Wallace Rimington with the Colour Organ

Alexander Wallace Rimington (1854-1918) was Professor of Fine Arts at Queen’s College, London and a water-colourist, whose studies of Turner led him to pursue his own ideas of a new language of art. He wrote a talk for the debut performance of his Colour Organ at the St James’s Hall, London, 6 June 1895. It was subsequently published as a paper, entitled A New Art: Colour-Music, and is reproduced in Klein’s book along with newspaper notices and the patent drawings (Klein was another artist who turned his eye to music). His Colour Organ was a somewhat unwieldy instrument, with a battery of arc lamps positioned in parallel high above a conventional organ console. The colours were projected onto a large screen. The organ was accompanied by piano and orchestra (the latter conducted by Louis N. Parker, later famous as a producer of pageants), and the programme featured music by Wagner, Dvorak, Chopin and Gounod. Other concerts then followed, which enjoyed a mixed reception, partly owing to poor stage management. A performance at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, on 30 November 1895 saw confusion from an audience which had imagined that by some marvellous new scientific discovery it was the sounds themselves that were producing the colours. Rimington was uncomfortable with public performance, and gave no more demonstrations after 1895. He wrote a book, Colour-Music: The Art of Mobile Colour in 1911, and in 1914 was invited by Sir Henry Wood to supervise the colour organ for a performance of Scriabin’s Prometheus at the Queen’s Hall, but the War intervened.

Here are some of Rimington’s thoughts from 1895:

Very briefly, my aim has been to deal with Colour in a new way, and to place its production under as easy and complete control as the production of sound in Music.

Until now colour to a large extent in nature, and altogether in art, has been presented to us without mobility and almost invariably associated with form. Colour combined with form has constituted the whole colour art of the world. In painting colour has been used only as one of the elements in a picture, although perhaps the greatest source of beauty. We have not yet had pictures in which there is neither form nor subject, but only pure colour. Even the most advanced impressionism has not carried us thus far. In decorative art colour has, broadly speaking, held the same position. Moreover, to obtain particular tints of colour it has been necessary to mix them laboriously on the palette or in the dye-house. Art hitherto has not been able to compete in any sort of way with Nature in the mobility of her multitudinous and ever-varying combinations of colour. There has, in fact, been no pure colour art dealing with colour alone, and trusting solely to all the subtle and marvellous changes and combinations of which colour is capable as the means of its expression.

The object of the present invention is to lay the first stone towards the building up of such an art in the future. The chief problem, then, that the new art sets itself is to introduce mobility into colour, and with this changefulness, the three great influences of Time, Rhythm, and Combination, slow or rapid and varied. Colour thus is freed from the trammels of form, and dealt with for the sake of its own loveliness.

Rimington’s talk on the Colour Organ, from which the above extract comes, expounds his thinking behind the invention, which was to find a means of marrying the arts of sound and light to a mutual aesthetic and emotional effect. In simple terms, Rimington took the colour spectrum and equated it with the musical octave, taking colours at particular points along the spectrum where their frequencies corresponded in ratio to the diatonic and chromatic scales, then putting these selected colours under the control of those specific notes on the keyboard. When depressed, the key then triggered the corresponding colour, by means of prisms, diaphragms, colour filters and fourteen arc lamps, the keyboard becoming, in Rimington’s words, ‘a large palette from which we can paint with instantaneous effect upon the screen.’ Some of the organ stops created further lighting effects, a pedal controlled luminosity, and three levers at the side of the organ controlled the degrees of strength for each of the primary colours. Rimington was therefore able to achieve a great variety of effect than might be assumed from a simple note-for-colour correlation. Nevertheless, the colours were inaccurate and relatively crudely produced. A review in The Times (28 June 1895) was sceptical both of the effect and the reasoning:

[I]t must have appeared doubtful to many whether there is any parallelism between the kinds of emotion produced by a piece of music rendered into sound in the ordinary way, and by its translation into colour as given by Mr Rimington. The tints with which the screen was filled were often very beautiful, if rather suggestive at times of ‘crushed strawberry’ and colours of that style, but they seemed unsatisfying, and did not convey the same impression to the mind as the music. There is perhaps force in the suggestion that our eyes are not yet sufficiently practised to make us competent judges of colour as expressive of emotion; but it may be remarked that even were the physical analogy between sound and colour complete which it is far from being it does not follow that the emotional effects are analogous. Mr Rimington, indeed, claims that his new art is not dependent upon the demonstration of the analogy; but, seeing that his instrument is constructed on the assumption that it does hold good, the point may not improperly be taken into account in considering the results obtained.

But if Rimington’s instrument was limited in its effectiveness, and if his theory of colour music was flawed and rather fell apart in performance, his passionate idealism demands respect. His rhapsodic description of pure colour, ‘freed from the trammels of form’, far in advance of most of the visual arts at this time (including his own art), soars above the mechanical realities and the mismanaged exhibitions which characterised the Colour Organ’s brief public turn in 1895. While the experimenters of the twentieth century who experimented with colour music seem of their time in engaging with abstract art – Scriabin, Wilfred, Fischinger, Mary Ellen Bute and others – Rimington the Victorian is the one who made the further leap imaginatively from the art that he knew to the art of his dreams.

But how did a Victorian art professor come to construct such an organ? His is the only name on the patent. What help did he receive? Who actually built it? And whatever became of it? The Colour Organ was located in Rimington’s home at 26 Kensington Park Gardens until 1914, certainly, but then what? I have searched where I can and have found no trace, online at least. Does anyone know what happened to it, if it survives? It would be grand to hear and see it played again.

Note: This post is an adaptation and expansion of an introduction I wrote to Wallace Rimington’s 1895 paper A New Art: Colour Music, for Living Pictures: The Journal of the Popular and Projected Image before 1914 (vol. 2 no. 2, 2003, a special issue on colour).