Madonna blue

English

Noun

Madonna blue (uncountable)

A shade of deep blue.
- 1917 August, Cynthia Stockley, “Blue Aloes: The Strange Story of a Karoo Farm”, in Cosmopolitan, volume LXIII, number 3, page 30, column 1:
  No doubt it had a beauty all its own, but beneath its fantastic, isolated blooms and leaves of Madonna blue, the gnarled roots sheltered a hundred varieties of poisonous reptiles and insects.
- 1922, The Illustrated Milliner, page 57:
  A little Dutch bonnet for the tiny girl is made of Madonna blue broadcloth.
- 1932, Agatha Christie, Peril at End House, page 85:
  She was wearing a gown of Madonna blue and looked very fragile and ethereal.
- 1944, Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street, New York, N.Y.: Coward-McCann, Inc., page 280:
  But now, in a few months’ time, the lease would be terminated, the owners were unwilling to renew it, and nowhere upon the Island could Reverend Mother find another vacant house large enough to house twenty female orphans; devout, happy little orphans who went to Mass on Sundays walking two by two, clothed in dresses of Madonna blue with white tuckers at the necks, blue cloaks, and black bonnets tied beneath their orphaned chins with neat blue bows.
- 1969, Gerald Durrell, Birds, Beasts and Relatives, London: Collins, page 236:
  Tanks would be filled and the sprayers would move through the frilly groves of vine, covering each leaf, wrapping each bunch of green grapes in a delicate web of Madonna blue.
- 1971, Nicolas Freeling, The Lovely Ladies, Harper & Row, page 87:
  Twilight had fallen, of a pure Madonna blue.
- 2014, Shelley Adina, A Lady of Spirit (Magnificent Devices; book six), Moonshell Books, →ISBN:
  She was painted on the plaster, her halo and the cross in her hand picked out in gold leaf, her mermaid’s tail a grand sweep of Madonna blue, lilac, and deep sea-green.

References

John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner, editors (1989), “Madonna”, in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, →ISBN.