Red & Cobalt & Lavender

Cobalt and Lavender create an unexpected contrast of cool registers: Cobalt is deeply saturated, weighty, and formally blue. Lavender is softly saturated, light, and dreamily warm-cool mixed. Both are in the blue-to-purple family but at opposite ends of the saturation and value spectrum within that family. Together they create a balance of serious cool weight (Cobalt) and dreamy cool softness (Lavender) — a combination found specifically in Romantic era painting and French salon culture, where heavy institutional colors were often paired with soft dreamy pastels to create a balance of formal and intimate.

The palette also appears in Wedgwood jasperware and Neoclassical decorative arts: the combination of cobalt-blue glazed background, white relief, and lavender accents (or cobalt blue with lavender-toned relief elements) in Wedgwood decorative ceramics was a specific 18th-century design formula. Against vivid red — which appears on the Wedgwood Portland vase and other classical motifs — the palette describes Neoclassical decorative arts at its most sophisticated.