The Sheremetev & Partners Foundation presents a lecture series on the technical study of pigments, material culture and the social history of colour in Europe and East Asia.

The programme examines how the availability of raw materials, textile dyeing technologies and the trade in pigments shaped social hierarchies, economic institutions and visual codes in the traditions of West and East.

7 October — A History of Colour: Black (Kuro 黒). The evolution of black from Spanish court etiquette of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the Victorian industrial canon to the Japanese understanding of tonal density in ink, in lacquer and in the ritual blackening of teeth.

8 October — A History of Colour: Red (Aka 赤). A comparative account of the global circulation of red pigments: from the conquest of the Americas and the export of cochineal to the application of mineral pigment in Japanese textiles and beyond.