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<\/a>Paul Gauguin, Still life with Oranges<\/em>, 1881<\/p><\/div>\n Something odd happened to me in late 2017: I became enamored with the color orange.<\/p>\n That fall, I\u2019d met someone, and orange was appearing everywhere, like some kind of hallucinatory sign. It sped by on the side of a truck, flowers in the park, the color of his surfboard. It appeared in past purchases: an orange skirt I bought in the spring, imagining it billowing in the wind, a tangerine wristlet made of pebbled leather. It appeared in poems I wanted to read aloud: Frank O\u2019Hara\u2019s lover in an orange shirt<\/a>; Ada Lim\u00f3n\u2019s ripening persimmons<\/a>. I wanted to know what it meant, that I was seeing this color as if for the first time, and why it was suddenly all around me.<\/p>\n When I was in high school, in spring\u2014sun out, the world thawing\u2014my friends and I would walk from our campus down to the wetlands, a startling bit of wilderness in the middle of Beaverton, Oregon. There was a pond, and a dock that led out onto it, where you could sit in skinny jeans and kick your legs out over the water. On bright and windless days, the landscape on the other side of the pond was reflected in its surface as perfectly as in a mirror. I loved to sit on the dock and look at the trees dancing on the water, their colored foliage, their leaves precisely outlined against the sky. There was something about the tree line that felt particularly painterly\u2014like something out of an American natural-history landscape, red alder and Oregon ash and western red cedar all lined up in a row.<\/p>\n It\u2019s this feeling I return to when I consider the natural world\u2014that awe at its specificity, its many names. It took me a long time to realize that all things are visible, even if my human eyes can\u2019t see them: shingles on a roof, eyelashes on a mouse, leaves on a tree. Naming things is a means of recognizing them, and I\u2019m drawn to flower guides and botanical illustrations the way a bookish child is drawn to a dictionary. I wanted to apply this same kind of naming to the color orange, to understand why it was all around me.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Any color historian will tell you that orange didn\u2019t have a name in English before Europeans encountered the fruit. Previously, the color family we call orange\u2014or sometimes carrot, or goldenrod, or mango\u2014was known in Old English as geoluhread<\/em>, or, as we\u2019d translate it now, yellow-red.<\/em> Katy Kelleher, writing<\/a> for The Paris Review<\/em>, notes that orange was late to be added to the canon of colors: \u201cThere is something about every shade of orange that feels secondary.\u201d Medieval Europeans recognized the existence of the color, and it appears in paintings and illuminated manuscripts, though for hundreds of years the only pure orange pigments available were realgar and orpiment, two arsenic-based compounds that were highly toxic. Orpiment, because of its brilliant hue, was highly sought after by alchemists, who thought it might be a means of making gold. It was only when Portuguese traders brought sweet orange trees from Asia to Europe in the fifteenth century that the object gave the hue a name. From laranja<\/em> in Portuguese, naranja<\/em> in Spanish, and the original naranga<\/em> in Sanskrit, we get the English orange<\/em>, which has no equivalent or rhyme.<\/p>\n Zhao Lingrang, Yellow Oranges and Green Tangerines, ca. 1070\u20131100.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n But sweet oranges existed in China long before they were crated up and sent away on Portuguese ships. An early depiction of the citrus fruit is Zhao Lingrang\u2019s Yellow Oranges and Green Tangerines<\/em>, ca. 1070\u20131100, a Chinese fan painting repurposed as an album leaf illustration, to be paired with a poem. In the silk painting, two groves of fruiting trees are planted on either side of a river, their leaves defined with careful strokes. There\u2019s not much color in Song Dynasty painting, and this depiction of oranges focuses less on their color than on the overall shape of the trees, speckled with fruit. The corresponding poem, by Su Shi, reads, in translation:<\/p>\n You must remember, The foreshortening of one of the groves creates a sense of distance in the small painting. In the top third of the fan, the horizon fades into the distance, along with the trees, creating a sense of space while maintaining the appearance of plenty. A small bird, its body a shock of white, perches on the western shore, while another\u2014painted with just a few strokes\u2014soars above the horizon. Like the poem, its transit crystallizes a fleeting instant in time: \u201cexactly now, \/ when oranges turn yellow and tangerines green.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Oranges and Tangerines<\/em>, Song Dynasty (960\u20131279)<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n Simply composed, intimate still lifes were also popular during the Song Dynasty, though many painters chose to render flowers, like plum blossoms or cherry blossoms, alongside native birds, in a genre known as bird-and-flower painting. Though early Chinese paintings of oranges aren\u2019t unheard of, they\u2019re far outnumbered by more traditional subjects\u2014lychees and persimmons, magnolias and chrysanthemums\u2014and I was surprised to encounter this small fan painting by Lin Chun in the National Palace Museum\u2019s database. The oranges and tangerines (or \u201coranges and green oranges,\u201d according to a different translation) are rendered with an enormous amount of detail, reminiscent of botanical illustration. As in Zhao Lingrang\u2019s fan, it\u2019s not the specific, iconic color of the oranges that lets us know what fruit is shown, but other details, depicted with fidelity: the specific shape of the leaves; the rumpling, navel-like bottom of the citrus; the bumpy skin rendered with tiny dots. The oranges are larger, their color lighter, than the small, smooth green tangerines. I love this fan painting\u2019s elegant framing, its delicacy and attention to nature\u2019s details. It feels like a true attempt to capture the world as it is.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Arnolfini Portrait <\/em>(full, left, and detail, right), Jan van Eyck, 1434<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n Nearly two centuries after the end of the Song Dynasty, oranges made their way to Europe, where they occupy a tiny detail of the Arnolfini Portrait<\/em>, by Dutch old master Jan van Eyck. To my knowledge, it\u2019s one of the earliest Western depictions of oranges in visual art. Half-hidden by the heavy robe of Arnolfini, a merchant, three oranges rest on the flat surface of a table. Another orange is placed on the windowsill: its face, turned stem-out, catches the cool gray light. This early in the fifteenth century, oranges would have been expensive, a rare import that Arnolfini himself might have traded. The fruits serve as an allusion to wealth, casually placed, their vivid color a beacon for their symbolism. The orange in the window entrances me, how its mottled surface seems made to catch the light: it seems a precursor to the still lifes arranged by Gaugin, or C\u00e9zanne, or Manet.<\/p>\n How must it have felt to see an orange for the first time\u2014did they peel them open with their hands, feeling the spray of citrus oil on their palms? Or did they use a knife, cutting past the white pith? How did it feel to taste the tang of citrus, to let the segments explode\u2014new, beguiling\u2014in one\u2019s mouth? It\u2019s in this moment that the color orange was given a name in the only language I speak.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Willem Kalf, Wineglass and a bowl of fruit<\/em>, 1663<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n Throughout the Dutch Golden Age, oranges, still a rarity, maintained an exotic symbolism. In Willem Kalf\u2019s dramatically lit still life from 1663, a huge, single orange perches in a bowl, which threatens to tilt out of the frame. The piled, precarious imported riches\u2014the Persian rug, the gleaming metal, the foreign fruits\u2014operate both as braggadocio and, from my vantage point in the twenty-first century, perhaps as a sharp, anti-imperial critique.<\/p>\n Two hundred years later, oranges, now common in Europe, lost their symbolic gravitas. The 1800s coincided with the arrival of a new synthetic orange pigment, \u201cchrome orange,\u201d made from the mineral crocoite. The advent of chrome orange allowed painters to use the color more widely. It was crucial to the Impressionists, who loved the brilliant shade. Consider Van Gogh\u2019s heady landscapes or Monet\u2019s sunsets over shimmering water\u2014the heat of the sun alive in the reverberating contrast between orange and blue. Loosed from the toxic pigment and expensive fruit, orange\u2019s presence in a painting became more about mood.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00c9douard Manet, Four Mandarin Oranges<\/em>, ca. 1882<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n The formal pleasures of an orange are never more obvious than in \u00c9douard Manet\u2019s Four Mandarin Oranges<\/em>, a still life from 1882, painted late in his career. I recently encountered this painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, in a show of Manet\u2019s later works<\/a>, on view through September 8. Painted atop a background of thinned umber, four oranges rest on a white surface, skin gleaming. Even over a hundred years later, Manet\u2019s brushwork looks as fresh as the day he painted it\u2014quick, buttery strokes, painted wet-in-wet, and highlighted with gleams of bright white. The vivid, distinct shades of orange\u2014I count at least four, as I imagine Manet\u2019s splotches on a palette\u2014aren\u2019t blended together, but retain their unique texture, creating a mottled effect. Manet\u2019s still lifes are a perfect model for a particular school of \u201cpainterly\u201d painting\u2014a brushstroke that moves with such life, such joy, that its subject seems dewy and alive.<\/p>\n Mandarin oranges appear frequently in Manet\u2019s late work, but it\u2019s this painting that aligns most closely to how orange makes me feel\u2014a zip of joy in all life\u2019s gray. Manet, in his later years, was said to hand out mandarin oranges on the street. I wonder how he peeled them\u2014if he, like me, went from the stem outward, sliding thumb under in a tight, careful spiral. If he, like me, left the peels to dry, long and velvet and still slightly fragrant, and if the next day he might have forgotten about them.<\/p>\n When I was in my freshman year of college, I spent a lot of time in the university art gallery, plodding back and forth between vitrines, penning comparison papers. No matter where my homework situated me for the afternoon\u2019s visit, I always made time before closing to stop by my favorite Rothko<\/a>, which was always on display. It\u2019s one of the abstract paintings he\u2019s best known for, examining the interactions of color: a pure orange panel with a layer of a lighter hue scumbled on top, a rich panel of red paint on the bottom, veiled in lavender purple. A bar of yellow paint, streaked horizontally across the surface, pulls the surface of the painting forward. At certain times of day, and in certain moods, it appears to glow.<\/p>\n I loved sitting under that Rothko on a bad day, or any day. A nice thing about Abstract Expressionism\u2014and a dangerous one, too\u2014is that it can come to feel like a blank slate, a means of art-making that elides explicit meaning in favor of emotional response. Rothko\u2019s paintings are universal, the way every language has a word for color<\/em>. I was lonely and far from home in my first year in Connecticut, and Rothko\u2019s orange painting was an easy painting to love. An easy painting to feel close to.<\/p>\n But its ease is the beauty of it, too, that it can take on our emotions the way it took on mine. I don\u2019t think Rothko\u2019s painting could have existed if orange hadn\u2019t had a name. It wouldn\u2019t have been possible to have this painting without the word, without the history, which is inextricably wrapped up in its eponym, that sweet, alchemical fruit.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/a>
\nthe best scenery of the year,
\nIs exactly now,
\nwhen oranges turn yellow and tangerines green.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>