Don’t eat your deadly greens

Why does the colour green remind you of poison and radioactivity? We're telling the story of two toxic green pigments to find out. Their stories interact with artists like Berthe Morisot, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, as well as the less likely figure of Napoleon Bonaparte. And we go for a very good nosy around Victorian libraries. 

Join cultural historian Kassia St Clair and National Gallery host Beks Leary to ask just how deadly these historic pigments really are! 

Kassia is the author of books including 'The Secret Lives of Colour', 'The Golden Thread' and 'Liberty: Design. Pattern. Colour'. She specialises in telling stories about the overlooked and every day. 

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Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/9PIn-7FesV8

You can email us with any questions via [email protected]

Find out more about the podcast on our website: www.nationalgallery.org.uk/podcast

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To take our short survey about the podcast please visit: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/podcast 

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Paintings mentioned:

Camille Pissarro, ‘The Côte des Bœufs at L'Hermitage’, 1877. The National Gallery, London https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/camille-pissarro-the-cote-des-boeufs-at-l-hermitage  

Edouard Manet, ‘Music in the Tuileries Gardens’, 1862. The National Gallery, London https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/edouard-manet-music-in-the-tuileries-gardens  

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Veronica Veronese’, 1872. The Delaware Art Museum © Delaware Art Museum / Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial / Bridgeman Images https://emuseum.delart.org/objects/321/veronica-veronese  

Berthe Morisot, ‘Summer’s Day’, about 1879. The National Gallery, London https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/berthe-morisot-summer-s-day  

Further reading:

Kassia St Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour, 2016 

David Bomford, Jo kirby, John Leighton and Ashok Roy, Art in the Making: Impressionism, 1990 

William Morris and Norman Kelvin, The Collected Letters of William Morris, 1984 

To see ‘The Arsenic Waltz’ wood engraving, dated to 8 February 1862, from Punch or the London Charivari, visit the Wellcome Collection’s online catalogue: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/awbr7whm/images?id=ascfupfg     

Lucinda Hawksley, Bitten by Witch Fever: Wallpaper & Arsenic in the Victorian Home, 2016 

Robert Clark Kedzie, Shadows from the walls of death: facts and inferences prefacing a book of specimens of arsenical wall papers, 1874 https://archive.org/details/0234555.nlm.nih.gov/page/n191/mode/2up 

Find out more about the ‘Poison Book Project’ – an interdisciplinary research initiative at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library and the University of Delaware: https://sites.udel.edu/poisonbookproject/ 

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Episode Credits:

Guest: Kassia St Clair 

Host and executive producer: Beks Leary 

Producer: Harry Rosehill 

Researcher: Hannah Rogers 

Technicians: Ian Warren and Timothy Carpenter 

Editor: Jeanne Kenyon and Paul Frankl 

Theme music: Theo Elwell