The Colours Purple
The checquered history of purpure, murrey and sanguine

Q: What colour is the purple finch?

Purpure is a debatable tincture in heraldry: while it is generally glossed as “purple” in modern texts, there is some disagreement about its true colour. What is evident is that the colour purple has changed over the centuries – and that colours formerly known as purpure or purple have acquired new names…

Tyrian purple

Purple was always associated with dress of gods and royalty in records from Homer (Iliad IV. 141-45) down through Helleniistic times to the end of the Western Roman Empire and eventually the Byzantine Empire. The wearing of royal purple robes in Imperial Roman times, at least, was forbidden by harsh laws to all but the inner circle of the ruling classes. {1}

Cooksey {2} says —

Arguably, Tyrian purple is the oldest known pigment, the longest lasting, the subject of the first chemical industry, the most expensive and the best known. The colour is derived exclusively from marine shellfish of the Muricidae and Thaisidae families. The long history, stretching back well into the pre-chemical era, and embracing chemistry, biology and sociology, contains not a few misconceptions and erroneous conclusions. …

This molluscan dye has been known since pre-Roman times and in the Mediterranean region there is evidence for the industry around the 13th century B.C. at Sarepta, now Sarafand, Lebanon.

While the origins of the purple-dyeing industry of Tyre are lost in antiquity – and mythologized in the story of Heracles (Herakle-Melqart), his dog and the nymph Tyrus – the trade and prosperity of Phoenicia (from the Greek phoinix, purple-red or purple-dye people) depended on it to a vast degree. {3}

While purple dye can be obtained from several types of shellfish of these families, including Helix ianthina, Purpura lapillus, and perhaps Purpura haemastoma, the two chief sources for Tyrian purple dye are Hexaplex (or Murex) trunculus (banded dye-murex) and Haustellum (or Murex) brandaris (spiny dye-murex). {4} Shells of these dye-murex are found in massive piles near the ancient dye-producing areas of Tyre.

The shellfish do not contain the purple colourant itself, but colourless precursors of it. The composition and nature of the pigments depends (in part, at least) on the species: the colourant of Hexaplex trunculus is a mixture of indigotin and 6,6'-dibromoindigotin, giving purple and blue colourations, while Haustellum brandaris (and Pupura species) produce only 6,6'-dibromoindigotin, giving purple red colourations. {5}

One of the trade secrets of the Tyrians was the mingling of the dyes from the two different shellfish. It seems that it was by immersing a cloth, first in the dye of the Hexaplex and then in that of the Haustellum, that the dark, rich colour known as Tyrian purple was obtained. {3}

The actual colour of Tyrian purple has been debated over time, the proposed tints ranging from violet to deep red and brownish red. Pliny the Elder thought the best Tyrian purple was, “the colour of clotted blood, dark by reflected, and brilliant by transmitted, light”. But interpreting the precise shade being indicated in the literature of other times and cultures can be difficult. {6}

Vitruvius writes in the first century AD, “Purple exceeds all colours in costliness and superiority of its delightful effect. It is obtained from a marine shellfish. … It has not the same shade in all the places where it is found, but is naturally qualified by the course of the sun”. Vitruvius further discusses the production of black, blue, violet, and red hues. Indeed, as recent researchers have noted, wool dyed on cloudy days tended to be purple, but on sunny days turned out a pure blue, owing to the photochemical reduction of purple dibromoindigo to blue indigotin. {6}

Although Tyrian purple was imitated by Tyre’s neighbours in the Mediterranean – even in the Canary Islands – none could equal the true Tyrian purple. Clearly, there was more to the process than the dying itself, very likely precisely controlling the exposure of the dyed cloth to sunlight and perhaps also a knowledge of how to use mordants to set the colours permanently. {3}

The following table sets out some of the examples of Tyrian purple that can be found on the web. Of course, as the Wikipedia article notes, the true colour of Tyrian purple, like most high chroma pigments, cannot be accurately displayed on a computer display.

#66023c (325°) seems very common, but I haven’t yet found an authoritative source for that value – although it is close to the colour of Iustinian I’s robes (above). Other colours in that region (close to the browser-safe #603, 330°) seem to be popular. The Kremer Pigmente sample is interesting: It is almost pure magenta, and claims to be genuine, but appears to be obtained from only one of the two shellfish used in Tyre.

Large-scale production of Tyrian purple ceased with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD, and in 1464 AD Pope Paul II introduced the so-called cardinal’s purple. This was really kermes, a red dye obtained by crushing the dried bodies of the females of a scale insect, Kermes ilicis (oak kermes). {7}{8}

Just as the purpura shellfish gave us the word purple, the kermes insect gave us the word crimson, from the Sanskrit krmi-ja, “(a dye) produced from a worm”, through the Arabic qirmaz and the Old Spanish cremesin. A continuing mistaken belief that the kermes was a worm also gave rise to the word vermillion – Latin “worm-coloured”, from vermiculus, the Latin term for the kermes. {9}

So… is Tyrian purple the precursor of heraldic purpure? Well… no. But, yes. But, then again… read on!

Bis …

Velde {10} outlines a history of purpure that relies on Michel Pastoureau’s Traité d'Héraldique. The thrust of this is that purpure was originally a grey-brown colour, being reinterpreted as purple only in the sixteenth century.

Bis

Velde says that, until the early fifteenth century, purpure is usually depicted as a colour in-between grey and brown, a colour that was earlier, until 1260-70, called bis. Indeed, in modern French, bis is described as gris moyen brunâtre and translated as greyish brown. {11}{12}

However, earlier in the century, Matthew Paris (c. 1244-59) blazons the purpure lion of the arms of León in leo de purpura!

Nevertheless, Velde asserts that the term bis disappears from heraldry exactly when the term purpure becomes more common, clearly replacing the former.

Why was this? notes that originally, in mediæval French, pourpre or porpre was a kind of fabric, which could be dyed in various colours. The most common such fabric was a low-quality grade called porpre bise and over time the terms bis and porpre became synonyms, and porpre or purpure replaced bis.

Now, Brault (p. 129) cites several occurences of bis during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – but only in literature, not in rolls of arms. While it is cited more often that purpure, it’s not clear that one replaced the other… Although most of Brault’s examples of purpure date from the late thriteenth century, he cites one early example in Le Roman de Troie par Benoît de Sainte-Maure (1154-60), vv. 7816-17 ―

N’aveit nul autre teint desoz
Mais de porpre ert coverz desus

― which clearly opposes porpre with teint, suggesting that purpure was already regarded as a colour. And while Brault finds one instance of pourpre noire (also in Troie), he cites no instance of pourpre bis.

Furthermore, Brault cites André G. Ott, Etude sur les couleurs en vieux français (Paris 1899), who derives bis from the Latin byssus, cotton, the meaning having theoretically evolved from an adjective meaning the “colour of cotton”, although Brault notes that this view has not generally been accepted. However…

Bis in modern French heraldry

… in modern French heraldry it blazons écru, “the light beige color of unbleached linen”. {13} {7}

… and old Plasticine

Is there any other evidence that purpure was an indistinct greyish-brown?

Velde notes that certain treatises of the fifteenth century make it quite clear that purpure is a combination of the other four colours in equal proportion (making it the heraldic equivalent of the brown of old Plasticine!).

John Guillim notes a similar description from a sixteenth-century treatise, Bartolomeo Cassaneus’s Catalogus gloriæ mundi, &c. (1546) ―

Cassàneus having formerly handled those former six Colours, viz. White, Blacke, Red, Yellow, Greene, and Blew, saith that of them all (being compounded and mixed together according to proportion) this Purpure Colour is raised.

And while Guillim himself says ―

Purpure is a Colour that consisteth of much Red, and of a small quantitie of Blacke…

― his illustration of purpure (right) matches better Cassaneus’s “Plasticine” brown…

Velde claims that it is plausible that, in the sixteenth century, the diffusion of Classical culture made most people think of purpure as purpureus Tyrianus and the colour of the tincture, which was rare in any case, was changed from greyish-brown to purple to accommodate the word.

Certainly there is evidence from English heraldry that this was so…

Murrey …

Woodcock & Robinson have this to say about the origin of murrey (p. 52-3):

… the colour in which [purpure] was painted seems to have changed in the course of the sixteenth century. In the fifteenth century it appears as mauve in a painting of the arms of Lacy [right]… A considerable number of grants by [Thomas] Wriothesley (Garter King of Arms, 1505-34) contain the colour that would now be blazoned Murrey, but the original grant of 1516 to John Compton blazons it Purpure. … By 1616 the Purpure supporters of the Marquess of Winchester are once more a shade of mauve.

The reasons for the change of purpure from mauve to a mulberry colour and back to mauve are unclear. Presumably – as Velde suggested – Wriothsley was influenced by the diffusion of Classical culture, and took the recently adopted blood-red cardinal’s purple as his model? And perhaps – and this is wild speculation! – the later reversion followed Henry VIII’s split from the Roman Catholic Church, the kings of arms re-adopting the traditional tint to distance themselves from a “papist” shade of purple!

Whatever the reasons, murrey came to be used to blazon the mulberry purpure of the sixteenth century, distinct from the again-mauve purpure.

Fox-Davies says, “[the] exact tint [of murrey] is between gules and purpure” (p. 57). Noting its use as a livery colour, he also says that it is “now termed chocolate or claret colour by the utilitarian language of the day” (p. 58).

… and sanguine

Sanguine – literally “blood red” – was taken to be synonymous with murrey until relatively recently. After all, murrey, “the deep purple-red color of a mulberry” {7}, has been seen as blood red since Classical times: In Metamorphoses, Book IV, Ovid recounts the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, the tragic lovers whose blood stained the berries of a white mulberry tree {14}:

[Pyramus dies.] Sprinkled with blood, the tree’s fruit turned a deep blackish-red, and the roots, soaked through, also imbued the same overhanging mulberries with the dark purplish colour. …

[Thisbe] said, “… And you, the tree, that now covers the one poor body with your branches, and soon will cover two, retain the emblems of our death, and always carry your fruit darkened in mourning, a remembrance of the blood of us both.” … [Thisbe dies.] Then her prayer moved the gods… for the colour of the berry is blackish-red, when fully ripened…

When did murrey and sanguine become distinct? Boutell (1867) refers to “Murrey or Sanguine” as does Fox-Davies (1909); Barron (1911) only sanguine… and Milbourne (1950) “sanguine, or murrey”. But in his 1969 annotations to Fox-Davies, Brook-Little distinguishes between them (without comment!). Possibly, then, only sometime during the 1950s or 1960s.

And why? I have yet to find any heraldist that describes that. Perhaps, like the split between purple and murrey/sanguine in the first place, it is a matter of ignorant writers putting too much emphasis on nuances of artistic interpretation.

And purpure?

While Tyrian purple (or cardinal’s purple) certainly seems to have given rise to murrey (and ultimately sanguine), it is still hard to reconcile Velde’s argument with the pre-sixteenth-century mauve purpure that Woodcock & Robinson cite or with modern purpure.

Very likely, the colour now used to emblazon purpure – a brighter and more saturated colour than the mauve of Lacy – has been influenced by the availability of synthetic purple dyes and pigments. (Although French pourpre, which is usually translated as crimson, is still a mulberry colour {15} – but in French heraldry it is more a red-tinted magenta {16}.)

If “ancient” purpure was mauve rather than Velde’s dull grey-brown – which, incidentally, would have been a poor choice for a tincture – could it have been influenced by Tyrian purple?

Crusader knights could well have been aware of the purple robes of the Byzantine emperors. But then, why was purpure mauve rather than a mulberry colour? I have yet to find an answer to this, but perhaps it is only that those knights brought back with them “Tyrian purple” of other hues (cf. Vitruvius and Kremer Pigmente, above), the “true” (i.e., crimson) Tyrian purple being too rare or too expensive…

Browser-safe tinctures from gules to azure

Clearly, browser-safe colours cannot reflect the subtle nuances of hue, saturation and brightness that might best distinguish one “purple” from another, but here’s a possible spectrum…

Notes & references

1. ^ Lloyd B. Jensen “Royal Purple of Tyre”, Journal of Near Eastern Studies April 1963, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp 104-118, ISSN 00222968
2. ^ Christopher J. Cooksey, “Tyrian Purple: 6,6’-Dibromoindigo and Related Compounds”, Molecules 2001, 6, pp 736-769, ISSN 14203049 — online at www.mdpi.org [PDF] 
3. a b c anon., “Saudi Aramco World : Tyrian Purple” 
4. ^ anon., “Purple Passion: www.jolique.com”  
5. ^ Tijani Karmous, Housam Binous and Naceur Ayed, “Painting on Location: Murex Imperial Purple, Zembra Punic Purple” 
6. a b Ryan J. Huxtable, “The Mutability of Blue”, Molecular Interventions 2001, 1, pp 141-144, ISSN 15340384 (print), 15432548 (online) — online at molinterv.aspetjournals.org  
7. a b c Erin McKean (principal editor), The New Oxford American Dictionary, Second Edition, Oxford University Press (Oxford) May 2005, ISBN 0195170776 • Apple Inc., Mac OS X Dictionary Version 2.0.1
8. ^ Richard M. Podhajny, “History, Shellfish, Royalty, and the Color Purple” 
9. ^ Michael Quinion, “The fugitive names of hues” @ World Wide Words 
10. ^ François R. Velde, “Purpure” 
11. ^ pourpre.com - Fiche couleur: bis 
12. ^ Pierre-Henri Cousin, Collins Gem Dictionary: French • English, English • French, Collins (London) 1987, ISBN 0-00-458604-2
13. ^ pourpre.com - Fiche couleur: bis [2] 
14. ^ Ovid, The Metamorpheses, Book IV — online at A. S. Kline’s Poetry in Translation 
15. ^ pourpre.com - Fiche couleur: pourpre 
16. ^ pourpre.com - Fiche couleur: pourpre [2]