What colour is the grass? It looks green to me, and you say it looks green to you, but are we seeing the same green? And what makes it green anyway – the light, or our brains? Welcome to episode one of Stories in Colour, a new podcast from the National Gallery.
This is a truly multidisciplinary endeavour – not just art but history, psychology, literature, sociology, economics and religion. World history is told through the story of pigments and how their development shaped centuries of artistic expression. Our emotional reflexes to colour – fear, disgust, calm – are put under the microscope. Paintings in the National Gallery’s collection take centre-stage, with the mastery of Turner, Renoir and Monet dissected brushstroke by brushstroke.
But it begins with science, as Beks Leary from the gallery’s digital department tries to understand what colour actually is and if it’s even real. For this, she is joined by “colour scientist” Professor Anya Hurlbert for a deep dive into physics and then evolutionary biology to understand why we see colour in the first place.
If you’re still wondering whether the dress in the photo that went viral ten years ago was really blue and black or white and gold, Hurlbert has recreated the illusion in real life and can give you the definitive answer. More interesting, though, is why it divided the internet, with millions of people utterly flummoxed that they could view the same image yet see something so different. Colours are, it turns out, our “personal possessions”: real, but also something we create in our own minds, influenced by both our surroundings and our memories.
So is the grass green? You’ll need a philosopher to answer that, not a colour scientist or an art historian. But the viral dress wouldn’t have bamboozled Monet or Turner. Orange skies, a golden cathedral, fields laid out in purple – the minds behind some of the world’s greatest artworks instinctively knew that colours aren’t always what they seem.
Stories in Colour
The National Gallery podcasts
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This article appears in the 04 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Housing Trap