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Sepia   Listen
noun
Sepia  n.  (pl. E. sepias, L. sepiae)  
1.
(Zool.)
(a)
The common European cuttlefish.
(b)
A genus comprising the common cuttlefish and numerous similar species.
2.
A pigment prepared from the ink, or black secretion, of the sepia, or cuttlefish. Treated with caustic potash, it has a rich brown color; and this mixed with a red forms Roman sepia. Cf. India ink, under India.
Sepia drawing or Sepia picture, a drawing in monochrome, made in sepia alone, or in sepia with other brown pigments.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sepia" Quotes from Famous Books



... the portfolio contained, were the children most affected and enchanted by one in sepia, which represented a girl kneeling before a rose-bush, from which she was gathering roses, whilst a lyre lay against a gravestone ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer

... in seeking the living wonders of the deep through the four quarters of the world; he had a cabinet of stuffed and dried fishes, of shells, sea-weeds, corals, and madrepores, that was the admiration and envy of the Royal Society. He had penetrated into the watery den of the Sepia Octopus, disturbed the conjugal happiness of that turtle-dove of the ocean, and come off victorious in a sanguinary conflict. He had been becalmed in the tropical seas, and had watched, in eager expectation, though unhappily always in vain, to see the colossal polypus rise from ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock

... tyrosinase could be obtained from the blood of certain insects, and, acting upon a chromogen present in the blood, converted it into a pigmentary substance of melanin-like nature. Hans Przibram also extracted a tyrosinase from the ink-sac of Sepia, and, causing it to act upon a watery solution of tyrosin, obtained a black pigment. From the blood of Bombyx mori, fe. von Ducceshi has also ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... to be the most artistic of photographic printing processes, may be separated into its three modifications—the hot bath and cold bath, in which a faintly visible image is developed, and the Pizzighelli printing-out paper. The hot bath process, again, may be divided into the black and white and sepia papers. I intend to give you a rough outline of the preparation of the paper and working of these modifications, concluding by demonstrating the hot bath method, and handing around ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various

... force by force. They furnish, however, the pharmacopoeia of medicine and not the practice of medicine. Now consider the personal means which nature has put into your hands for self-defence; for Providence has forgotten no one; if to the sepia (that fish of the Adriatic) has been given the black dye by which he produces a cloud in which he disappears from his enemy, you should believe that a husband has not been left without a weapon; and now the time has come for ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... takes place with bitumen, are capable of rendering very beautiful half tones, both on polished zinc and on albumenized paper. These sensitive substances are extracted by dissolving marine glue or coal-tar in benzine. By exposure to light, both marine-glue and coal-tar turn of a sepia color, and, in a printing-frame, they render a visible image, which is not the case with bitumen; their solvents are in the order of their energy; chloroform, ether, benzine, turpentine, petroleum spirit, and alcohol. Of these solvents, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various

... especially those of the sparrow and finch tribe, come to feast on the oily seeds; and where is there a more charming sight than when a family of goldfinches settle upon the huge, top-heavy heads, unconsciously forming a study in sepia and gold? ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... Sch., and G.-V. Evidently a sauce or dressing. The formula for the forcemeat of the fish is not given here but is found in {Rx} No. 406—stuffed Sepia, a fish ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius

... picture a more terrible object than one of these huge monsters brooding in the ocean depths, the gloom of his surroundings increased by the inky fluid (sepia) which he secretes in copious quantities, every cup-shaped disc, of the hundreds with which the restless tentacles are furnished, ready at the slightest touch to grip whatever is near, not only by suction, but by the great claws set all round within its circle. And in the centre ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen

... scale. The members of this genus have rusty spores. These may be sepia-brown, bright yellowish-brown or light red. There is no volva, but there is a ring which is sometimes persistent, friable, and fugacious. In this respect it corresponds with the Armillaria among the white spored ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard

... of Oki is the same as that of Hinomisaki—dried cuttlefish; an article of food much in demand both in China and Japan. The cuttlefish of Oki and Hinomisaki and Mionoseki are all termed ika (a kind of sepia); but those caught at Mionoseki are white and average fifteen inches in length, while those of Oki and Hinomisaki rarely exceed twelve inches and have a reddish tinge. The fisheries of Mionoseki and Hinomisaki are scarcely known; ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn

... black matter found in the lungs is not a secretion, but comes from without. The pigmentum nigrum of the ox I find to lose its colour entirely, and to leave only a quantity of white flocks, when rubbed in a mortar with chlorine water. Sepia, which is a preparation of the dark-coloured liquor of the cuttle fish, was also bleached by chlorine, but the black matter of the lungs was not destroyed or bleached in the slightest degree by chlorine, it ...
— An Investigation into the Nature of Black Phthisis • Archibald Makellar

... of the Sepia has passed into a proverb. The animal possesses a store of dark fluid, which, if attacked, it at once ejects, and thus escapes under cover of the ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock

... him," she said in an odd voice. And, looking at it, Craven realised that the cleverness of the painted head on the large canvas paled to mediocrity beside the brilliance of the sepia sketch he held. It was the same head—but marvellously different—set on the body of a faun. The dancing limbs were pulsing with life, the tiny hoofs stamping the flower-strewn earth in an ecstasy of movement; the head was thrown forward, bent ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull

... edge of a big rock pool. Wisps of blue smoke from dying fires tell of the tea that has washed beef and biscuit down dry and dusty throats. The last company of bathers are drying in the sun upon the rocks, necks, arms and knees burnt to a sepia brown, the rest of their bodies alabaster white in the sunshine. It is three o'clock, and the drowsy heat of afternoon has hushed the bird and insect world to sleep. Only in the tree-tops is the sleepy hum of bees, still busy with the flowers, and the last twitter of soft birds' voices. ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey

... round and overhead was palest green and strangely luminous, the sea before us stretched to the far horizon in tones of gentlest mauve and violet, beneath our feet was the firm brown sand for miles and miles unrolled like a glossy, sepia carpet. On one side broke the tiny waves in undulating lines of white; on the other, the wild sand-dunes, grown over with rough grass and waving cocoanut palms, came ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross

... both sides with the crimson powder, softening off the same, and leaving a margin of the yellow free from colour. The stamina are prepared (according to pattern), from double yellow wax, and painted with rich brown (cake sepia and crimson), from the broad part to the point. To a large wire affix a piece of double green wax, cover the same with lemon wax, and press it into a triangular form: place a strip of double green wax three quarters of ...
— The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling • Emma Peachey

... round quickly to meet the gaze of mischievous eyes that strove vainly to seem simple and sincere. His own, in which amusement was blended with wonder, noted that they were very handsome eyes and rather curiously colourful, the delicate sepia shade of the pupils being lightened by a faint sheen of gold in the irides; they were, furthermore, large and set well apart. On the whole he decided that they were even beautiful, for all the dancing glimmer of perverse humour in their depths; he could fancy ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance

... state from China has the same pure black colour as in the Octopus ventricosus, and differs entirely in its shade, when diluted, from that of the Loligo sagittata, as may be seen from specimens of these three colours on drawing paper. Swammerdam suspected the China ink to be made from that of the Sepia; Cuvier found it more like that of the Octopus and Loligo; but different kinds of that substance are brought from China, probably made from different genera of these animals, where they abound of gigantic size." At the present day, according ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various

... painting, and had taken a course of drawing-lessons from no less a person than Cotman. She painted small watercolour landscapes herself, with a delicate economy of means and a graceful Norwich convention; her sketch-books were filled with abbeys gently washed in, river-banks in sepia by which the elect might be dimly reminded of Liber Studiorum, and woodland scenes over which the ghost of Creswick had faintly breathed. It was not exciting art, but it was, so far as it went, in its lady-like reserve, the real thing. Our sea-anemones, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... — N. brown &c adj.. [Pigments],, bister ocher, sepia, Vandyke brown. V. render brown &c adj.; tan, embrown^, bronze. Adj. brown, bay, dapple, auburn, castaneous^, chestnut, nut-brown, cinnamon, russet, tawny, fuscous^, chocolate, maroon, foxy, tan, brunette, whitey brown^; fawn-colored, snuff-colored, liver-colored; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... preserve the most perfect order. The evergreen arch wouldn't stay firm after she got it up, but wiggled and threatened to tumble down on her head when the hanging baskets were filled. Her best tile got a splash of water, which left a sepia tear on the Cupid's cheek. She bruised her hands with hammering, and got cold working in a draft, which last affliction filled her with apprehensions for the morrow. Any girl reader who has suffered like afflictions will sympathize with poor Amy and wish ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... boy's astonished interest Stanton spread out on the bed all around him a dozen soft sepia-colored photographs of a dozen different girls. Stately in satin, or simple in gingham, or deliciously hoydenish in fishing-clothes, they challenged his surprised attention. Blonde, brunette, tall, short, posing with wistful tenderness in the flickering glow of an open fire, or smiling frankly ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... months' time, there were to be found in more crowded and less affluent quarters of our thriving little city four more Rowena Hildegardes, of tender years, or rather, tender months—two black ones, one chrome-yellow one, and one sepia-brown one. ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb

... her a little sepia sketch of Borvabost, its huts, its bay, and its upturned boats on the beach. Sheila's expressions of praise, the admiration and pleasure that shone in her eyes, would have turned any young man's head. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various

... and beard, with their vacant glance and their wonderful draperies, clinging and weighty like the wet draperies of ancient sculpture. They are beautiful petrifactions, or vivified statues; Mantegna's masterpiece, the sepia "Judith" in Florence, is like an exquisite, pathetically lovely Eurydice, who has stepped unconscious and lifeless out of a Praxitelian bas-relief. And there are stranger works than even the Judith; strange statuesque fancies, like the fight of Marine Monsters and the Bacchanal ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... small faience reliefs are of particularly exquisite design and execution, particularly one of a Cretan wild-goat and her young, the subject being executed in pale green, with dark sepia markings, and characterized by great directness and naturalism of treatment. Most interesting, however, were the figures of the Snake Goddess and her votaresses. The goddess is 13-1/2 inches in height. She wears a high tiara of purplish-brown, with a white border, and her dress consists of a richly ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... The sepia of the artist comes from a mollusk, and is the fossil or extant ink-bag of a cephalopod or squid, while the cuttle-fish bone is used for a variety of purposes. In the islands of the Pacific the young of the pearly ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various

... pretty clear, which is, that, whether or not Koster was the printer, the first block-books were produced somewhere in Holland, as several are in Dutch, a language seldom, if ever, printed out of its own country. They were generally printed in light-brown ink, like a sepia drawing, which, I think, was adopted with a view to their being colored—a condition in which we find the greater part of them. When these prints were colored they presented very much the appearance of the Low Country ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson

... slowly. Out of the nose of the plane, which had now become a tiny submarine, started a narrow tube of black, oddly like the sepia of a giant squid. Straight toward the side of the liner it went. Above the rail the Secret Agents could see the pictured form of Prester Kleig, hand upraised. The black streak reached ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various

... of gamboge, of sepia, of blue-black, of cobalt, and vermilion; and prepare gradated columns (exactly as you have done with the Prussian blue) of the lake and blue-black.[206] Cut a narrow slip all the way down, of each gradated colour, and set the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... collection particularly valuable, is its large number of original drawings by eminent masters which accompany the written and engraved works. Amongst these are two large sepia drawings, by Amici, of the Pantheon and St Peter's at Rome. These drawings were engraved and published with several others by Ackermann. Both the originals, and the engravings executed from them, are in the collection. The ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... that the ladies of his time had recourse, on such occasions, to the brains of the mustela piscis. The Sepia octopus was also in great repute, and Plautus, in his play of Cisina, introduces an old man who has just been purchasing some at ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport

... written in my album, Clemence," said Aline, in her turn. During vacation, among her other pleasures forbidden her at the Sacred Heart, the young girl had purchased a superbly bound album, containing so far but two ugly sketches in sepia, one very bad attempt in water-colors, and the verses in question. She called this "my album!" as she called a certain little blank book, "my diary!" To the latter she confided every night the important events of the day. This book had assumed such proportions, ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard

... markings, the eggs vary surprisingly. The ground-colour is in some a clear pale greenish blue; in others pale blue; in others a dingy olive; and in others again a pale stone-colour. The markings are blackish brown, sepia and olive-brown, and rather pale inky purple. Some have the markings small, sharply defined, and thinly sprinkled: others are extensively blotched and streakily clouded; others are freckled or smeared over the entire surface, so as to leave but little, if any, of the ground-colour ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume

... and who was ever on the watch for some extravagant appropriation. He, with Ransom, of North Carolina, and other Confederate brigadiers, saw opposite to them, as their equal, Senator Bruce, of Mississippi, round-faced, bright-eyed, and sepia-hued, the emancipated slave who had reached the full stature of citizenship through the flame ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore

... morning; he inhales clouds of incense; he is a god at home. The faithful, to obtain access to him form a line in the court.[31111] One by one they are admitted into the reception room, where they gather around portraits of him drawn with pencil, in stump, in sepia and in water color, and before miniature busts in red or gray plaster. Then, on the signal being given by him, they penetrate through a glass door into the sanctuary where he presides, into the private closet in which the best bust of him, with verses ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... said the boatman, "zat's sepia ink ze squid has squirted so as to hide. Zey always do zat. Zere's probably a lot of zem zere, for zey ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... his own slight sepia drawing; the Bibler's Seat is marked Not so daring, but much more mischievous, was a trick which he played with some of his companions on the tops of the houses on the north side of the Grassmarket. The boys took a barrel to the Castlehill, ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... phantom trees, for not a leaf stirs; but the corn seems to grow more luminous, as if it had drunk something of the fire as well as the colour of the sun, while the horns of the sinking moon gleam silver-bright just over the topmost trees, painted in sepia upon a cobalt sky. How weird, phantasmal, enigmatic the forms of those trees now appear! Some like hell-hags, with wild hair flying, are rushing through the air; others, majestic, solitary, wrapped about with dark horror, are the trees of ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... opposite side of the room was something fairly familiar. At first glance it seemed a simple basket of kittens, done in black and white—something like crayon, and yet resembling sepia. Alongside the basket, however, was a spoon, one end resting on the edge of a saucer. And it was the size of the spoon that commanded Chick's attention; rather, the size of the kittens, any one of which could have curled up comfortably in the bowl of the spoon! Judging relatively, if it ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... in her Cell in Oxford Castle Frontispiece From an unpublished Sepia Drawing in the Collection of ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead

... them over in ink, and in a forged ancient hand. The same word sometimes recurred in both handwritings. The ink, which looked old, was really no English ink at all, not even Ireland's mixture. It seemed to be sepia, sometimes mixed with a little Indian ink. Mr. Hamilton made many other sad discoveries. He pointed out that Mr. Collier had published, from a Dulwich MS., a letter of Mrs. Alleyne's (the actor's wife), referring to Shakespeare as "Mr. ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang

... writers, translations of whom in every tongue had just then descended, Gothlike, upon Europe, to the great energising of its various literatures. She it was too who first handed them the fretted golden key to the enchanted garden of the Pre-Raphaelites, and the striking head of the young Dante in sepia, which had hung in a sort of shrine-recess in Henry's study, had been copied for him from Rossetti's sketch by ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne

... Scotch friend in his estimate of Forbes, and if he were alive and the controversy beginning, I should say draw your picture in your best sepia or lampblack. But I have been thinking over this matter a good deal since I received your letter, and my verdict is, leave that tempting ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... Victor Radnor's apprehensions of a possible, if not an impending, consummation, that the ghastly vision of the Jew Dominant in London City, over England, over Europe, America, the world (a picture drawn in literary sepia by Colney: with our poor hang neck population uncertain about making a bell-rope of the forelock to the Satyr-snouty master; and the Norman Lord de Warenne handing him for a lump sum son and daughter, both to be Hebraized in their different ways), fastened on the most ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... sealed. I fancied at first that it was paraffin wax, and smashed the glass accordingly. But the odour of camphor was unmistakable. In the universal decay this volatile substance had chanced to survive, perhaps through many thousands of centuries. It reminded me of a sepia painting I had once seen done from the ink of a fossil Belemnite that must have perished and become fossilized millions of years ago. I was about to throw it away, but I remembered that it was inflammable and burned with a good bright flame—was, ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... young cocoanut-tree, was a necklace of pearls that an empress might have envied her, had they been real and not the synthetic gift of some trader. Small and shapely feet, bare, peeped from under her filmy frills. Her eyes were the large, limpid orbs of the typical Marquesan, like sepia, long-lashed; her nose straight and perfect, her mouth sensuous and demanding. Ghost Girl, her name signified, and she flitted about the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... including the whole. Take, for instance, the large one in our National Gallery, seen from the opposite door, where the black cow appears a great deal nearer than the dogs, and the golden tones of the distance look like a sepia drawing rather than like sunshine, owing chiefly to the utter want of aerial grays indicated ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin

... Sevres) was brought in on a camel fresh from the jungle of the Jardin des Plantes, and followed by quantities of natives of every variety of shade, from sepia to chocolate, as near to nature as they dared go without spoiling their beauty. Some of the costumes were very fantastic. Ladies dressed in skirts made of feathers, and beads hanging everywhere, copied after ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone



Words linked to "Sepia" :   brown, burnt sienna, cuttle, Indian red, family Sepiidae, pigment, Venetian red, copper, mahogany, brick red, genus Sepia, Sepiidae, reddish brown, mollusk genus, brownness



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