; in an age of rifles with longer range, soldiers in grey were less visible as targets than those in blue or red. Grey was the color of the uniforms of the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, and of the Prussian Army during the Franco-German War of 1870.

Several artists of the mid-19th century used different tones of grey to create memorable paintings; Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot used tones of green-grey and blue grey to give harmony to his landscapes, and James McNeill Whistler created a special grey for the background of the portrait of his mother, and for his own self-portrait.

Whistler's arrangement of different tones of grey had an effect on the world of music, on the French composer Claude Debussy. In 1894, Debussy wrote to violinist Eugène Ysaÿe describing his Nocturnes as "an experiment in the different combinations that can be obtained from one color – what a study in grey would be in painting."

• Portrait of Captain Augustus Keppel (1752) by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

• Portrait of Charlotte Walsingham, Lady Fitzgerald by John Hoppner (18th century). Grey was a color of high fashion in the 18th century.

• Private Edwin Francis Jemison of the Confederate Army, (between 1860 and 1862), a soldier in the American Civil War, wore a grey uniform. The war was sometimes called the War of the blue and the grey.

• An oak in the Forest of Fontainbleau, by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (about 1830).

• Arrangement in grey and black no.1 by James McNeill Whistler, (1871), better known as Whistler's Mother.

• The Self-Portrait of James McNeill Whistler (1872), also called 'Arrangement in grey" was a virtuoso concert of different tones of grey.