Historical colors hit the right note

IF you've ever agonized over what neutral modern shade to paint your Tudor, Mediterranean or Cape Cod living room (or wished you had the guts to choose a daring color), you might want to take a lesson from Shelley Bennett. As curator of British and European art at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, Bennett confronted and conquered the color conundrum for the John Constable landscapes show, which opens Saturday.

Bennett is no amateur at choosing colors. She's spent years studying the subtle shadings used by great painters throughout the ages. She understands that colors have history, just like countries, and that some are more historically appropriate than others for use in certain styles of homes, as backdrops for private art collections and for the walls of the museum in San Marino.

Constable, who lived from 1776 to 1837, is one of England's national treasures, a man whose passion for his homeland's rural countryside and moody skies caused him to paint them repeatedly, in all sorts of weather.

Those paintings -- including 6-foot landscapes never before shown in the U.S. -- were coming to what has been Bennett's workday home for 27 years. But when she had to choose a color for the walls on which she would hang them, none of her expertise helped her in that age-old debate: Do I go with what is tried and true? Or do I dare do something different?

The show started at the Tate Britain, then traveled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where Bennett attended the opening. She noticed the landscapes were hung on walls painted in blues and greens -- colors traditionally used in museums for display of 18th and 19th century master landscapes.

But then she learned of a letter Constable wrote in 1813 to a friend. "He described the paint colors he was putting on the walls of his own home in London. The colors he spoke about were a deep red and a salmon," she says.

"This perplexed me. I couldn't imagine his work hung against salmon. I talked about it with the director of art collections here at the Huntington, and he reminded me of a British paint company that has developed historical paint colors based on English country house interiors. This company actually did scientific analysis of paints used in these great houses from the 17th to 19th century and has reproduced the colors. I contacted them and learned that they offer an 1805 shade named Dead Salmon. It turned out that the name doesn't refer to the flesh of the fish, but to its scales. It's a warm shade of gray, almost like taupe."