“How beautiful yellow is!” Vincent van Gogh wrote in an 1888 letter to brother Theo van Gogh that began “Sunshine, a light which, for want of a better word I can only call yellow—pale sulfur yellow, ...

Michel Pastoureau, Yellow: The History of a Color (image courtesy of Princeton University Press) My copy of the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols describes yellow as “the hottest, the most expansive and ...