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Category: Philip Ball

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Monday Morning Art School: a brief history of color

Most of us use a mixture of modern and antique colors. We stand on the shoulders of giants, after all.

Best Buds, by Carol L. Douglas. Available. Like most modern artists, my palette is a combination of historic and modern colors.

Minerals have been used as pigments since prehistory. What our ancestors did with color is largely a mystery, but pigments and paint-grinding equipment dating between 350,000 and 400,000 years old have been found in a cave in Zambia.

Most of these earliest colors are warm, and most are named after cities where they were mined and milled. Thus we have the siennas, from Siena, Italy, and the umbers, from Umbria. Siennas are warmer and lighter than umbers; the difference comes from the introduction of manganese to the umbers, either naturally or in the milling process.

Vineyard, by Carol L. Douglas. Available. This painting could have been executed in purely mineral pigments, but it was not.

This ancient family of pigments also includes red and yellow ochre. What they all have in common is the presence of iron oxide. In its most common form, that’s plain old rust.

The last pigment our prehistoric ancestors used was charcoal, which they discovered along with fire. That comes down to us as modern ‘carbon black.’

There is one cool pigment that was available to the ancients: the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli. This comes down to us as the pigment ultramarine blue, so named because it came from ‘beyond the sea’. Needless to say, when you were grinding up the family jewels for color, you used it sparingly.

Striping, by Carol L. Douglas. Available. The search for blue drove pigment synthesis.

That limited palette frustrated our intrepid ancestors as much as it would frustrate us today. They experimented with synthesizing pigments as early as 2000 BC. The earliest of these synthetic pigments were Egyptian Blue, which we still only imperfectly understand, and lead white. By the time of the Renaissance, vermilion, verdigris, and lead-tin-yellow had been added to the paint box. These were made from mercury, copper and lead, and were all deadly.

Indian yellow is another pre-modern pigment. Legend had it being produced from the urine of cattle on the Indian sub-continent. Its actual source remains a mystery. Unlike its modern analog, it was fugitive (meaning it faded).

The expense and rarity of lapis lazuli drove the discovery of modern blue pigments. Prussian blue was discovered by accident in 1704, and ultramarine was being synthesized by the turn of the 19th century. Cobalt (cobalt and aluminum) and cerulean (cobalt and copper) blues are about the same vintage. I’m vastly oversimplifying here, but scientists were tinkering with the whole notion of chemistry, mixing up minerals to see what happened. And a lot of what happened were new pigments.

Marshall Point rocks, by Carol L. Douglas. Available. Impressionism would not have been possible without modern chemistry.

In 1856, William Henry Perkin was attempting to make a cure for malaria when he accidentally created the first aniline dye, mauveine. This was the forerunner of hundreds of synthetic dyes and pigments, and the basis of modern organic chemistry.

It is no coincidence that Impressionism was invented simultaneously with organic chemistry. It would not have been possible without the new colors being synthesized in the laboratory.

The last explosion of color happened with mass industrialization in the 20th century, as science searched for coatings for steel. While cadmiumhas been known as a pigment since the 1840s, it was rare. It wasn’t until industrial chemistry found a way to isolate the metal in the 1930s that cadmium became cheap enough to use as a pigment. Phthalo blue is another pigment that is a by-product of industrial science.

Everything I know about color history comes from Philip Ball’s Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color, and Victoria Finlay’s Color: a Natural History of the Palette. Of the two, I prefer the former, but both are good reads.

Gamblin publishes an excellent chart of colors, classified as either mineral (Impressionist and Classical) and organic (20th century). Your assignment is to look through your paint box and list where your paints came from. Are they:

  • Classical
  • Impressionist
  • 20th Century

If you’re using a classical palette, it will probably be made of modern pigments, because most of the toxic or rare older colors have been replaced. But these analogs have been designed to mimic the historic colors as closely as possible.

If you’re trying to paint like Rembrandt, but are using Van Gogh’s palette, you’re going to fail. Rembrandt painted indirectly, in transparent layers, and Van Gogh painted alla prima. You need to match your paints to your desired outcome.

That doesn’t mean that every pigment you use has to slavishly match some historic period. Most of us use a mixture of mineral and organic colors. We stand on the shoulders of giants, after all.

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Monday Morning Art School: an art education at your fingertips

Art school averages $42,000 a year. In comparison, these books are a steal.

The most important book I recommend to my students is Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, by David Bayles and Ted Orland. This slim volume (I’ve always wanted to say that) lays out the fundamental rule of artmaking: if you want to be an artist, you have to make art, lots of it, over and over again.
Drawing is a skill, not a talent. Not being able to do it holds you back as a painter. Sketching from Square One to Trafalgar Square, by Richard Scott, is a series of exercises that will take you from simple measurement to complex architecture.
If you’re looking for similar exercises in figure drawing, I recommend Drawing the Human Form, by William A. Berry. It’s based on anatomy, not style.
Every art studio should have one anatomy textbook. I use Atlas of Human Anatomy, by Frank H. Netter. Netter was both a doctor and an artist, and he did his own beautiful illustrations. There are other, art-targeted, anatomy books, but this provides all the information I need.
Landscape Painting Inside and Out, by Kevin Macpherson, is a clear, concise guide to getting paint from the tube to the canvas.
I have a shelf full of watercolor books, but my primary pigment reference is a website, Handprint, by Bruce MacEvoy. This has replaced the classic Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green, by David Wilcox. There are many different ways to get watercolor on paper. If you want to buy only one book on the subject, try The Complete Watercolorist’s Essential Notebook, by Gordon MacKenzie.
There are two color books I love. The first is Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color, which is filled with exercises to understand how color works. It’s fifty years old. The writing is dense to our modern sensibilities, but stick with it.
Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color, by Philip Ball, is a brilliant, readable treatise on how chemistry and technology have combined to influence art. (It’s far better than Victoria Finlay’s Color, which is merely a travelogue.) When you’re done reading it, you should have a firm handle on the differences between earth, organic and twentieth-century pigments.
I have shelves full of catalogues raisonné, museum guides, and other illustrated histories of art, but three books compel me over and over. The first is Sister Wendy’s 1000 Masterpieces. It is a simple compendium of things she likes. Fortunately, she has great taste. The internet wasn’t a big deal when she wrote this, but use it as a starting point for your own online research on artists.
The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, by David Silcox, deals with the painters who’ve most influenced me. Growing up in the shadow of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, I had no concept of twentieth-century realism, but there it was, being made right across border from me.
John Constable: The Making of a Master, by Mark Evans, illustrates a simple truth of landscape painting: it all starts outdoors.
Have a recommendation? Add it as a comment on this blog, rather than on Facebook, where it will get lost.
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The scientists of color

We owe a great debt to the engineers and scientists of the 19th century. In many ways, they invented modern painting.
In the Time of Harmony. The Golden Age is not in the Past, it is in the Future, 1893–95, Paul Signac, Mairie de Montreuil

A friend once told me engineers were ‘boring.’ Having now been married to one for 37 years, I can tell you that she was wrong. Equally importantly, we wouldn’t have much art without science and engineering. Art rests on discoveries in the physical world.

Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color by Philip Ball is a fun read. It also makes the serious point that art isn’t created merely by artists. Art incorporates the scientific and engineering innovations of its day.
Ball’s emphasis is on the advances made in pigment technology in the 19th century, and how they influenced Impressionism. That’s true as far as it goes, but scientific insight into perception also influenced how painters handled color.
Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), 1872, Claude Monet, Musée Marmottan Monet. This painting is what gave the movement its name.
Michel Eugène Chevreul was a famous French chemist. He is best remembered for having invented margarine. He was also the director of the dye works at the Gobelins Manufactory in Paris. In trying to make a uniform black dye, he realized that a color was perceived differently based on its setting. This lead to the idea of simultaneous contrast, which in turn led to the Impressionist understanding of complementary colors.
Scientists have a great influence on art, but they are sometimes reactionary. Chevreul believed chiaroscuro was the most important element in creating natural, or lifelike, paintings. Instead, Impressionists turned to his color relationships to define light and shadows.
Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwellis most famous for his theory of electromagnetic radiation, but his interests were wide. He was particularly interested in color perception, color-blindness, and color theory. Using linear algebra, he proved that all human color perception was based on three types of receptors. He is the father of colorimetry, or the systematic measurement of color perception.
An image of James Clerk Maxwell’s color photograph of a tartan ribbon. Scanned from The Illustrated History of Colour Photography, Jack H. Coote, 1993
Based on his research into the psychology of color perception, Maxwell designed the first color photography system. He proposed that a color photograph could be made by shooting three black-and-white pictures through red, green and blue filters and then projecting it in the same way. He demonstrated this first color photograph in 1861.
American physicist Ogden Rood was also an avid painter, a member of the American Watercolor Society. Rood divided color into three constants: purity, luminosity, and hue. In 1874 he gave two lectures to the National Academy of Design in New York on Modern Optics in Painting.
La Récolte des Foins, Éragny, 1887, Camille Pissarro, Van Gogh Museum.
Rood suggested that small dots or lines of different colors, when viewed from a distance, would blend into a new color. He believed that the complementary colors of his color wheel, when applied in pairs by the artist, would enhance the presence of a painting: “… paintings, made up almost entirely of tints that by themselves seem modest and far from brilliant, often strike us as being rich and gorgeous in colour, while, on the other hand, the most gaudy colours can easily be arranged so as to produce a depressing effect on the beholder.”
Rood’s theory of contrasting colors influenced Impressionism, and was particularly influential on  Georges-Pierre Seurat. Seurat called his new style chromo-luminarism; Pointillism was a derogatory term invented by his critics. We are now so used to optics experiments in painting that we hardly  give any thought to their origins. But we, along with the painters who came before us, owe a great debt to the work of Maxwell, Chevreul, Rood and others.