The paper presents the use of corpus-based methods to investigate color terms in fiction. On the basis of Irving Stone's biographical novel about the post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, Lust for Life (1934), which established the genre of fictionalized biographies, a comprehensive analysis of color terms has been carried out, and a statistical profile of color terms has been developed. Corpus-based research allows for the identification and analysis of the frequency of use of lexemes and their collocations, etc., including the distribution of the frequency of color terms in the text of the novel, distributional analysis, and the study of the valence of color terms. For the research, the capabilities of the Sketch Engine software were used. A subcorpus of the text of the novel Lust for Life was created, based on which a list of color terms was compiled, the frequency of color terms and their shades was found, and the distribution of frequency of use throughout the novel was determined. The results of the study are illustrated with tables, diagrams, and reproductions of the artist. The characteristic features of using color terms in the text are analyzed, and the patterns of color terms coinage by the writer in comparison with the color palette of the artist's paintings are revealed.
Colors are a professional tool for artists, their biographical fiction writers, and art scholars. This tool is complex, and multifaceted, and requires separate research on color terms. The study of artistic biographical prose about painters yields more effective results when using interdisciplinary approaches, incorporating methodologies from various fields, including the application of corpus technologies. Corpus-based studies of color terms are currently employed in applied and cognitive linguistics, literary studies, and are the subject of comparative and intermedial studies [1; 2; 3]. Within the field of corpus linguistics, color terms are also actively studied based on texts belonging to various styles and genres [4; 5]. Furthermore, they are viewed in contrastive [6; 7] and translation studies [8; 9].
Digital technologies are constantly evolving and actively used for the analysis of works of art. For example, in 2019, the results of a study on the use of the CIELab color space for analyzing the colors in Van Gogh’s oil paintings were published. The main goal of the study was to propose a simple and fast method for analyzing colors in paintings, this research “is motivated by the idea that image and color science could reasonably analyze the color used in an artwork” [10; 2]. “This study used a novel method, which is identifying the color distribution of oil paintings through color volume analysis” [10; 7]. Researchers analyzed 370 oil paintings regarding their color distribution: “The right side of Figure 1 shows the color gamut of VG’s oil paintings. Many colors used in his paintings, such as light blue, light orange, yellow, light red, brown, cyan, teal, light gray, and dark gray, were compared to the left side of Figure 1, which shows the typical color gamut base on the CIEL*a*b* color space. The figure also shows that purple, pure red, and pure green were hardly used in his paintings” [10; 5].
The aim of this article is to explore the potential application of corpus methods to analyze biographical texts about painters, analyze the peculiarities of using color terms in such works, identify patterns in the creation of color terms by the writer in comparison with the color palette of the artist’s canvases, and develop a statistical profile of color terms in the analyzed text.
The research material is the biographical novel by American writer Irving Stone about Dutch painter
Vincent van Gogh [
Corpus-based analysis, as repeatedly highlighted by researchers such as C. Meyer [
A focus subcorpus of the text of the novel Lust for Life (201,305 tokens) was created in the Sketch Engine. To determine the frequency of color terms, a preliminary list of 56 color terms was compiled. The text of the novel features 23 color terms with different frequencies, see Table 1.
In addition, the words colour and tone are of a high frequency in the text, Table 2, which is logical and consistent with the thematic focus of the novel.
It is interesting to compare the obtained results with the data presented by N. Zaslavsky, Ch. Kemp, N. Tishby, T. Regier [18] taken from the American English dataset, Figure 2, as well as with the data from the COCA, Table 3.
The actual sequence of color terms on the frequency list is distinctive. In the studied novel, the color term black is of the highest frequency, and in the corpora used for comparison it surpasses the lexeme white (in Stone’s novel, it is fourth); yellow and blue are second and third in frequency of use in the text of the novel Lust for Life, but according to N. Zaslavsky, Ch. Kemp, N. Tishby, T. Regier, and the COCA, they are fifth and seventh, respectively [18].
It is important to note that the high frequency of the color term black in the initial chapters of the analyzed text is its characteristic feature and can be explained by the chronological presentation of the artist’s biography and iconography in Stone’s novel. While working as a missionary in a Belgian mining town, van Gogh saw a lot of black around: mines, miners, their outfit, skin, and their way of life almost devoid of daylight and color.
The artist wrote extensively about it in his letters and depicted it in dark tones in his paintings and drawings. Consequently, the writer accurately conveyed it in the novel through color references. In these chapters, black is intentionally dense. Below we provide a few quotes from Stone and reproductions (Figure 5–6) of van Gogh’s works to illustrate it:
“Although Marcasse was only one of a string of seven mines owned by the Charbonnages Belgique, it was the oldest and most dangerous pit in the Borinage. <...> The tall chimneys, which once had been of yellow brick, spread tangible, black smoke over the neighbourhood twenty-four hours a day. Around Marcasse were poor miners’ huts with a few dead trees, black from the smoke, thorn hedges, dunghills, ash dumps, heaps of useless coal, and towering above it all, the black mountain. It was a gloomy spot; at first sight everything looked dreary and desolate to Vincent. “No wonder they call it the black country,” he murmured” [11; 47]. “The pickers worked in coarse linen suits, filthy and black. The shoveller was usually a young boy, stark naked except fora burlap loin-cloth, his body a dull black, and the miner pushing the car through the three foot passageway was always a girl, as black as the men, with a coarse dress covering the upper part of her body. Water was leaking through the roofs of the cells, forming a grotto of stalactites. The only light was from the small lamps whose wicks were turned down low to save fuel. There was no ventilation. The airwas thick with coal-dust. The natural heat of the earth bathed the miners in rivulets of black perspiration. In the first cells Vincent saw that the men could work standing erect with their picks, but as he advanced down the passageway, the cells became smaller and smaller until the miners had to lie on the ground and swing their picks from the elbow. As the hours went on, the bodily heat of the miners raised the temperature of the cells, and the coal- dust thickened in the air until the men were gasping great mouthfuls of hot, black soot” [11; 62].
The author of the novel notes that the artist paints using charcoal (29, 81). The diagram in Figure 4 shows that the author uses the color black throughout the novel, with the exception of a few chapters, but its context changes: at the end of the novel, black is no longer used to describe people but rather coffee, velvet, stone, hair, eyes, coat, jacket, dress, etc., which can be easily tracked using corpus analysis methods.
The frequency of the color term brown (104.32) is comparatively high in the novel, including its shades: reddish brown (4.97 per million), curly brown (4.97 per million), deep brown (4.97 per million), dark reddish brown (4.97 per million), light brown (4.97 per million).
Following the descending order of color terms frequencies in the novel, the next ones are yellow, blue, and their shades (for yellow: lemon, gold, etc.; for blue: ultramarine, azure, indigo, lavender). These color terms are significantly more frequent in the second part of the novel (see Figure 7).
Figures 4 and 7 show that the distribution of the use of the color terms black and yellow is distinctive:
black dominates in the initial parts of the text, while yellow dominates in the final parts. Throughout
twothirds of the novel, yellow appears rarely and with low frequency. The author seems to prefer shades of
this color rather than pure color; yellow is used to describe the artist’s hair, sand, the waters of the Thames,
paper, the sun, leaves, cheese, a lamp, and more, for example: “Both sides of the ward were lined with
beds sloping downward at an angle of five degrees, each surrounded by a framework on which were hung
dirty cream-coloured curtains” [
Concerning the shades of yellow, the following were found in the novel: lemon-yellow (29.81 per
mln); sulphur-yellow (14.9 per mln); dirty yellow (4.97 per mln); dark yellow (4.97 per mln); very
yellow (4.97 per mln); golden-yellow (4.97 per mln); yellow-red (4.97 per mln), etc. In both van Gogh’s
works and Stone’s text, yellow becomes an accent color: “As the summer advanced, everything became
burnt up. He saw about him nothing but old gold, bronze and copper, covered by a greenish azure sky
of blanched heat. There was sulphur-yellow on everything the sunlight hit. His canvases were masses
of bright burning yellow. He knew that yellow had not been used in European painting since the
Renaissance, but that did not deter him. The yellow pigment oozed out of the tubes onto the canvas, and
there it stayed. His pictures were sun steeped, sun burnt, tanned with the burning sun and swept with
air” [
The most frequent collocation is yellow house (35), which is the house of his dreams, where the artist wanted to create a home for like-minded artists. As already mentioned, one of the key colors in the text of the novel is blue (Figure 11).
In the text of the novel, we encounter a variety of shades of blue (Table 4). There are examples of
individual authorial comparisons: “Vincent gaped at the woman in utter bewilderment. She was young,
but not a child. Her eyes were as blue as the cobalt sky of an Arlesian night, and her hair, which she
wore in a great flowing mass down her back, was as lemon-yellow as the sun” [
The frequency of the use of the color term white is relatively balanced in the text of the novel, Figure 12.
The frequency of the color term red and the names of shades of red is relatively high in the text of
the novel (Figure 13): “Her colouring was burnt gold, her teeth, between the smiling lips, as white as
an oleander seen through a blood-red vine” [
In 2020, a Ukrainian translation of the novel by Anna Markhovska was published [
Він схопив гребінець, намагаючись розчесати сплутане руде волосся, взяв зі столу картину Цезаря де Кока й відчинив двері.
the raw red of her country-women, but a curious intermingling, in which the fire of one had caught up the light of the other in a glowing, subtle warmth.
Vincent leaned against the carriage, rivulets from his red hair streaming down his face. На відміну від інших тамтешніх жінок, волосся її було не пшеничнобілявим чи яскраво-рудим. У ньому прецікаво поєдналися ці кольори: полум’я одного відтінку зливалося із сяйвом іншого, утворюючи м’яке тепло. Вінсент притулився до екіпажа; вода струмочками стікала з його рудого волосся на обличчя.
His eyes were just two black pin pricks, Очі його нагадували дві чорні his cheeks had been sucked in, the шпильки, щоки запали, кістки під circular bones under his eyes protruded, очима виступали, а обличчя a dirty, red beard matted his face. прикривала брудна руда борода. fire sun soil
coarse, red beard splashed all over his face and neck. Вінсент був невмитий і неохайний, його жорстка руда борода вкривала все обличчя й шию.
red glow of the stove, entwined in each other’s arms. Вони сиділи на долівці, зігріті багряним жаром плити, обвивши одне одного руками.
The sun was setting red behind the pine trees, the evening sky was reflected in the pools, and the heath and yellow sand were full of harmony. Багряне сонце опускалося за сосни, вечірнє небо відбивалося у ставках, а кольори пустища й жовтого піску гармонійно поєднувалися.
fields and the peasants were trudging their weary way home. Багряне сонце сідало над полем, землероби змореною ходою верталися додому.
Behind the saplings, behind the brownish red soil was a very delicate sky, bluish grey, warm, hardly blue, all aglow. За молодими деревцями, за червонясто-брунатною землею було дуже ніжне небо: сіро-голубе, тепле, ледь блакитне, повністю осяйне.
Biographers and art historians have devoted numerous studies to explaining how van Gogh
discovered color and how it influenced his palette, themes, subjects, and technique. Stone writes: “He
quickly learned that a colorist is one who, seeing a color in nature, knows at once how to analyze it
and say. «That grey-green is yellow with black, and hardly any blue” [
Anna Kwiatkowska has analyzed the poetics of impressionism in Stone’s work [21, 22], and in her
essay "Narration in Lust for Life" she also draws attention to the importance of color and chiaroscuro
in Stone’s novel and their lexical manifestations: “The narrator of Lust for Life is aware of the
significance of chiaroscuro, i.e. the distribution of light and shade. This awareness is thus duly
demonstrated on the lexical level. The colour-related vocabulary is employed by him on a large scale.
The colour palette enchants just like the paintings by van Gogh do. Additionally, the palette changes
continuously in harmony with the changes of tones in the painter’s works <...>. Gradually the colour
palette of the artist brightens and so does the verbal palette of Irving Stone: it is enriched with primitive
reds, greens, hues of blue and glaring yellows <...>. There are more and more of light, clear colours
even in the descriptions of the pictures that are to express sadness <...>. The colour of narration,
correspondingly to the colour on the canvas, develops into an effective method for expressing the most
profound feelings, individual reactions and most private opinions and views of the artist, both the
painter and the hero <...>” [
In this study, we focus on the color terms that reflect the painting experiments in the novel. The results of the quantitative analysis of color terms show that Stone’s text demonstrates sensitivity to van Gogh’s color palette, the writer professionally describes the names of paints, pigments, etc. that are important for the artist’s work:
“As soon as his allowance arrived from Theo — who had arranged to send fifty francs on the first,
tenth, and twentieth — he would rush down to the dealer and buy large tubes of ochre, cobalt, and
Prussion blue, and smaller tubes of Naples yellow, terra sienna, ultramarine, and gamboge. Then he
would work happily until the paints and the francs were exhausted, usually five or six days after the
allowance arrived from Paris, and his troubles set in again” [
The author often resorts to the ekphrastic description of the artist’s paintings, focusing more on color than on imagery or plot:
“A Zouave lad with a small face, the neck of a bull, and the eye of a tiger agreed to sit for a small
sum. Vincent did a half length of him in his blue uniform, the blue of enamelled saucepans, with a
braid of a faded reddish orange, and two pale lemon stars on his breast. There was a reddish cap on
the bronzed, feline head, set against a green background. The result was a savage combination of
incongruous tones, very harsh, common and even loud, but fitting the character of the subject” [
I. Stone’s novel was written in the 1930s, when van Gogh’s letters went out of print, and interest in his works grew significantly. At that time, the strategies of writing a biography about artists, which was founded by I. Stone, were focused on the detailed study of biographical facts, documents, artworks, memoirs, catalogs, and albums. The biographer worked with original works or reproductions in albums. Modern digital technologies allow both authors of biographical works and researchers to group research objects according to various criteria. For example, reproductions can be grouped by genre, chronology, size, technique, and, importantly for our study, by color.
For example, filtering van Gogh’s works on the Van Gogh Museum website allows us to illustrate and confirm our findings based on corpus lexical studies of the text of the biographical novel, Figure 1415.
This method will help to highlight the shades of color, to see certain characteristic features, and to develop a methodology of analysis. Thus, in modern conditions, it will provide a toolkit for fiction writers, film scriptwriters, etc. to create new texts that will more accurately convey the artist’s color palette.
For intermedial studies, the analysis of the relationship between color terms and exemplars is an important aspect, primarily in terms of paintings, their colors, and shades [20, 26]. Such linguistic research can serve as a basis for literary scholars in their search for the interaction between literary and pictorial works, analysis of the poetics of a literary text describing paintings, identification of the influence of painting on the writer’s style, linguistic characteristics of the text, etc. Such an analysis can serve as a basis for translators and editors of biographical works about artists or texts about paintings, as it can facilitate searching, identify quantitative and qualitative characteristics, explain and analyze how color terms are related to the colors and shades of the original paintings.
The developed methodology of corpus-based research of color terms can be applied to the analysis of other biographical novels by I. Stone, for example, The Passionate Journey, and The Agony and the Ecstasy, as well as texts from the epistolary corpus of Vincent van Gogh and other artists. The proposed algorithm of analysis can be applied to the study of biographical novels about artists in other literatures, such as Soutine’s Last Journey by Ralph Dutli’s, Saturn (Black Images from Lives of the Goya Family Men) by Jacek Dehnel, Self-Portrait of an Artist in Maturity by Mykhailo Slaboshpytskyi, A Lonely Traveler Walks a Lonely Road by V. Domontovych, The Landscape Artist by Stanislav Stetsenko, SelfPortrait from the Imagination of Volodymyr Yavorivskyi, Lunia i Modigliani by Silvia Zientek, The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, etc.
Corpus-based methods make it possible to compile a statistical profile of the use of color terms in the text of a literary work, to process them depending on the purpose according to a number of characteristics, in particular, to identify the dominant compatibility with different thematic groups of lexis, to comprehensively analyze their functioning in the work, to compare the frequency of color terms in other texts of a particular linguistic culture.
Thus, the profile of the studied text is formed by the following colors: black, yellow, blue, white, red, green, grey, brown, orange, violet, etc. It has been revealed that black is a dominant color term in the novel, the frequency of which is almost twice as high as the frequency of the next color – white. The dominance of black and, in general, the frequency of use of black and white differs significantly from the frequency of use of these lexemes within the English linguistic culture, in particular its American variant, which can be naturally explained by both the theme of the text and the author’s creative intention. The text of the analyzed novel is characterized by a high frequency of use of such color terms as yellow and blue. It should be noted that the significance of yellow and blue is manifested in the use of a variety of shades. At the same time, the frequencies of use of white, brown, pink, and purple in Stone’s text and in COCA are comparable.
Quantitative analysis of color terms should be combined with qualitative analysis, since a significant number of lexemes denoting color, in particular the colors of the spectrum, in addition to their direct meaning, convey figurative and symbolic meanings and are components of phraseological units, which are revealed in the course of contrastive research.
The article outlines the research strategy, methods, and algorithm of analysis that can be applied to other similar texts, primarily biographical works about painters, as well as their translations into other languages. Researchers argue that many of Van Gogh’s paintings have changed color since they were created, including his Field with Irises near Arles, Bedroom in Arles, and others [see, for example, 23]. This factor needs to be taken into account by scholars and non-fiction writers, therefore, creating a database of color terms based on the artist’s correspondence or other materials can facilitate the search for descriptions of paintings.
Corpus-based methods can be helpful for translators of works of fiction and other genres; editors of original works and translations who edit texts; researchers who study ideostyle of writers or analyze artworks where it is necessary to choose the most accurate shade of color; lexicographic practice; developers of software related to linguistic tasks, etc.
The prospect of our study is the translation aspect of the analysis, in particular of color terms in biographical works about van Gogh and the artist’s letters and their translations using corpus-based methods.
[18] N. Zaslavsky, C. Kemp, N. Tishby, T. Regier, Communicative need in colour naming, Cognitive
Neuropsychology 37 (2019) 1-13. doi: 10.1080/02643294.2019.1604502. [19] V. van Gog. The Letter. URL: http://www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let629/letter.html. [20] J. Gage, Color in Art, Thames & Hudson, 2006. [21] A. Kwiatkowska, Narration in Lust for Life. The Treatment of Impressionism in the Narration of Lust for Life by Irving Stone, Conventions and Texts, in: A. Zgorzelski (Ed.), Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, Gdańsk, 2003, pp. 188-205. [22] A. Kwiatkowska, Impresjonizm w narracji w powieści Irvinga Stone’s “Pasja życia”, Acta
Neophilologica III (2001) 197-208. [23] M. Geldof, A. N. Proaño Gaibor, F. Ligterink, et al., Reconstructing Van Gogh’s palette to determine the optical characteristics of his paints, Herit Sci 6(17) (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-018-0181-6. [24] R. S. Berns, Color science for the visual arts: a guide for conservators, curators and the curious,
Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2016. [25] Van Gogh Museum. URL: https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection. [26] І. Rajewsky, Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality, Intermédialités 6 (2005) 43-64.