Mauve
From Free net encyclopedia
Template:Infobox color Mauve (French form of Malva, "mallow") is a pale grayed pink-lilac color, one of many in the range of purples. It is more gray and more blue than a pale tint of magenta would be. Many pale wildflowers called "blue" are mauve.
Discovery
Template:Main Mauve was first named in 1856. Chemist William Henry Perkin, then eighteen, was attempting to create artificial quinine. An unexpected residue caught his eye, which turned out to be the first aniline dye—specifically, mauveine, sometimes called aniline purple. Perkin was so successful in recommending his discovery to the dyestuffs industry that his biography by Simon Garfield is titled Mauve (2001).
The Mauve Decade was the title of a 1926 Thomas Beer (1889–1940) book about the 1890's in the United States. Beer, looking back on this time, believed the United States was moving away from its New England traditions to a time of "decay and meaningless phrases". He took the title from a quote from artist James Whistler: "Mauve is just pink trying to be purple."
Use, symbolism and colloquial expressions
- In the classic Bruce Robinson film Withnail and I, Montague Withnail declines his nephew's offer of sherry with the explanation "Oh dear no, no, no. I'd be sucked into his trap. One of us has got to stay on guard. He's so mauve we don't know what he's planning." He fears alcohol may cloud his judgement and weaken his determination to engineer a private encounter with Marwood (accused of mauveness in the quotation) on Monty's terms. Marwood wishes to avoid such an encounter on any terms, but regardless of this he is as unlikely as the viewer to understand any literal meaning in having this colourful adjective applied to him. Whether that uncertainty is its own explanation, given what we later come to know of Monty's (cruelly misinformed) understanding of Marwood's lifestyle choices, and Marwood's own ambiguous reaction in several scenes to Monty's advances, is a question left unanswered until much later, ironically in opposite ways in the minds of the two protagonists.
- The 1890s were sometimes referred to as the Georgian "Mauve Decade," because William Henry Perkin's aniline dye allowed the widespread use of that colour in fashion.
- In the British science fiction TV show Doctor Who, mauve is the universal colour for danger.
- In an episode of the kids television series Hey Arnold! the protagonist Arnold and his friend Stinky name their go-cart the Mauve Avenger.