Black
- HEX
- #16171A
- RGB
- 22 23 26
- HSL
- 225° 8% 9%
- CMYK
- 15 12 0 90
Language
Old English had near-twins: blæc, black, and blac, pale or shining. Both may come from a root meaning to burn: the glow of fire and the soot it leaves. Medieval writers mixed them up so often that the surname Blake can mean either pale or dark.
History
Black was the first drawing material. People drew lions and rhinos in charcoal on the walls of Chauvet Cave in France more than 30,000 years ago. Painters later charred bones and ivory for bone black and ivory black, and collected soot for lamp black.
Symbolism
Black opens the alchemist's Great Work: nigredo, the blackening, rot before rebirth (alchemy). Heraldry calls black sable, after the dark fur. Across much of Europe it is the color of mourning; Queen Victoria wore it for forty years after Prince Albert died in 1861.
Design
Henry Ford wrote that a customer could have a Model T 'any colour that he wants so long as it is black.' In fact the car came in red, grey, green and blue until 1914 and got colors back in 1926. The story that black was chosen because it dried fastest has little evidence. In 1926 Vogue called Chanel's little black dress 'Chanel's Ford'.
Science
The blackest blacks are forests of carbon nanotubes. Vantablack, unveiled in 2014, swallows about 99.96% of light, so a crumpled sheet coated in it looks like a flat hole. The sculptor Anish Kapoor's exclusive right to use it as art sparked a long feud.
Kin
- White: Every language names dark and light first; color words start here
- Red: Alchemy's Great Work begins in black and ends in red
- Charcoal: Burnt wood, the black of the first cave drawings
- Ivory: Ivory black was made by charring ivory scraps
- Pink: Vantablack's exclusive license provoked the 'pinkest pink'
In paintings
- The Arnolfini Portrait, Jan van Eyck
- The Arnolfini Portrait, Jan van Eyck
- The Arnolfini Portrait, Jan van Eyck
- The Milkmaid, Johannes Vermeer
- Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci
- Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer
- The Swing, Jean-Honoré Fragonard
- Whistler's Mother, James McNeill Whistler
Sources
- Etymonline, 'black'
- Ford, My Life and Work (1922); Ed Conway, 'Watching paint dry' (Model T colors 1908-1926)
- Vogue, October 1926, via Wikipedia, 'Little black dress'
- Surrey NanoSystems (2014); Smithsonian Magazine on the Kapoor-Semple feud (2016)
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.