Page:Arts & Crafts Essays.djvu/222

 it as an art. Henceforward there is an absolute divorce between the commercial process and the art of dyeing. Any one wanting to produce dyed textiles with any artistic quality in them must entirely forgo the modern and commercial methods in favour of those which are at least as old as Pliny, who speaks of them as being old in his time.

Now, in order to dye textiles in patterns or otherwise, we need four colours to start with—to wit, blue, red, yellow, and brown; green, purple, black, and all intermediate shades can be made from a mixture of these colours.

Blue is given us by indigo and woad, which do not differ in colour in the least, their chemical product being the same. Woad may be called northern indigo; and indigo tropical or sub-tropical woad.

Note that until the introduction of Prussian blue about 1810 there was no 198