Word: colorism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Albert Museum. Chronicling more than three centuries of made-to-order luxury, Jaffer draws from the archives of Baccarat, Cartier, Chanel, Louis Vuitton and other design houses that crafted some of their most splendid pieces for the maharajas. In turn, the houses were influenced by the Indian love of color and embellishment. It was, of course, a love affair fated to end. Britain lost India, and Indian royals lost their lands, titles and allowances to a newly independent, democratic state. Jewel-encrusted lipstick cases and cigarette lighters were sold off to pay debts, while stunning palaces crumbled for lack...
Ella has learned from her research that the blue color in her dream is that of the precious lapis lazuli pigment used in Renaissance paintings to emphasize the Virgin’s miraculous agency. And as the color recurs throughout Chevalier’s novel, it becomes a motif for Isabella’s and Ella’s own searches for agency...
Blue is the color of the beautiful “Catholic cloth”—a “soft wool, dyed very deep”—for which Isabelle resists Huguenot mores in buying from a peddlar. Blue is also the color of the distant horizon of the Cévennes mountains that Isabelle has left behind...
...Ella, the color blue carries the grave portent incarnated in a Renaissance painting she stumbles upon: “Only the Virgin’s face, dead center in the painting, moved and changed, pain and a strange peace battling in her features as she gazed down at her dead son, framed by a colour that reflected her agony...
...rather than ending on a sobering note of subjection to historical conditions, the epilogue closes the novel with a final incarnation of the color blue. Isabelle is at a crossroads, questioning whether to go forward, back, or remain where she is. A“blue light surrounds her, giving her solace for the briefest moment.” Blue ultimately represents the ability of Chevalier’s luminous prose to capture the beauty of the fleeting moments in her heroines’ lives...