{"id":564,"date":"2022-01-06T17:53:38","date_gmt":"2022-01-06T17:53:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/?p=564"},"modified":"2025-12-30T17:58:24","modified_gmt":"2025-12-30T17:58:24","slug":"rose-pink","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/rose-pink\/","title":{"rendered":"Rose Pink"},"content":{"rendered":"

REQUEST A SAMPLE<\/a><\/p>\n

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The true British Rose-Pink, a color from Brazil.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I have been working for a couple of weeks to produce a pigment which was one of the archetypical botanical pigments of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British color palette.\u00a0 I don’t know if it is true, as others have claimed<\/a>, that red is the first color in most languages\u2014I mean after black and white.\u00a0 But it was the first color to go down on Sterne’s motley emblem: red first, then (usually) green and yellow.\u00a0 And its importance in early modern trade is matched by no other.\u00a0 Red pigments were among the engines of transatlantic colonialism, certainly not more important than sweetness and gold, but the only hue which can be spoken in the same conversation.\u00a0 A red called carmine<\/a>, made from cochineal, was an export from central America critical to Spanish colonial exploitation after the first flush of specie was violently exhausted, and reds from Caesalpinia echinata<\/em>\u2014Paubrasilia or the Brazilwood tree\u2014were harvested before anyone thought of Brazil as a place for sugar production.\u00a0 What is more, a red called vermillion, made from mercuric sulfide, travelled the other way, as a trade good exchanged for furs and other goods extracted from the North American interior.<\/p>\n

The red I have been laboring to recreate is a rough-and-ready red called rose-pink, a generic name for an everyday crimson pigment derived from brazilwood.\u00a0 Pinks are not necessarily pink<\/a>.\u00a0 They can be any color– which is why this one is specified as “rose.”\u00a0 Rather, a “pink” is a pseudo-lake<\/a>, in which the tingeing particles of a dye, instead of being precipitated directly on a substrate, are deposited from solution onto a “white earthy body” like chalk.\u00a0 Pinks can come in yellow, brown, green, blue– and occasionally light red.<\/p>\n

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The unprepossessing shavings from the heartwood of Caesalpinia Brasil, called “emberwood” for the fiery dye it can be made to render up.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Brazilwood has not much been used as timber or in the making of furniture; from the start, it has been used for color.\u00a0 After being cut and sawn, the dense heartwood of Paubrasilia<\/em> is a relatively unimpressive amber color, not unlike other dye-releasing heartwoods, like sandalwood, or Caribbean logwood (about which more below).\u00a0 But as soon as it is boiled, brazilwood releases a deep crimson dye, of which the amber sawdust gives no hint.\u00a0 The whole arrangement is fantastical, akin to a metamorphosis, and offers a good example of the sorts of quasi-natural chemical reactions that fascinated early-modern philosophical chemistry: a pile of amber shavings, boiled in clear water with alum (also clear), produces a colors not found in any reagent.\u00a0 Explaining the emergence of new qualities was one of the first challenges of early modern atomic chemistry, like the “corpuscular” system of Robert Boyle, and the “emergent redness” of a certain botanical tea<\/a> was one of his most important examples (something I have discussed <\/span>elsewhere<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

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Brazilein, the organic flavonoid responsible for brazilwood’s deep red dye.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Robert Dossie, to whose Handmaid of the Arts <\/em>I am indebted for the rose-pink recipe, reports that the quality of rose-pink is to be judged by its color; it is more valuable as it inclines to a true, deep crimson, and less so as it inclines to purple.\u00a0 The active compound responsible for its color, a flavonoid called brazilein, was well-known even then to be sensitive to (what we now call) pH levels<\/a>; it is known empirically that an acidic solution will produce more orange shades, while an alkali one will incline to purple.\u00a0 But Dossie’s warning about quality wasn’t really about problems in controlling the alkalinity of the chemical dye-bath.\u00a0 Even in 1760, the year that the motley emblem was manufactured, brazilwood was already overharvested<\/a>.\u00a0 From an ecological perspective, this of course means that slow-growing Paubrasilia remains endangered, and coming across genuine brazilwood, from responsible sources, is difficult.\u00a0 But, from a practical one, it means that the genuine brazilwood was often adulterated with outwardly similar species, like Campeche<\/em>, a Caribbean export Dossie calls “Peachy wood,” and which commonly goes by “logwood.”\u00a0 Because hematoxylin, the flavonoid from logwood, is highly similar to brazilein, rose-pinks can be made with mixed reagents.\u00a0 Dossie himself reports on the possibility.\u00a0 But since that slightly different flavonoid produces a different range of purplish colors, the true crimson can only be achieved from brazilwood in its unadulterated state.\u00a0 Helping consumers tell the difference was one of the purposes of Dossie’s book.<\/p>\n

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Might be a beautiful purple, but not a desirable pink: this pigment is not a brazilwood pink.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I will add that something like this sort of adulteration affected my earliest trials with Dossie’s rose-pink.\u00a0 Each batch of rose-pink takes roughly eight hours to prepare, boiling the shavings in alum and water, multiply filtering them through paper, then slowly evaporating the resulting tincture, all the while “washing over” a quantity of chalk with a further quantity of alum.\u00a0 But, every time, even changing sources of chalk, water, and alum, even altering the proportions of alum in the chalk, or differently grinding chalk with tincture, I would see that crimson tincture hit the chalk and transform, within minutes, to a deep violet hue, exactly what Dossie inveighs against.<\/p>\n

It was only after acquiring a small offcut of plantation-grown brazilwood and transforming it to sawdust myself that I was able to achieve the deep, dark red which was the object of Atlantic piracy and ecological predation.\u00a0 Logwood shavings look like brazilwood to a human eye (though, I have since discovered, they smell different to a human nose).\u00a0 What I had been working with before had clearly been stepped on by a supplier up the supply chain, or swapped out altogether– either as a cost-cutting measure, or simply by mistaking one pile of shavings for another.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
P. Toornenburgh, “De beinnenplaats van het Rasphuis” (c. 1799), where labor, extracted from convicts, extracted dye from paubrasilia.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The European brazilwood system militated against adulteration by scrupulously controlling the supply and circulation of the true brazilwood shavings, extracting rent along the way.\u00a0 Some of this rent was extracted in import fees and duties, but other methods were also tried, including the Rasphuis in Amsterdam, a state-controlled penal institution which employed the forced labor of convicts to rasp whole logs into shavings.\u00a0 (I reduced my scrap of brazilwood by running it over a stack dado-head cutter on a table saw attached to a shop vacuum.)<\/p>\n

Here’s the recipe from Dossie’s Handmaid to the Arts<\/em>; quantities can of course be reduced as long as the ratio is maintained.\u00a0 A good starting place is a ratio of ten grams to every pound.<\/p>\n

Take Brazil wood six pounds, or three pounds of Brazil wood and three of Peachy wood.\u00a0 Boil them an hour with three gallons of water, in which a quarter of a Pound of allum is dissolved.\u00a0 Purify then the fluid by straining through flannel, and put back the wood into the boiler with the same quantity of allum, and proceed as before; repeating this a third time.\u00a0 Mix then the three quantites of tincture together, and evaporate them till only two quarts of fluid remain, which evaporation must be performed first in the pewter boiler, and afterwards in the balneo mariae<\/em>.\u00a0 Prepare in the mean-time eight pounds of chalk by washing over; a pound of allum being put into the water used for that purpose, which, after the chalk is washed, must be poured off and supplied by a fresh quantity, till the chalk be freed from the salt formed by the allum; after which it must be dried to the consistence of stiff clay.\u00a0 The chalk, and tincture as above prepared, must be then well mixed together by grinding.<\/p>\n

If your reagents are good, you will wind up with a pigment somewhere between crimson and fuchsia; if they are adulterated, you will have a rich purple one, which, for what it is worth, the Motley Emblem’s junior apprentice (age 9) vastly prefers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

REQUEST A SAMPLE I have been working for a couple of weeks to produce a pigment which was one of the archetypical botanical pigments of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRose Pink - The Motley Emblem<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/rose-pink\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Rose Pink - The Motley Emblem\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"REQUEST A SAMPLE I have been working for a couple of weeks to produce a pigment which was one of the archetypical botanical pigments of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British … Read More\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/rose-pink\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Motley Emblem\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2022-01-06T17:53:38+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2025-12-30T17:58:24+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/02\/Rose-Pink-scaled.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Sean Silver\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Sean Silver\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/rose-pink\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/rose-pink\/\",\"name\":\"Rose Pink - 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My last project was a born-digital museum of eighteenth-century cognitive models; visit at www.mindisacollection.org. I am currently engaged in recreating a marbled page from Laurence Sterne's novel _Tristram Shandy_. 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