From prehistoric to contemporary times, colour has been a central element in art, and performs not only an aesthetic function, but also serves to convey emotions, and even acts as a symbol of societal evolution.
But where does the colour that we see in paintings come from? Coloured paint is created when natural or artificial pigments (finely milled substances) are combined with a medium or binding agent. Pigments of natural origin can be either mineral (earth and rocks) or organic (vegetable or animal), whereas artificial pigments are created through a process of chemical reactions.
Throughout history, painters have used the materials which were available to them, for reasons including environmental influence, geographical location, economic scarcity or abundance, financial restrictions, physical capability, and scientific and technological advances, to name just a few.
In prehistoric times, painters used pigments that were found in close proximity to their settlements: earth pigments like yellow ochre, red ochre, black, and white. These came from naturally occurring minerals such as finely ground rocks, chalk, and charcoal from the fire. They were mixed with water to allow the pigment to be painted onto a surface using tools, fingers, or even sprayed from the mouth. The naturally occurring hues that were available at the time mean that cave paintings are discernible by their restricted and rustic colour palette of reds, yellows and browns.
In approximately 400 BCE Greek artists worked with a limited palette of four earth tones known as the tetrachromy, due to the limited local minerals available to them. These colours were yellow ochre, red ochre, vine black, and gypsum white. According to an article in the Royal Society of Chemistry online “the beauty of the earth tones was that these colors work in relationship with each other, creating a harmonious and subtle vibrancy to figures and nature”. A wide range of colours could be mixed from the simple palette, including all flesh-tints, making it ideal for portraying figurative depictions. In the 5th century BCE the painter Polygnotus of Thasos was notable for his arrangement of figures to create depth, and to portray emotion - purportedly the first portraiture painter to do so.
Let’s take a look at the development of just some of the pigments used throughout art history.
WHITE
White was one of the first colours* used in art, and the Lascaux Caves in France are probably the most well known early paintings which make use of white pigments (from ground calcite and chalk). However, it was the emergence of new techniques in Ancient Greece that made arguably the most significant contribution to the widespread use of the pigment in the form of lead white.
This pigment is said to have first been synthesised in the 4th century BCE Greece, although some art historians say that it was actually in 7th century BCE China that the earliest known example of man-made lead white was found. In any case, from the 5th century BCE it was being produced in enormous quantities in Greece, and soon after by Egyptian and Roman craftsmen.
An extremely versatile pigment, lead white was dense and opaque (meaning that thin coats would suffice when mark making), quick drying, could be used to prime canvases and panels, as well as underpainting, and for adding highlights to a painting. These attributes gave it a principal position on most artist’s palettes.
Dutch Baroque painter Rembrandt is famous for his exemplary use of lead white in paintings such as The Night Watch (1642), in which it was used to great effect to convey light and contrasting texture in such elements as Lieutenant Willem Van Ruytenburch’s white scarf detail.
Having long been the primary white pigment used in European easel paintings, in the late 1800s lead white’s manufacture began to be restricted due to its toxicity, and advancements in synthesising pigments.
In 1834 fine art paint company Winsor and Newton introduced a new white watercolour pigment to the market - Chinese white. Named after a popular type of porcelain of the time, this calcine zinc oxide was a development of the earlier produced zinc white, and was denser and more opaque than other whites on the market. It became hugely popular due to its reliability, ease of use, and affordability, and even gained the seal of approval from acclaimed scientist Michael Faraday, who was adviser for the National Gallery, aiding with the conservation of its art collection.
At the birth of the 20th century, experiments were being made with the metal titanium dioxide as a potential white pigment. By the 1930s, the result of this exploration - Titanium white - had become the most widely used white pigment in both the American and European markets. Titanium white was the brightest and most opaque white ever made, and had a far greater tinting strength than both lead white and zinc white, albeit with a longer drying time and cooler tone.
RED
Red has become known as a colour which dominated visual culture for thousands of years, and historian Michel Pastoureau writes in his book Red: The History of a Color, “red is the archetypal color, the first color humans mastered, fabricated, reproduced, and broke down into different shades.”
As we have mentioned, minerals naturally occurring in the soil have long been used to generate a range of warm hues, and the vibrant and distinctive red of vermilion is believed to date back to 5000 BCE when the Ancient Chinese developed an extraction process involving the mineral cinnabar. Cinnabar is a form of mercury sulphide and a side product of the mining of mercury. This made it both expensive and dangerous, and a great many miners of the ore lost their lives during its unearthing. China red, as vermilion became known, was nonetheless used extensively in Chinese culture. Due to high demand, in the 4th century, the Chinese made a synthetic vermilion from mercury and sulphur, the method of which was later documented in Persian alchemist Jaber ibn Hayyan’s 8th century recipe book of colours. This testimony led to the process being widely used in Europe.
During the 4th and 5th century, the Romans revered vermilion and used it to paint statues and frescoes, and even covered the faces of victors with vermilion powder in celebration of their triumphs. At the time, it was as expensive as gold, and was often mixed with cheaper red pigments to increase profitability. So expensive and sought after was the pigment, that it is believed that painters who used it to paint the walls of luxurious villas in Pompeii would save the water in which they (very frequently) washed their brushes, in order to extract it for later use.
Vermilion was widely used during the 9th century onwards by manuscript illuminators, and European painters, and later became popular amongst the 19th century Impressionists like Georges Seurat and Vincent Van Gogh for its fiery opacity.
During the 20th century, however, vermilion lost favour within the art world due to its cost and toxicity and cadmium red became a comparable substitute for its bold colour and opacity. The journey to cadmium red began when a German chemist discovered the new element cadmium in 1817, and it was later developed into cadmium red in 1910, when it became commercially available.
Check out our blog next week for Part 2 of A History of Colours in Art as we look at the history of blue, green and black pigments.
*although white light is not considered a colour, when used as a physical pigment, it is.
