An Atlas of Rare & Familiar Colour; The Harvard Art Museums’ Forbes Pigment Collection, is a monograph produced in collaboration with the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at the Harvard Art Museums.

The Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at the Harvard Art Museums encompasses over 2500 of the world’s rarest pigments. Visually excavating the museums’ extraordinary collection, the monograph examines the contained pigments and artefacts; their providence, composition, symbology and application. Simultaneously, the publication also explores the larger related fields of chromatics, the historical narratives of art and chemistry, and the innovations our species’ have sought for millennia, to better illustrate our aesthetic and expressive compulsions.

An introduction to the monograph is authored by Straus Center Director Dr. Narayan Khandekar, accompanied with a foreword by renowned British colour scholar, Victoria Finlay.

First Edition, Second Printing