History of Colors
A History of Color in Art
Artists invented the first pigments—a combination of soil, animal fat, burnt charcoal, and chalk—as early as 40,000 years ago, creating a basic palette of five colors: red, yellow, brown, black, and white. Since then, the history of color has been one of perpetual discovery, whether through exploration or scientific advancement. The invention of new pigments accompanied the developments of art history’s greatest movements—from the Renaissance to Impressionism—as artists experimented with colors never before seen in the history of painting.
Red
First employed in prehistoric cave paintings, red ochre is one of the oldest pigments still in use.
Found in iron-rich soil and first employed as an artistic material (as far as we know) in prehistoric cave paintings, red ochre is one of the oldest pigments still in use. Centuries later, during the 16th and 17th centuries, the most popular red pigment came from a cochineal insect, a creature that could only be found on prickly-pear cacti in Mexico. These white bugs produced a potent red dye so sought-after by artists and patrons that it quickly became the third greatest import out of the “New World” (after gold and silver), as explains Victoria Finlay in A Brilliant History of Color in Art. Raphael, Rembrandt, and Rubens all used cochineal as a glaze, layering the pigment atop other reds (like red ochre) to increase their intensity. A non-toxic source for red pigment, the cochineal bug is still used to color lipsticks and blush today.
Blue
For hundreds of years, the cost of lapis lazuli rivaled even the price of gold.
Ever since the Medieval era, painters have depicted the Virgin Mary in a bright blue robe, choosing the color not for its religious symbolism, but rather for its hefty price tag. Mary’s iconic hue—called ultramarine blue—comes from lapis lazuli, a gemstone that for centuries could only be found in a single mountain range in Afghanistan. This precious material achieved global popularity, adorning Egyptian funerary portraits, Iranian Qur’ans, and later the headdress in Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665). For hundreds of years, the cost of lapis lazuli rivaled even the price of gold. In the 1950s, Yves Klein collaborated with a Parisian paint supplier to invent a synthetic version of ultramarine blue, and this color became the French artist’s signature. Explaining the appeal of this historic hue, Klein said, “Blue has no dimensions. It is beyond dimensions.”
Yellow
Turner used the experimental watercolor Indian Yellow—a fluorescent paint derived from the urine of mango-fed cows.
Few artists in history have been known for their use of yellow, though Joseph Mallord William Turner and Vincent van Gogh are the most notable exceptions. Turner so loved the color that contemporary critics mocked the British painter, writing that his images were “afflicted with jaundice,” and that the artist may have a vision disorder. For his sublime and sun-lit seascapes, Turner used the experimental watercolor Indian Yellow—a fluorescent paint derived from the urine of mango-fed cows (a practice banned less than a century later for its cruelty to animals). For brighter touches, Turner employed the synthetic Chrome Yellow, a lead-based pigment known to cause delirium. Vincent van Gogh also painted his starry nights and sunflowers with this vivid and joyful hue. “Oh yes! He loved yellow, did good Vincent, the painter from Holland, gleams of sunlight warming his soul, which detested fog,” wrote the painter Paul Gauguin of his friend and artistic companion.
Green
Green pigments have been some of the most poisonous in history.
While the color green evokes nature and renewal, its pigments have been some of the most poisonous in history. In 1775, the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele invented a deadly hue, Scheele’s Green, a bright green pigment laced with the toxic chemical arsenic. Cheap to produce, Scheele’s Green became a sensation in the Victorian era, even though many suspected the color to be dangerous for artists and patrons alike. The French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s bedroom wallpaper even featured Scheele’s Green, and historians believe the pigment caused the revolutionary’s death in 1821. By the end of the 19th century, Paris Green—a similar mixture of copper and arsenic—replaced Scheele’s Green as a more durable alternative, enabling Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir to create vivid, emerald landscapes. Used as a rodenticide and an insecticide, Paris Green was still highly toxic, and may have been responsible for Cézanne’s diabetes and Monet’s blindness. Not surprisingly, it was eventually banned in the 1960s.
Purple
The Impressionists—especially Monet—so adored the new hue that critics accused the painters of having “violettomania.”
“I have finally discovered the true color of the atmosphere,” Claude Monet once declared. “It’s violet. Fresh air is violet.” The purple shadows and lavender specks of light that enliven Monet’s haystacks and waterlilies owe much to a little-known American portrait painter named John Goffe Rand. In 1841, Rand grew frustrated with the messy practice of storing paint in a pig’s bladder, which was the prevailing method for preserving pigments at the time, and invented a more practical and portable option: a collapsible paint tube made of tin. This enabled artists like Monet to paint plein air, easily transporting their color to outdoor locations to capture impressions of the environment, and in turn led to the production of nuanced, pre-mixed paint shades in tin tubes, such as Manganese Violet, the first affordable mauve-colored paint that meant artists no longer had to mix red and blue to make purple. The Impressionists—especially Monet—so adored the new hue that critics accused the painters of having “violettomania.”
Black
The darkest pigment of the Old Masters, “bone black” is produced by burning animal bones in an air-free chamber.
The darkest pigment found in Old Masters paintings is aptly named “bone black,” and is produced by burning animal bones in an air-free chamber. While the Impressionists avoided black paint—finding areas of darkness to be filled with color—American artists in the ’50s and ’60s returned to black with avengeance. Frank Stella, Richard Serra, and Ad Reinhardt all created monochromatic black paintings, stripping the canvas of any subject matter other than the paint itself. Taken together, these painters prove that black is as nuanced a color as any other, capable of many permutations, tones, and textures. Speaking about his practice in 1967, Reinhardt quoted the Japanese painter and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai, saying, “There is a black which is old and a black which is fresh. Lustrous black and dull black, black in sunlight and black in shadow.”
White
Of all the pigments that have been banned over the centuries, the color most missed by painters is likely Lead White.
Of all the pigments—Chrome Yellow, Scheele’s Green, Paris Green—that have been banned over the centuries, the color most missed by painters is likely Lead White. This hue could capture and reflect a gleam of light like no other, though its production was anything but glamorous. The 17th-century Dutch method for manufacturing the pigment involved layering cow and horse manure over lead and vinegar. After three months in a sealed room, these materials would combine to create flakes of pure white. While scientists in the late 19th century identified lead as poisonous, it wasn’t until 1978 that the United States banned the production of lead white paint. In this era, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Ryman, and Agnes Martin turned to titanium and zinc whites to create monochromatic white paintings, while artists like Dan Flavin bypassed pigments altogether in sculptures that emitted white light directly.
A Brief History of Colors
When most people think of color, the first thing that comes to mind is the color wheel we were shown in elementary art class. This abstract representation is meant to show the relationships between certain colors in the wheel, and denotes the “primary”, “secondary”, and “tertiary” colors, which can be combined in various ways to create a broader spectrum.
What most people do not know is the vast history behind the color wheel and the discoveries which were integral to its invention and standardization.
The first color wheel was presented by Sir Isaac Newton in the 17th century when he first discovered the visible spectrum of light. Around this time, color was thought to be a product of the mixing of light and dark, with red being the “most light”, and blue the “most dark”. Newton saw that this theory was flawed, and while in isolation as the bubonic plague ravaged Europe, began testing the properties of white light and “to try therewith the celebrated Phenomena of Colour”. In his classic prism experiment, he noted that white light is composed of a variety of colors. He then mapped these colors into an octave schema as the first color wheel and the original ROY G BIV. His experimentations also led to the discovery that all secondary colors can be made by mixing primary colors. The mixtures of colors in varying ratios resulted in different “hues” of novel colors from the classic ROY G BIV baseline, and resulted in the first hue wheel, which is likely the color wheel we are most used to seeing.
Right: Newton’s color wheel. Note the arrangement of the colors within the pattern of an octave. Left: Goethe’s color wheel.
Right: Isaac Newton, from Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light (London, 1704). Left: Wolfgang von Goethe, from Theory of Colours. 1810
Well after Newton’s publication of Opticks in 1704, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe began his own experiments with color. Like Newton, Goethe attempted to “conceive nature in her simplest, most conspicuous creations,” although he proposed to do so “without the aid of mathematics”. His experience as a painter and artist led to a fascination with the phenomena of color much like that of Newton’s, though he fervently disagreed with Newton’s idea that darkness was just an absence of light. Instead, he insisted that darkness was an active ingredient in the production of color. This questioning of the science behind Newton’s discovery led many to believe him to be an opponent of the sciences in general. However, Goethe himself claimed that “nobody can appreciate [mathematics] more highly than I,” but that “to understand the phenomena of color nothing is required but unbiased observation and a sound head”. Strikingly, Goethe’s investigation of color mirrored that of Newton’s. The 1810 publication Theory of Colours, although not strictly scientific, was monumental in its breadth of data and investigation. Goethe conducted numerous experiments with color to address the gaps he perceived in Newton’s theory, a holistically scientific approach similar to the rigor of Newton’s prism experiments. Perhaps due to his background in poetry and the arts, Goethe also went into detail about the psychological aspects of colors and their relationship to human emotions and behavioral traits. He especially hoped that his investigation would aid painting, which he deemed “an art which has the power of producing on a flat surface, a much more perfect visible world than the actual one can be”. His work was also in part a contemplation of the effects of light and dark on human color perception, such as the way in which ratios of light and dark produce differences in the color spectra. These observations led Goethe to develop his own color wheel, which is more akin to the one we use today. In his wheel, colors opposite each other have a visually antagonistic role. Surprisingly, this observation later became the foundation for our knowledge of how color is interpreted by the human brain.
Two more aspects of color were expanded upon by the research of American painter Alfred Munsell in the early 20th century. As a teacher, Munsell recognized the usefulness of a systematic method for communicating and teaching color. This required a system where color was easily measurable and definable, a system which was missing from arts education. To achieve this, Munsell added the dimensions of “chroma” and “color value” as additions to hue. Chroma is the purity or intensity of the color, and is now referred to as saturation. Color value refers to the lightness or darkness of the color, and is now referred to as value or brightness. These dimensions now defined the 3D “color space”, represented by Munsell’s tree with color value as the y-axis, chroma as the x-axis, and hue as the z-axis, He also defined a standardized method of notating specific colors within this space. Variations in these properties are set up within a 3-dimensional graph space, and a precise color can be relayed by naming its specific coordinates. For example, 5PB 5/1 refers to Purple-Blue 5 with a value of 5 and a saturation of 1. This “color space” is still used for not only arts education, as Munsell had intended, but also in the field of optics and color mathematics.
Munsell’s color tree. Notice how the vertical axis displays color brightness and the horizontal axis shows color saturation, or chroma. The circle around the verticl axis represents hue.
Jacob Rus, 2007
The work of these men, as well as many other men and women, led to the standardized color wheel and color space that are now used across arts, science, and mathematics in a multitude of color research. Their approaches, both scientific and artistic, set the foundation for studies of color for generations to come. Color production is still standardized by hue, value, and saturation, which have important implications for such things as production of paints and dyes and coding of pixels in televisions for specific colors. Color perception used the fundamentals of Goethe’s Theory of Color to further investigate the role of color in psychology, ecology, and evolution, as well as the physiology of human sight and color discernment.
These artists and scientists both desired to explore the nature of color in their own mediums, and only through the synergy of their research can understanding the fundamental human experience of color vision move forward. As famous color theorist Josef Albers said, “Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art. They are all the same absolutely.”