Rethink everything you think you know about our hero shade. Colour expert Kassia St Clair explores its history and cultural impact.

In December 1861, the combative American artist James McNeill Whistler began daubing paint onto a fresh canvas. In a letter to a friend, he described the composition as “a woman [he was being coy, it was his mistress, Joanna Hiffernan] in a beautiful white cambric dress, standing against a window which filters the light through a transparent white muslin curtain – but the figure receives a strong light from the right and therefore the picture, barring the red hair, is one gorgeous mass of brilliant white.” It was later exhibited in Paris and caused a stir, in part because no one could agree on what they were really seeing. For some Symphony In White, No. 1 was an allegory of innocence; others saw it as a comment on male lust; still others believed it to be a delicious work of fantasy, an apparition. Great art always invites interpretation but, in this case, the presence of so much white lay at the heart of the tangle.

Ask a physicist, and they’ll tell you that white isn’t really a colour at all, but an expression of light. (Sunlight, as the 17th century polymath Isaac Newton discovered when he used two prisms to prise apart a beam into a rainbow and then put it back together again, contains all colours.) But the rest of us can probably agree that white can be a colour, too. We wear white cotton and linen shirts, paint thick lines of it on roads and tennis courts. We apply it in glossy layers on cars, buy white goods, refine our flour, paper and sugar to make them whiter, put brightening drops in our eyes and agonise over which tint to select for the walls of our home. The production of so many snowy goods takes work. Historically, natural fibres could be bleached by the sun or by being bathed in lye, an alkaline solution made from water and wood ash. White pigments, including kaolin, chalk and calcite had to be dug from the earth and ground to powder. Lead white, which was stable and long-lasting – although poisonous – was manufactured using a series of simple chemical reactions. Since the mid-20th century, the world has come to rely on titanium dioxide, much of it manufactured by the American firm DuPont using a secret method that’s worth around $2.6 billion.

White, then, is unmistakeably desirable, but understanding what it is that gives it its cultural heft is more difficult. In his 1851 novel, Moby-Dick, Herman Melville worried over mankind’s inability to “[solve] the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul”. Bright light or white objects, like eggs, stones, clouds and disks, are recurring motifs in the creation myths of cultures the world over. It’s associated with purity, innocence and virtue: think wedding dresses. Simultaneously, it is used to symbolise rebirth and grief, which is why it is present in funerary contexts in many countries. It’s also redolent of wisdom and creation: lightbulb moments, blank pages, the Big Bang. In many cultures it forms a pair with another colour – usually black or red – to represent duality of life and death, order and chaos, luck and misfortune.

On a more basic level, white reflects status. For example, keeping delicate lace ruffs and cuffs looking fresh in the 17th century meant that not only could you afford to wear so delicate and pure a fabric against your skin, you also had the staff required to maintain it. This dynamic still operates today: whites show the dirt and turn dingy with wear, meaning that they need to be cared for or replaced. White contains darkness, too. The narrator of Moby-Dick admits that it is “the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.” What can be read as both spiritual and peaceful can conversely appear bleak, null and terrifying, as devoid of life as sun-bleached bone. And, as Melville was well aware, dogmatic constructs of whiteness have been used to justify atrocities.

White, then, is a mirror for our hopes, fears and desires, it is light, it is – like beauty – in the eye of the beholder. This is probably why James Whistler, consumed by the idea of art for art’s sake, returned to it repeatedly. For Symphony In White, No. 2, he once again depicted a luminous woman, this time before a looking glass, twinned with her own reflection. One critic called it “generally grimy grey”. Another – the poet Algernon Swinburne – thought it “complete in beauty, in tenderness and significance”. White contains multitudes.

Kassia St Clair is a writer, cultural historian and the author of The Secret Lives Of Colour (John Murray), available now. Her new book, The Race To The Future, will be published November 2023.