Blue Color Stories
From ancient Egypt, where artisans fused copper and sand into a brilliant blue used to color the tombs of pharaohs, to renaissance Europe's ultramarine, ground from lapis lazuli and reserved for the robes of the Virgin Mary, blue was once a mark of luxury.
Modern synthetic dyes made blue affordable and part of everyone's wardrobe. Today’s blues range from faint coastal hues, nursery pastels, and worn denims to the deep tones of evening wear and night-sky ceilings.
Here are the stories about some of those Blues in our Collections.
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/ APOLLO BLUE / muted with a cool, gray-green undertone.
NASA's Apollo Command Module instrument panels were finished in a plain, muted gray, a practical choice that kept hundreds of switches, dials, and gauges legible without adding visual clutter to an already dense control layout. Mission Control's Houston operations room used a similarly restrained palette of grays and muted blue-greens throughout the Apollo missions.
That understated, utilitarian tone became inseparable from the visual identity of the space race, still evoking the quiet, focused atmosphere of a control room during humanity's most audacious missions.
/ BLUE IRIS / violet-leaning, soft and slightly muted floral.
The name comes from the Greek goddess Iris, personification of the rainbow, and was applied to the flower by Theophrastus in the 4th century BC in recognition of the range of colors found across its species.
In art, this specific blue-violet tone appears in Vincent van Gogh's Irises (1889), painted at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy, where he studied the flowers growing in the garden with sustained attention to their precise color. After his death, the painting passed through several private collections before selling at auction in 1987 for $53.9 million, a world record at the time; it has hung at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles since 1990.
/ PALE CERULEAN / soft blue with a gentle grey and airy quality.
The word cerulean derives from the Latin caelum, meaning sky, and its first recorded use in English as a color name dates to 1590. The pigment cerulean blue (cobalt stannate) was developed by the German chemist Andreas Höpfner in 1805 and commercially produced from 1860, when it became available to artists as a stable, lightfast alternative to earlier sky blues that were prone to fading.
John Constable was among the first painters to use the manufactured pigment, applying it to render the specific pale, grey-tinged quality of the English sky with a precision that earlier pigments could not sustain.
/ FORGET-ME-NOT / soft, romantic, floral blue.
The name comes from a medieval German legend: a knight walking along a riverbank stooped to pick the small blue flowers for his beloved, but the weight of his armor pulled him under. As he was swept away, he threw her the bouquet and called out "Vergiss mein nicht" — forget me not. The phrase spread across German-speaking Europe by the 15th century and crossed into English by the 1530s, attaching itself permanently to the flower's pale, unmistakable blue — a color Victorians later adopted as a token of remembrance worn at partings and funerals.
/ INDIGO / dark, cool blue with a green undertone.
The dye comes from Indigofera tinctoria, a plant cultivated in India for over four thousand years. Its name derives from the Greek indikon, meaning simply "from India." For centuries, Arab and Venetian merchants carried it overland and across the Mediterranean to Europe in limited, costly quantities. That changed after Vasco da Gama opened a direct sea route in 1498, letting traders ship indigo to Europe in bulk.
Long before any of that trade existed, though, indigo dyeing had already been invented independently on the other side of the world. In 2016, researchers analyzing cotton fragments from Huaca Prieta, a ceremonial site on Peru's northern coast, confirmed the presence of indigotin — the same dye compound found in Indian indigo — in textiles roughly 6,000 years old and using a species likely related to Indigofera suffruticosa, sometimes called añil, native to the tropical Americas.
/ LATE MIDNIGHT BLUE / cosmic deep and nightly dark.
The first recorded use of the color name midnight blue was in 1810. Van Gogh used this depth of blue in Starry Night and Café Terrace at Night (1888), among the first of his works to feature the night sky.
In fashion, the future King Edward VIII caused a stir in the 1920s by wearing midnight blue evening suits as an alternative to black. Under artificial lighting, midnight blue cloth reads as a truer, richer tone. One of his evening suits is now part of the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
/ RAINCLOUD BLUE / pale gray, softly muted in tone.
When sunlight passes through layers of cloud, it softens the sky's blue into a muted gray in this same range. Similar tones have long appeared in landscape painting, where artists used diluted pigments to represent mist, distance, and changing weather.
James McNeill Whistler used a closely related blue-gray throughout his Nocturnes, a series of paintings begun in the 1870s that rendered London's Thames at dusk in hazy blues and grays. The critic John Ruskin accused Whistler of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face," prompting Whistler to sue him for libel in a trial that became a landmark argument for treating mood and atmosphere as serious subjects for art.
/ MAYA BLUE / vivid and clear, slightly greenish cyan.
Developed by the ancient Maya beginning around 800 CE, it is an unusual pigment: a hybrid of organic and inorganic ingredients, combining indigo dye extracted from the añil plant with palygorskite, a fibrous clay mineral, heated together to bond at a molecular level. The resulting color proved extraordinarily durable, resisting acids, alkalis, and centuries of jungle humidity in a way that plain indigo never could, which is why it still survives vividly on murals at Bonampak and sculptures at Chichén Itzá. Its chemical structure remained a mystery to Western science until the 1960s, when X-ray diffraction analysis finally confirmed how clay and dye could combine into something so stable.
/ NEBULA BLUE / light cloudy grayish pastel.
William Herschel, the 18th-century astronomer who conducted some of the earliest telescopic surveys of nebulae, described what's now called the North America Nebula as a "faint milky nebulosity scattered over this space, in some places pretty bright."
Earlier in the century in Sweden, King Gustav III returned from France taken with Neoclassical style, which Swedish craftsmen adapted into their own restrained, chalky paint palette. Because Sweden's winters left rooms dark for months, furniture and paneling were finished in pale grays, whites, and this same washed-out blue-gray to bounce what little daylight there was around a room. That soft, wintry tone became one of the defining colors of Gustavian style, and it's still widely copied in Scandinavian interiors today.
/ AIR FORCE BLUE / muted calm, cool and dusty.
The Royal Air Force adopted this shade for its uniforms in 1919, though the choice was more accident than design: Britain had a surplus of inexpensive sky-blue herringbone twill originally woven for the uniforms of Czarist Russian cavalrymen, an order left unfulfilled after the Russian Revolution.
When the United States Air Force became its own branch of the military in 1947, it took nearly three years of committee work before "air force blue" cloth was finally issued in 1950. The color has since been adopted, in close variants, by air forces across the Commonwealth, from Canada to Australia to New Zealand.
/ DENIM / rich, saturated blue of a new pair of jeans.
The fabric takes its name from serge de Nîmes, a sturdy twill first woven in Nîmes, France, by weavers attempting to recreate a fustian cloth from Genoa, Italy — a city whose French name, Gênes, is the likely source of the word "jeans." Traditional denim is woven with indigo-dyed warp threads and undyed white weft threads, which is why the inside of a pair of jeans is so much paler than the outside.
Levi Strauss, a Bavarian immigrant who moved to San Francisco during the Gold Rush, popularized the fabric for work trousers in the 1870s, and synthetic indigo, developed by Adolf von Baeyer in the 1880s, made the color affordable and consistent enough to clothe the world.
/ MOROCCAN BLUE / vivid, saturated indigo-violet.
Inspired by the painter Jacques Majorelle, who in the 1920s built a garden studio on the edge of Marrakech and drenched its walls, fountains, and pergolas in a saturated, electric blue — a color so distinctly his that it eventually carried his name, now recognized as part of the country's heritage.
The garden fell into disrepair after Majorelle's death, until fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé bought and restored it in 1980. The color became closely associated with Saint Laurent's own work, appearing in a Fall/Winter 1975 Rive Gauche dress rendered in the same electric blue.
/ ONAHAU BLUE / tropical cool cyan with a whisper of green.
Evocative of Hawaii, the color is best understood as a mood: the pale, sun-lit hue of a calm tropical shoreline.
In the late 1960s, David Hockney painted a series of Los Angeles swimming pools in this flat, glowing turquoise, most famously in A Bigger Splash (1967). The bright, shallow-water blue then became synonymous with Southern California leisure.
A decade earlier, American kitchens had already embraced this turquoise pastel: appliance makers like Frigidaire and GE sold refrigerators and stoves in its shades, which by the mid-1950s had become one of the most popular color choices in the American home.
/ TRANQUIL / calm and gentle gray-toned tint of teal.
That sense of calm has a long practical history behind it. In 1914, American surgeon Harry Sherman repainted the operating theatre at St. Luke's Hospital in San Francisco in a muted green-blue after finding that the glare of an all-white room, combined with hours of staring at red blood, was straining surgeons' eyes and distorting their vision. Sherman's choice sat directly opposite red on the color wheel, letting the eye rest and reset — and hospitals worldwide gradually adopted some version of that same calming, grey-toned blue-green for operating rooms and scrubs, a tradition that continues today for exactly the same reason.
/ MALIBU BLUE / bright, clear, sun-washed hue, named for the stretch of Southern California coastline that has stood for beach culture and easy luxury since the mid-20th century.
Malibu's identity as a symbol of coastal leisure took hold after the opening of the Pacific Coast Highway in the 1920s, which made its beaches newly accessible, and cemented itself through Hollywood's decades-long fascination with the area as a retreat for stars. Today, the color carries that same associations, evoking clear skies, open water and sporty fashion.
/ EGYPTIAN BLUE / medium-dark cobalt, a historical pigment.
First produced in Egypt around 3100 BCE, it is widely considered the world's first synthetic pigment, made by heating together sand, copper, lime, and an alkali flux until they fused into calcium copper silicate. Egyptians used it to line tomb ceilings as a stand-in for the night sky and to color the skin of the god Osiris, and it later spread through the Roman world as a cheaper alternative to costly, imported lapis lazuli. The pigment fell out of use after the fall of the Roman Empire and its recipe was lost for centuries, only rediscovered and chemically explained by modern researchers.
/ AQUAMARINE / cool, mineral blue-green.
The name comes directly from the Latin aqua marina, meaning sea water, and was first applied as a colour name in English in 1598.
It is also the name of the gemstone, a variety of beryl coloured by trace amounts of iron, whose distinctive pale blue-green has been prized since antiquity. Roman fishermen carried aquamarine gemstones as protective talismans at sea, and the stone was used extensively in jewellery throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. The colour's association with clarity and water is rooted in its name's own etymology one of the more literal and direct connections between a colour and its source.
/ AZURE / richly saturated vivid blue with a cool clarity.
The word traces back to the Persian lazhward, the name of the region famous for lapis lazuli, which passed through Arabic and into Old French as azur.
In 1887, French writer Stéphen Liégeard used the word to title his travel book La Côte d'Azur, naming the Mediterranean coastline of southeast France after its vivid sea — inspired by his home region's own name, the Côte d'Or, in Burgundy. The name caught on almost instantly, replacing "French Riviera" and becoming the coastline's identity ever since.
/ DAYDREAM BLUE / softly sweet, sky cast haze.
This pale, luminous blue found one of its grandest expressions on the ceiling of the Würzburg Residence in Germany, where Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo spent 1752 and 1753 covering the world's largest ceiling fresco with airy, sky-filled scenes of the four continents. In March 1945, Allied bombing destroyed roughly 90 percent of Würzburg in a single night, yet Tiepolo's vast painted sky survived largely intact.
/ GLACIAL ICE / misty, cool and airy winter blue.
The color is produced by the optical properties of dense glacial ice as snow compresses over centuries, air bubbles are forced out and the crystals absorb red wavelengths, scattering back this pale gray-blue. Arctic explorers documented the phenomenon from the early 19th century, and it appears throughout the expedition watercolors that first brought polar landscapes into public consciousness.
Edward Wilson, scientific illustrator on Scott's Terra Nova expedition, recorded this tone in field studies of Antarctic ice between 1910 and 1912. It became a natural reference point in Scandinavian design, where its association with northern light and cold clarity suited the restrained aesthetic of the region's architecture and interiors.
/ NAVY BLUE / nautical, coastal, celestial, deep and dark.
The Royal Navy adopted this shade for officers' uniforms in 1748, the first time it had any standardized dress at all. As the story goes, King George II so admired a deep blue riding habit worn by the Duchess of Bedford that he asked the Navy's officers to be dressed to match it — her husband happened to hold the relevant Admiralty post at the time. The deep, near-black blue chosen that year gave the color its name and has remained the standard for naval uniforms worldwide ever since.
/ PALE PERIWINKLE / very light, soft, airy blue.
In his Confessions, philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau describes stumbling on a patch of periwinkle flowers in 1764 while walking near Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and crying out with sudden joy — the sight instantly returned him to a walk he'd taken thirty years earlier with Madame de Warens, the woman who had first pointed the flower out to him.
The passage became one of the most quoted meditations on memory in French literature, and periwinkle's pale blue has carried associations of nostalgia and old friendship ever since.
/ ROBIN'S EGG BLUE / mid-tone, cool teal with a strong green undertone.
This vivid shade takes its name directly from the American robin's eggshell, a color admired by ornithologists and collectors well before it entered design vocabulary. Victorian glassmakers embraced it for decorative milk glass and pressed-glass tableware, prizing its cheerful clarity against white porcelain.
The tone appeared widely in mid-20th century American kitchen and bathroom enamelware, where its clean, bright character suited the optimistic domestic palette of postwar design.
Quilters and needleworkers of the same period favored it for its lively contrast against cream and white threads. Today the shade remains tied to that original springtime association, evoking renewal and clear skies.
/ ULTRAMARINE / mid-tone, cool blue with a violet undertone, vivid, fully saturated, and luminous.
The name comes from the Latin ultramarinus, "beyond the sea" referencing the lapis lazuli stone mined in the Sar-e-Sang mines of Afghanistan and shipped to Europe via trade routes from the 6th century onwards. Ground lapis produced the most prized pigment in medieval and Renaissance painting, reserved by patrons specifically for the robes of the Virgin Mary as a mark of devotion and expense. At its peak, genuine ultramarine cost more than gold by weight, and contracts between artists and patrons stipulated its use by name.
French chemist Jean-Baptiste Guimet synthesized an affordable equivalent in 1826, winning a prize offered by the French government, which made the color widely available to artists and manufacturers for the first time.
/ MEDITERRANEAN / medium saturated open sea.
In the summer of 1905, Henri Matisse invited fellow painter André Derain to the fishing village of Collioure on France's Mediterranean coast, where the two spent weeks painting the harbor in colors far more intense than was typical at the time, including this kind of pure, saturated blue for sea and sky.
When their paintings were shown that autumn at the Salon d'Automne in Paris, where the critic Louis Vauxcelles dismissed the painters as “wild beasts” (fauves), inadvertently naming the expressive movement, Fauvism.