Celadon
- HEX
- #ACCFB0
- RGB
- 172 207 176
- HSL
- 127° 27% 74%
- CMYK
- 17 0 15 19
Celadon or Mint?
Greyer and a little darker than mint.
Language
Celadon is named after a lovesick shepherd. In Honoré d'Urfé's pastoral novel L'Astrée (1607 to 1627), Céladon wears pale green ribbons, and French collectors gave his name to the soft green glaze on Chinese ceramics.
Science
Celadon's green comes from a pinch of iron, roughly 1 to 2.5 percent, in a glaze fired in a kiln starved of oxygen. The missing oxygen turns the iron from its red form, the one that colors bricks, to a green one. Fire the same glaze with plenty of air and it comes out yellow-brown.
Art
Chinese potters made celadons for well over a thousand years, from Yue ware to the Longquan kilns of the Southern Song, prized because they looked like jade. Korean potters of the Goryeo period (918 to 1392) invented their own inlay: they carved designs and filled them with black and white clay.
History
Tang poets praised mi se, the 'mysterious color' celadon made for the court, and for about a thousand years no one knew exactly which wares they meant. In 1987 a sealed crypt under the Famen Temple pagoda was opened, with a stone inventory of bowls an emperor had donated in 874. The fabled color turned out to be a soft olive.
Culture
Celadon was believed to reveal or neutralize poison. Ottoman sultans collected it by the hundreds, and the Topkapi Palace still holds a huge hoard. It doesn't work: the Mughal emperor Jahangir reportedly tested it and found nothing.
Kin
- Jade: Chinese potters prized celadon for looking like jade
- Brick: Same iron, different fire: celadon green or brick red
- Oxblood: China's other legendary glaze, copper red fired the same way
- Bottle green: Iron tints both bottle glass and celadon glaze green
Sources
- Wikipedia, 'Celadon' (L'Astrée; iron 0.75-2.5%; Goryeo sanggam inlay)
- Wikipedia, 'Longquan celadon'; 'Goryeo ware'
- Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette (2002)
- St Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour (2016)
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.