Local colour is a calque of the French phrase couleur locale. In its earliest documented use in the late seventeenth century, it pertained to the language of painterly technique. Since the 1820s, it has been applied in both French and English to describe imaginative literature and drama, initially among Romanticist circles, designating the use of particularizing traits in the fictional depiction of a locale or a bygone era. In American English, however, the term regularly refers to regionalist prose, through association with the writers of the so-called Local color movement (1870–1920). Due to their differing semantics and the distinct sets of critical reflections that they have inspired, the Franco-British and the American variants will be discussed separately in this entry and distinguished by their spelling.

Local colour's link to travel and travel writing stems from the tenacious belief that there is such a thing as a ‘spirit of a place’ (genius loci as the ancient Romans called it) – a set of distinctive features inherent to every locale (see place) – and that this ‘spirit’ might be grasped empirically. Many nineteenth-century writers avowedly set out on journeys in search of local colour (Thompson 2012) and even claimed to have found it on the ground, like Théophile Gautier (2001 [1843], 16) upon crossing a bridge on the Franco-Spanish border: ‘At the end of the Bridge you run straight into Spanish life and local colour: Irun has no sort of likeness to a French village.’ The recognition of these features as distinctively or authentically Spanish depends, of course, more upon the consensus-effect produced by the doxa of Gautier's home culture and its semiotic codes (Culler 1981) than upon any empirical reality. Journeys in search of local colour and the accounts they inspire are therefore a quest for the distinctive, or authentic, rather than the unfamiliar or the unknown (see exotic); they are journeys of recognition rather than discovery.

As a critical concept, local colour has little currency in contemporary scholarship, discredited as a ‘superficial, scopic reliance on “picturesque” aspects of radically different cultures’ (Forsdick 2000, 34) (see picturesque) and the Romantic fascination for the quaint. Nineteenth-century travellers nonetheless explain their motivation for journeying in more ambivalent terms, as a desire for ‘immersion in local colour’.