Colour Conversations: Neil Parkinson – The Colour Librarian
Priority booking on all COLOUR events for members and patrons from 28 February 2025. General release 10 March 2025.
Colour Conversations: Neil Parkinson – The Colour Librarian
Saturday 26 April 2025
ROYAL PAVILION, WILLIAM IV ROOM
11am – 12 noon
£15 (Members £10)
Neil Parkinson – The Colour Librarian
Neil Parkinson is perhaps the only known ‘colour librarian’ in the UK. As head of special collections at the Royal College of Art, his responsibilities include the internationally renowned Colour Reference Library, one of the largest collections of material on colour in the world. The Library embodies six centuries of colour theory, and includes many rare and beautiful books, alongside colour-related archives and manuscripts. The materials in the Colour Reference Library are as diverse as the subject itself: classic works of theory by Newton, Goethe and Chevreul sit alongside psychological tests, optical illusions and occult texts.
Neil will talk about the challenges of interpreting and organising such a vast and eccentric collection and will discuss the different ways its many users, from archaeologists to set designers, approach the subject of colour. In conversation with Alexandra Loske, curator of the exhibition COLOUR at the Royal Pavilion, the pair will discuss some of their favourite books on colour, and the many exquisite ways in which the spectrum has been visualised and organised on the printed page. Some of the key works discussed will be on display in the exhibition, for example Mary Gartside’s An Essay on Light and Shade from 1805, the first illustrated book on colour published by a women in the West, and Chromatics from 1817 by Britain’s most prolific Georgian ‘colourman’, whose pigments may have been used in the Royal Pavilion.
Neil has often supported Alexandra in her research over the last 17 years and has recently published his own book on colour: The History of Colour: A Universe of Chromatic Phenomena (Frances Lincoln, 2023).
