Color: A Natural History of the Palette (4 page)

As well as the alienation of artists, putting paint-making into the hands of a few commercial dealers had another radical effect on the art world: technical innovation. When Cennino wrote his
Handbook
, artists were going through the all-important transition period between using tempera (egg) and oils (linseed or walnut or poppy were popular) as binders. Later Giorgio Vasari would ascribe this invention to Johannes and Hubert Van Eyck. Certainly the Flemish brothers’ brilliantly translucent fifteenth-century oil paintings were the new medium’s greatest early advertiser, but oils had been used for many years before that. In the late 1300s Cennino was already using oils to paint the top layer on a picture of a velvet gown, for example,
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and even in the sixth century a medical writer called Aetius was mentioning how artists used a “drying oil,” which was probably linseed.
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However, since the eighteenth century, inventions and innovations have been coming in so quickly it is not surprising that some artists have been bewildered. It is not just the hundreds of new paints but also the mediums—pigments can now be suspended in acrylics, fast-drying alkyds and a whole range of gums and exotic oils
¹⁰
—and even the packaging of paints which have changed.

One discovery that changed the art world was made by a young man called William Reeves in the late eighteenth century. He was a workman employed by a colorman called Middleton, but he spent some of his spare time doing experiments of his own. Up until then watercolors— which are basically pigments mixed with water-soluble gum—had been sold in dry lumps that had to be grated. But Reeves found that honey mixed with gum arabic would not only stop the cakes from drying out, but also allow them to be molded into regular shapes. His brother, who was a metalworker, made the molds, and in 1766 Reeves & Son opened near St. Paul’s, supplying the army and the East India Company with the first watercolor paintboxes. It would take the collaboration of artist Henry Newton with chemist William Winsor in 1832 before anyone would think to add glycerine—meaning that watercolors no longer had to be rubbed and could be used straight from the pan. Suddenly it was easy—in terms of materials at least—to become an artist, and many enthusiastic amateurs followed Queen Victoria’s lead in ordering the new paintboxes and using them out of doors to sketch landscapes.

The Watercolor room at Winsor & Newton in the mid-nineteenth century

Oil painting alfresco was naturally the next big change. For centuries, artists had stored their paints in pigs’ bladders. It was a painstaking process: they, or their apprentices, would carefully cut the thin skin into squares. Then they would spoon a nugget of wet paint onto each square, and tie up the little parcels at the top with string. When they wanted to paint, they would pierce the skin with a tack, squeeze the color onto their palette and then mend the puncture. It was messy, especially when the bladders burst, but it was also wasteful, as the paint would dry out quickly. Then in 1841 a fashionable American portrait painter called John Goffe Rand devised the first collapsible tube—which he made of tin and sealed with pliers. After he had improved it the following year and patented it, artists in both Europe and America really began to appreciate the wonder of the portable paintbox. Jean Renoir once told his son that without oil paints in tubes: “There would have been no Cézanne, no Monet, no Sisley or Pissarro: nothing of what the journalists were later to call Impressionism.” Impressionism, after all, was a movement that depended on recording nature in nature. Without being able to use colors outside it would have been hard for an artist like Monet to record the impressions that the movements of the light had made on him, and so create his atmospheric effects.

The Oil-color Tube-filling room at Winsor & Newton in the early days

One of the most popular colormen in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century was Julien Tanguy, affectionately nicknamed “Père.” This jovial dealer and art supplier was an ex-convict who had once served time on a prison ship for subversion
¹¹
—a biographical detail that no doubt endeared him to some of the post-Impressionists, who were his main customers. Paul Cézanne bought from him, as did Émile Bernard, who described going to Tanguy’s shop at 14 rue Clauzel as being like “visiting a museum.” Another famous (though impecunious) customer, Vincent van Gogh, painted three portraits of Père Tanguy. The first, from 1886, is very brown—the subject looking rather like a workman, with just a touch of red on his lips and a spot of green on his apron.
¹²
Then, in the spring of 1887, van Gogh changed his palette—experimenting with color oppositions of red against green, orange against blue—and his work was never the same again. The other two portraits of Tanguy (dated 1887 and 1888) are a raucous celebration of the dealer’s paint products. They show him standing in front of Japanese prints, kabuki actors competing on the walls with soft-focus cherry-tree landscapes. Suddenly blues are striped with yellows, and on top of Tanguy’s hat is Mount Fuji, giving him the conical look of a rice farmer, rather than the quizzical look of a French merchant. Both paintings were part of what van Gogh called his “gymnastics” of experimenting with how to put intense colors rather than gray harmonies in his paintings.
¹³

Van Gogh’s relationship with the Tanguys was turbulent— Mme. Tanguy frequently complained about the amount of credit the artist was given (blaming one’s spouse for financial precision is a convenient way for a merchant to stay both amiable and solvent), and van Gogh often complained in turn about the insipidness of some of the products.
¹⁴
He may have been right: certainly someone was supplying him with fugitive paints, as there are several that have faded. One of the most popular works at Washington’s National Gallery of Art is a van Gogh painting that for years has been titled
White Roses
. It was only in the late 1990s that it was realized that it contained traces of what was probably madder red, and that the roses had originally been pink.
¹⁵
When I visited the gallery shop in early 2001, the postcards labelled the painting simply as
Roses
but the posters, which were older stock, still bore witness to van Gogh’s choice of a paint that had faded.

Since the end of the eighteenth century we have seen dozens of new colors arrive on artists’ palettes. The new colors are mostly beyond the scope of this book—but some of the more important were chromium (isolated by Louis Nicolas Vauquelin in 1797 from a rare orange mineral called crocoite), cadmium, which was discovered by accident in 1817 by a German chemist, Dr. Stromeyer, and the “aniline” colors first isolated from coal tar in 1856 by a teenage chemist called William Perkin, who reappears in my quest for purple.

But alongside the excitement of new discoveries, there has often been a parallel movement to rediscover the colors of the past. Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon is one of England’s most popular tourist destinations. In 2000 it was redecorated—from an arrangement of white walls and what, in retrospect, look from the photographs like 1970s curtains, to an attempt to reproduce in an authentic way what Shakespeare actually grew up with in the sixteenth century. So “painted cloths”—the kind of cheap alternatives to tapestries that a middle-class glove-maker could have afforded—have been made on unbleached linen, with the designs of naked putti and satyrs colored in with ochre reds and yellows, lime white and soot, just as the Stratford “peynter-steyners” and “daubers” would have made them. Meanwhile the “second-best bed”
¹⁶
is now covered with curtains and bedspreads in astonishingly bright greens and oranges, as was the fashion of the time. The fabrics are made of a woven material called dornix—a wool-linen blend, dyed with natural plant extracts, which was last made in England in 1630.

It is a trend for authentication that is being followed by historical houses all over the world—from colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, which has become a center for eighteenth-century paint technology, to a Tudor town house called Plas Mawr in Conwy, North Wales. At Plas Mawr the original wall decorations have been re-created—big-bosomed and near-naked caryatids leering pinkly from above fireplaces—so bright in their authentic organic and mineral colors (and certainly a shock if one had thought the Tudors liked whitewash or subtle effects best) that when I met the paint consultant, Peter Welford, he asked me whether I had my sunglasses with me.

This move to revisit the ghosts of pigments past, mixed with a sense of loss for what today we have forgotten, is not new at all. The Romans carefully copied the Greek polychrome techniques, the Chinese were always re-creating and adapting the crafts and colors of previous dynasties, while Cennino’s book itself was an attempt to preserve methods that he feared were about to disappear. And in the 1880s one of Holman Hunt’s friends, the designer William Morris, was a major force in bringing back some of the old colors being displaced by aniline dyes, calling the new ones “hideous”
¹⁷
and challenging people to take another look at the old colors, and see how “magnificent” they were. It is almost as if every few generations we seem to realize we have assigned our predecessors to a black-and-white past, and then rejoice together at rediscovering that they loved colors too.

One of the most extraordinary moments in the history of paint happened in eighth-century Byzantium, where painted icons had been all but destroyed after senior church members argued it was against God’s teaching to make images. There was passionate debate on both sides, and in the end it was resolved that the works were celebrations of the natural gifts of God. Not only in their depictions but in their materials—and that by using plants and rocks and insects and eggs God was glorified through the very body of the artwork.
¹⁸
Which is one of the reasons why even today, when there is so much choice, it is an instinctive decision for an Orthodox icon painter to choose pigments that are as natural as possible. “Look for the sign to Bog,” my instructions read. “And then go along the other track.” I was looking for the studio-cottage of Aidan Hart, a New Zealand icon painter. The former Brother Aidan had been a novice Orthodox monk for sixteen years before leaving, with the blessings of his church, to get married. He was living on a very remote hillside on the Welsh borders: it seemed a fitting place to find a man who works with natural paints. He is not a rigid purist— there was a small pot of zinc white and a few other manufactured paints on his shelves among the intriguing flasks of colored stones and powders from Siberian riverbanks, Turkish trees and Italian mountains—but over the years he had found that natural colors fitted not only with his sense of aesthetics, but with his theology.

“The natural paints aren’t perfect . . . and that’s the point,” he said, in words that would echo so much of what I would hear, throughout my travels, from people who worked with paints and dyes. He then poured a little French ultramarine powder (invented in the nineteenth century) onto his palm, to demonstrate his point. “All these crystals are the same size, and they reflect the light too evenly. It makes the paint less interesting than if you used real ultramarine, from stones.”

When Aidan starts an icon painting, he always begins in the traditional way, by applying gesso to a panel made of ash or oak. Gesso is the Italian word for gypsum or plaster of Paris, although in fact artists have a choice of “whitings,” including chalk or alabaster. First he paints several layers of rabbit-skin glue (which before it is added to water looks like demerara sugar and smells like a pet shop), after which he lays a piece of linen on top, so if the wood cracks later it can be replaced without damaging the painting. Then he adds a dozen layers of glue and chalk, and sands them down so finely that the panel looks startlingly like white Formica. The Orthodox tradition emphasizes the light inside every human being: and so icon paintings also begin with light, which seems to shine through the pigments and through the gold laid on top.