Edo Colour Palette

1 Handscroll — Visit of Korean Ambassadors to Edo Castle

Tosa School, c. 1790–1810

Dominated by a distinctive soft blue-green (verdigris / rokusho) on the tatami and floor areas. This is paired with:

• Warm tan/gold for the architectural woodwork and beams
• Deep indigo and black on the officials' robes
• Rich crimson/vermillion on select garments (the central figure in blue being the most vivid accent)
• Cream/buff background paper showing through clouds
• Muted earth tones — browns and ochres on the wooden structure

2 Triptych woodblock — Night Attack of the 47 Ronin

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, c. 1830s

Much more dynamic and saturated:

• Snow white — the largest single area, creating dramatic negative space
• Black — the ronin's distinctive striped surcoats (black-and-white chevron pattern)
• Deep Prussian blue — sky, distant hills, shadows on snow
• Vermillion/red — temple architecture, gate posts, scattered clothing
• Grey-green — pine trees under snow
• Yellow-gold accents in cartouches and name labels

3 Triptych woodblock — Ghosts of the Taira at Daimotsu Bay

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, c. 1845

The most atmospheric of the three:

• Deep indigo/Prussian blue — the enormous wave dominates the right half, grading from near-black to vivid blue
• Slate grey — the stormy sky, with ghostly figures rendered in dark charcoal/smoky black silhouettes
• Brown/russet — the ship's hull and masts
• Off-white/cream — the billowing sail, wave foam
• Scattered vermillion/red — cartouche seals, small garment accents
• Muted blue and teal on the warriors' armour

The first colour humans manufactured

Prussian blue was made accidentally in Berlin, c. 1704–1706, when the pigment-maker Johann Jacob Diesbach (working with the alchemist Johann Conrad Dippel) was trying to produce a red lake and got a deep blue precipitate instead. It is the world's first modern synthetic pigment — "derived not from a natural, animal, vegetable, or mineral source, but from an artificial chemical compound" [1]. Chemically it is ferric ferrocyanide [1]. It was the first stable, lightfast, affordable deep blue since the recipe for Egyptian blue was lost in antiquity — before it, deep blue meant ruinously expensive ground lapis. A durable blue at roughly a tenth the price was a rupture in the economics of colour.

The name still echoes "Berlin"

It reached Japan as a costly Western curiosity by the late 18th century, used sparingly for painting. Its Japanese names — bero / bero-ai / beroin — are a garbling of the Dutch Berlyns blaauw ("Berlin blue"): the pigment carries the echo of its birthplace in its very name [4]. After ~1820 the price fell, and steadily cheaper Chinese imports from the late 1820s finally made it affordable enough to use as a printing colorant [4] — the price crash is what moved it from the painter's cabinet to the mass-market print.

The blue that made the landscape print

The Met's framing: the publisher Eijudo advertised Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji for New Year 1831 featuring "an exotic pigment newly available for the print market: Prussian blue" [2]. The Great Wave (from that series, c. 1830–32) was marketed as aizuri-e — blue-printed prints — with the blue an explicit selling point [3]. The MFA credits the pigment with stimulating Hokusai and Hiroshige to design their landscape series [1].

The nuance worth its weight in gold: spectroscopy shows the famous blue outlines of the Fuji series are not pure Prussian blue but a Prussian-blue / indigo mixture [3]. The most celebrated "Prussian blue" in art history is, on inspection, the new synthetic pigment married to the old plant dye.

Our two sampled Kuniyoshi triptychs (c. 1830s–1845) sit exactly in this window — the first decade of cheap Prussian blue. Kuniyoshi's night-sea and ghost scenes depend on a deep, non-fading blue that simply wasn't achievable at that saturation before the price fell. Sampling #1E3A5F from those prints was sampling the blue revolution itself.

The new blue wearing the old blue's name

Edo already had a profound blue culture: indigo (ai, 藍) and the aizome dyeing tradition so saturated the city that a visiting chemist coined "Japan blue" for it. The genre name aizuri-e literally means "indigo-printed picture" (藍摺絵) — yet it came to denote prints made with the synthetic Prussian blue, which displaced native indigo and dayflower from the 1820s because it was more vivid, stronger, and didn't fade [5]. The new colour wore the old colour's name.

The colour that circled the world

Hokusai's blue-drenched prints flooded Europe and helped ignite Japonisme; the Great Wave informs Van Gogh's Starry Night and shadows Picasso's Blue Period [6]. Beyond art, the same compound is the chemistry of the cyanotype / blueprint (Herschel, 1842) — which is why engineering drawings were ever called "blueprints." A colour born in a lab that became the sea in Japan's most reproduced image, then the technical drawing of the industrial age.