Colour

As history went on, our colour palette expanded. People came up with innovative and downright strange ways to make colour - Tyrian purple was a rare and expensive pigment made from shellfish and Indian yellow is said to have been made from the urine of cows which only ate mango leaves. Turner and Van Gogh famously used this pigment but it was later banned due to its cruelty. 

A Swedish chemist called Carl Wilhelm Sheele invented a bright green paint in 1775 which he named after himself. Scheele’s green became extremely popular and was used in clothes, carpets and even in food. But this was a deadly green. It contained poisonous arsenic. People died while sleeping in rooms decorated with the killer green, perhaps even Napoleon. A sample of his hair was found to contain arsenic. Could he have suffered from death by wallpaper?

Artists have made pigments into paints in all sorts of ways. Unsurprisingly, oils are used to make oil paints but did you know that artists used to make paints using eggs and animal glues? This is known as tempera and has been used to paint portraits on Egyptian mummies and by Botticelli to paint his famous Birth of Venus. 

Pastels are sticks of pigment used by artists and in the 19th century they were popular with Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt, one of only three women Impressionists. Degas used pastels to create some of his famous images of ballet dancers and Cassatt used them to capture rare scenes of women and children. Impressionism was an early influence on the artist Jack Butler Yeats. He went on to develop a loose and expressive way of using paint to depict colourful scenes from mythology and daily life. 

In the 20th century, artists have remained obsessed with colour and have even invented their own. In the 1950s, Yves Klein patented an intense ultramarine blue called International Klein Blue. Nearly 200 of his paintings are canvases painted only with this luminous blue. Anish Kapoor bought the rights to a material called Vantablack, a ‘super-black’ coating which is the darkest material ever created. 

Words by Helena Hunt