Local Colour Revisited - an Essay in Conceptual Genealogy

The article offers information on the retracing of the history of the concept of local color. It states that etymologically, local color is the English equivalent of the French term "couleur locale" which was first recorded in the writings of French art critic and theorist Roger de Piles. Relative to this, it is also posed that from the end of the 18th century the term commenced to be used in literacy criticism in France, and gaining wider value at the start of the 19th century when it came to be related with the Romanticist movement. In its North American variant, the term has been used as a regionalist prose.