Color: A Natural History of the Palette

"If you’re going to do any kind of experimentation about a 17th-century painter, you’ve really got to know something about the materials they’re working with. One of the many books I looked at was Victoria Finlay’s. She not only documented what colours Vermeer used, she went to find them in the real world. So her book is a travelogue. She’s rushing around the world trying to find the source of particular pigments. That’s a really difficult question. I suppose I would have to side with Vermeer and go for blue. Artists were working in layers in Vermeer’s time and did not put all the colours they were going to paint with all on their palette at once, as people do now, and mix them all up. You used them at particular stages of the work. Pigments were sometimes incompatible, some were expensive, and you wouldn’t really want to put an expensive colour underneath a cheap one, because it would be a complete waste. Among the most expensive then and now is ultramarine. The Music Lesson , the very famous painting that belongs to our Queen, has ultramarine blue mixed in with the brown of the ceiling of the scene portrayed; it’s got this blue in the white of the wall; in the window glass; it’s got blue all over. I reckon the reason that Vermeer put it everywhere was that he really couldn’t bear to waste it. It couldn’t be stored, and so he would have to use it up, or it would just dry on his palette. “It is quite extraordinary that the finest blue stone still comes from the same mine now as it did in Vermeer’s time. It’s also still as highly priced.” Finlay documented a visit to the lapis lazuli mines in present day Afghanistan, the source of ultramarine for hundreds of years, and variously controlled by the Taliban and others. She was fearless to seek it out after several attempts, and she described a river running over blue stones underneath – her descriptions are very vivid. Finlay saw the method of extracting lapis lazuli for herself. It is quite extraordinary that the finest blue stone still comes from the same mine now as it did in Vermeer’s time. It’s also still as highly priced. Its value is just about the same as gold, even now. There are two other colours I’d like to mention, which Finlay researches in her book. One is Indian yellow, which has always been a bit of a mystery, and which she proves does not exist. It was described as having been made from the urine of cows that fed on mango leaves. This pigment appears in a lot of literature on painting, and was supposed to feature in one of Vermeer’s pictures, but she discovered that Indian yellow was unlikely to have been anything to do with mango leaves, although urine may have been one of the ingredients. The other is cochineal, which is a very important colour, made from dried insects from South America, and which makes a strong deep red. In Vermeer’s day, this raw material was a hot new thing, and also very valuable, though few people knew what it was. We still use it in pink icing on cakes and in red lipstick. If you go into an art store and see a shade of red called carmine lake, that’s it. But be aware that the word ‘lake’ means it’s a dye that’s been made into a pigment, by attaching it to something insoluble. In Vermeer’s day, red and yellow lakes were used as glazes over other colours, but they tended to fade. So today Vermeer’s pictures don’t quite look as they did when they left his easel. Finlay was a great inspiration to me. If she can do something so practical I thought I could too. And so I went off and made some lake colours of my own in the kitchen. I researched paint storage, and because paint tubes hadn’t been invented in Vermeer’s day, I filled pigs’ bladders with paint to see how well they worked. I also made ultramarine from lapis lazuli, which came from the very place where Finlay had travelled to in Afghanistan. This was not over-successful I might say, because a huge amount of effort produced a very small amount of pigment – but this also tells you something about why it costs such a lot of money. It’s probably just as difficult to make it now as it was then. It’s Cennino Cennini who, if you want to do a nice little segue, has the ultramarine recipe."