Concentrating on the general shift away from color that began around 1800, Harvey traces the transition to black from the court of Burgundy in the fifteenth century, through sixteenth-century Venice, seventeenth-century Spain and the Netherlands. He uses paintings from Van Eyck and Degas to Francis Bacon, religious art, period lithographs, wood engravings, costume books, newsphotos, movie stills and related sources in his compelling study of the meaning of color and clothes.