Color: A Natural History of the Palette (16 page)

When used beneath other pigments, asphaltum behaves like melting treacle, making everything drip down the canvas and the surface wrinkle up. “It never dries and the paintings are a mess,” said Michael Skalka, conservation administrator at Washington’s National Gallery of Art, about the work done by bohemian American artist Albert Pinkham Ryder in the 1880s. Ryder was a guru figure for artists like Jackson Pollock,
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but his paintings were never intended to be as splodgy as they have turned out. “The asphaltum is a nuisance,” Skalka said. “But it is also a beautiful translucent brown: I can see why they wanted to use it.”

But the most extraordinary brown was called mommia or “mummy,” and it was, as its name promised, made of dead Ancient Egyptians. In her book
Artists’ Pigments 1600 to 1835
Rosamund Harley quotes from the journal of an English traveller who in 1586 visited a mass grave in Egypt. He was let down into the pit by a rope, and strolled around the corpses, which were illuminated by torchlight. He was a cool customer, and described how he “broke of all parts of the bodies . . . and brought home divers heads, hands, arms and feete for a shewe.” Mommia was a thick bitumen-like substance and was apparently excellent for shading, although no good as a watercolor. The British colorman George Field recorded getting a delivery of “Mummy” from Sir William Beechey in 1809. It arrived “in a mass, containing and permeating rib-bone etc.—of a strong smell resembling Garlic and Ammonia—grinds easily—works rather pasty—unaffected by damp and foul air.” By then it was a well-established color: as early as 1712 an artists’ supply shop rather jokily called “A la Momie” opened in Paris,
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selling paints and varnish, as well as—most appropriately— the funeral ritual substances of incense and myrrh.

Mummy. From a 1640 Herbal

The Egyptians mummified their dead in a complicated process which involved pulling the brain through the nostrils with an iron hook, washing the body with incense and, in later dynasties, covering it with bitumen and linen. They did this because they believed that one day the Ka or spirit double would return. In some cases the Ka might be kept busy for years, trotting sadly around the museums and art galleries of the world where its earthly remains are now smeared on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century canvases.

If the suppliers ran out of Egyptian brown, they could always make their own. In 1691 William Salmon, a “Professor of Physick” working out of High Holborn,
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gave a recipe for artificial mummy, as follows: “Take the carcase of a young man (some say red hair’d) not dying of a Disease but killed; let it lie 24 hours in clear water in the Air: cut the flesh in pieces, to which add Powder of Myrrh and a little Aloes, imbibe it 24 hours in the Spirit of Wine and Turpentine . . .” It was a particularly good remedy for dissolving congealed blood and expelling wind “out of both Bowels and Veins,” he said.

My favorite story about mummy brown is told by Aidan Dodson and Salima Ikram, in their book,
The Mummy in Ancient Egypt
. They recount how one nineteenth-century artist was so upset to learn that his paint was mixed from real human bodies that he took all his tubes of this pigment into the garden “and gave them a decent burial.” When I contacted Ikram for more details, she admitted that her computer hard disk had also suffered from an excess of mortality and had given up the ghost without leaving her the reference for the anecdote. But I like to imagine this being a real ritual, with mourners and candles and a wake to follow. I also fancy that this unnamed artist may have been an Englishman. It seems such a British thing to do.

THE JOURNEY

But to return from Egypt to Corinth, what of the sailor? Did he miss her? Or did he have women in every port wanting to change the world for him? Did he, knowing her sudden interest in this art thing she had discovered, send her souvenirs from his travels? First it might have been ochres or chalky whites, but perhaps, as he saw more of the world, or at least the Mediterranean, he may have sent more exotic gifts: pretty minerals in little glass bottles, or exotic dyes for her clothes. Would little packages of saffron for her hair and malachite for her eyes have arrived unexpectedly at her door, bringing unknown scents and stones into that first art-studio home? Would she, over the years, have received purple shawls from the Levant, red skirts from Turkey and indigo carpets from Persia?

I like to think so; but more than that I like to think that perhaps one day she—being an independent soul and a little tired of black and brown—just picked up the ancient equivalents of her passport, credit card and driver’s license, and went out to find the other colors for herself.

3

White

“For those colors which you wish to be beautiful, always first prepare a pure white ground.”

LEONARDO DA VINCI
¹

One morning, so the story goes, the American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler was feeling a little off-color. Of course he is, boomed a friend unsympathetically. “He’s been painting that white girl for days.”
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In Western culture a woman wearing white so often represents purity that it is easy to imagine the paint itself having that squeaky-clean reputation as well. But in China and Japan the color represents death and sickness in general and funerals in particular—and for some white paint at least this is a more appropriate way to think about the color. In Whistler’s case it was the white paint he used for his model’s gown and for the abstract drapery behind which was probably making him feel ill (although perhaps the redness of her hair and the pout of her lips may also have contributed to the young artist’s confusion).

White paint can be made of many things. It can come from chalk or zinc, barium or rice, or from little fossilized sea creatures in limestone graves. The Dutch artist Jan Vermeer even made some of his luminescent whites with a recipe that included alabaster and quartz—in lumps that took the light reflected into the painting and made it dance.
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In 1670 he painted the picture of a young woman standing up to play a little harpsichord, or virginal.
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Her thoughts are far away, and if we are in any doubt about whether or not she might be wishing that she herself were not so virginal, the artist has placed a painting of Cupid above her head as a clue. Most entrancingly, the white-walled room is suffused with an extraordinary light, streaming through the window. The rough grains of the white paint (and the consummate skill of the artist) make that cool northern light seem to shift, and it becomes easy to believe in the young musician’s dreams of being somewhere different, away from the ordinariness of her childhood home.

The greatest of the whites, and certainly the cruellest, is made of lead. European artists for hundreds of years have rated lead white as one of the most important paints on their palette—it would often be used in the primer to prepare their boards and canvases, and then they would mix it with other pigments to build up layers of color. Finally it would be used to dot the eyes, and for the highlights. If you look at Dutch still-life paintings, lead white is everywhere. You can see it in the glimmer on a silver jar, the snarl on a dog’s canines, the slimy shine on a mass of deer entrails, or the shimmer on a pomegranate seed. Fresh or putrid, they all need to shine.

White paint is white because it reflects most light rays away from it. The penalty it pays for this apparent purity is that it absorbs almost no light into its own body, and—for lead white at least—this means that its own heart is black. In its time it has poisoned artists and factory workers, women looking for beauty fixes and even little children playing on slides who have been attracted to the strange sweet taste. The poison in this pretty paint has been written about since Roman times, but somehow nobody has seemed to care about the consequences too much.

Pliny included lead white in his
Natural History
. He said it was poisonous if swallowed, although he didn’t comment about the dismal effects of absorbing it through the skin, or of breathing in the dust while grinding it. In his time the best quality of lead white came from Rhodes, and he described how it was made. Workers would put shavings of thin lead over a bowl filled with vinegar. The action of the acid on the thin metal would cause a chemical reaction and leave a white deposit of lead carbonate. The lead-workers of Rhodes then powdered it, flattened it into little cakes and left it to dry in the summer sun. The small amount of lead white made nowadays still basically follows the formula Pliny wrote about, of acid plus metal equals paint. In fact the most radical change in the recipe was introduced in Holland in Rembrandt’s time. It included a new and nasty ingredient—one that must have had all art studio apprentices dreading the unveiling of the latest batch of white.

Setting the Beds for White Lead

The Dutch or “stack” process involved using clay pots divided into two sections—one for the lead and the other for vinegar. The apprentices would line up several dozen of these, and then they would add the secret ingredient—great bucketsful of manure straight from the farm, which would be heaped all around the pots to produce not only the heat to evaporate the acid but also the carbon dioxide to transform the substance from lead acetate to basic lead carbonate. The room would be sealed, and was left closed for ninety days, after which the apprentices would no doubt draw straws to see who got the unpopular job of going in to get it. But for the one who pulled the short straw there must—at least the first time he did it—have been a moment of amazement. In those three months the stagnant heat, gurgling excrement, sour wine and poisonous metal would have worked their alchemical magic, the dirt and the smells metamorphosing into the purest and cleanest white, which formed in flakes or scales
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on the gray metal. It was one of the many small miracles of the paintbox, the transformation of shit into sugar.

“Do not ingest, do not breathe dust,” warns Ralph Mayer in
The Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques
in the lead white section, and indeed, since 1994, the paint has been banned from sale within the European Union except under special conditions. Winsor & Newton warn that lead white is only “available in selected sizes, in selected countries, in childproof tins from either a locked display area or from behind the counter”
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and recommend that artists use a white made from titanium instead—a paint so opaque that the same pigment is used in correction fluid. Not everyone is happy with this: I met hand painters at Spode’s porcelain factory in the Midlands in March 2001, just three months after they were forbidden to use lead-based paints. They complained that the replacements were “rubbish: not as vibrant and nothing near as sharp.” The risk was for the employees, not the buyers, said Clare Beeston, who had been gilding and painting at Spode for sixteen years. “We’ve always had blood tests, and we’ve always been careful.” She told me about a colleague who had just retired in a state of happy health after fifty-two years of painting five days a week. For her, as for many artists, it was worth taking the small risk for the paints to be right.

DYING TO BE WHITE

Lead white was rarely more insidious than when it was used for makeup. In the 1870s the cosmetics company George W. Laird ran a series of cartoon-style advertisements in fashionable New York magazines.
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In one of them a young man asks his uncle, an old chap in a monocle (and very tight hunting trousers) the name of the “lovely young creature on whom all the heavy swells in the room are dancing attendance.” We then cut to the lady, on the arm of a pompous-looking man with sideburns. She is looking mysterious—or perhaps that is just a look of pain at the tightness of her corset. The uncle agrees with the young man that the woman is indeed lovely, but adds, “Young, that’s a different question.” He observes that she is forty-five if she’s a day, and whispers that the secret of her conquests lies in the Laird’s Bloom of Youth foundation she uses on her face. “Of course this is
entre nous
,” the uncle warns the young man. He would have been kinder to have warned the woman. Her youthful appearance would have come at a high price.