Im Artikel «The Harvard Library That Protects The World’s Rarest Colors» werden ungewöhnliche Farben aus der Harvard Pigment Bibliothek beschrieben. Dazu gehören z.B. Mumienbraun, Cadmiumgelb, Drachenblut und Smaragdgrün (via chemie-zeitschrift.at).
Im Artikel «A wall of color, a window to the past» sind u.a. kurze Podcasts verlinkt, in denen Narayan Khandekar, Direktor des Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies erklärt, was es mit den einzelnen Farben auf sich hat.
Zur Harvard Pigment Bibliothek:
«Curious visitors who turn left exiting the museums’ elevators will see the Forbes Pigment Collection, a floor-to-ceiling wall of color compiled between about 1910 and 1944 by the director of the Fogg Art Museum.
“In thinking about the role of a university museum, he was the first to conceive of it as ‘a laboratory for the fine arts,’ ” noted research curator Francesca Bewer in her book “A Laboratory for Art: Harvard’s Fogg Museum and the Emergence of Conservation in America, 1900–1950.” (…)
By the 1920s, Forbes had amassed containers of deep blues, rich purples, vibrant yellows, and myriad other colors from his travels to Europe and the Far East. Through the years, word of mouth helped the collection to grow as other art lovers and experts donated their own pigments. The museums’ collection, which is continually added to, now contains more than 2,500 samples and is renowned in the art community. For years, the pigments have helped art experts to research and authenticate paintings. Samples from the collection have been sent to the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Library of Congress, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and the National Research Laboratory for Conservation of New Delhi, India.»