Silver
- HEX
- #C0C0C0
- RGB
- 192 192 192
- HSL
- 0° 0% 75%
- CMYK
- 0 0 0 25
Silver or Slate?
A clean light grey with no tint, much lighter than slate.
A flat screen stand-in for the shiny metal.
Science
Photography began with silver. Silver salts darken in light, and Louis Daguerre's process of 1839 fixed images on silver-plated copper. Black-and-white film and prints are made of tiny grains of silver.
Art
Before pencils, artists drew with silver. Silverpoint, a silver wire dragged over prepared paper, leaves fine grey lines that tarnish to warm brown over months. Albrecht Dürer drew his self-portrait in silverpoint at 13.
Symbolism
Heraldry calls silver argent and paints it white. Alchemy ties silver to the moon, as it ties gold to the sun.
History
Silver paid for an empire. From 1545 the Spanish mined the Cerro Rico at Potosí, in today's Bolivia, with forced Indigenous labor, and its silver flooded the world's markets. Even a country is named for it: Argentina comes from Latin argentum, silver, after the riches Europeans hoped to find up the Río de la Plata, the 'river of silver'.
Kin
- Gold: Alchemy's moon and sun; heraldry's two metals
- White: Heraldry paints silver as white: argent
- Sepia: Sepia toning turns a photo's silver into brown silver sulfide
In paintings
- Rouen Cathedral (series), Claude Monet
- Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich
- Whistler's Mother, James McNeill Whistler
- Woman with a Parasol, Claude Monet
- Woman with a Parasol, Claude Monet
Sources
- Wikipedia, 'Silverpoint' (tarnish; Dürer)
- Britannica, 'Daguerreotype'
- St Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour (2016)
- Wikipedia, 'Argentina' (etymology); 'Potosí'
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.