In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color
  • Anthony S. Travis (bio)
Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color. By Philip Ball. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. ix+382. $18.

Bright Earth is written by a master of his craft as a popularizer of science: Philip Ball truly deserved the 2003 Sally Hacker Prize for this brilliant and fascinating record of just one aspect of chemical technology. This is an enterprise of tremendous scope, often expressed in ceremonious attention to skin, sky, and leaf color as achieved by artists ranging from cave dwellers to the present day. Ball weaves the technical chemistry of colorants (pigments and dyes) with color physics at an accessible level to describe the development and use of artists' colors. Here is all that most readers will need to know about oranges, aquamarines, scarlets, and whites, and the color theories of Newton, Goethe, George Field, Michel Chevreul, James Maxwell, Hermann Helmholtz, and, in the twentieth century, the artist Albert Munsell.

The master painters from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth, Ball argues forcefully, were also master colorists. They had to be, for there were no sources of preformulated paints. The knowledge was precious, and dispensed with care. Economics also came into play, particularly the cost of rare minerals. This meant that even Rembrandt, toward the end, was forced to restrict his palette. As for the physics of color, "the Old Masters wrought their miracles through an intuitive feeling for color that the discoveries of Newton do not touch" (p. 26). Vincent van Gogh's palette may have contained very few pigments, but he knew how to use contrasting colors, those known as complementary colors, such as blue and orange, or brown and green, to great effect. Sometimes his paintings were accentuated by pigments [End Page 259] available in the nineteenth century from specialist color makers: purples and blues that provided dashes of color as well as swirling backgrounds. He also purchased heavy tubes of white, a pigment originally based on lead and, among artists, replaced by zinc white only after 1900.

Recipes for artists' pigments, along with dyes, were published in sixteenth-century textbooks, though there had been no real innovations for several centuries. Alchemists, if we exclude their magic, did contribute to improved processing of materials. From the late eighteenth century on, new minerals provoked new experiments. The bright earths, their applications and limitations, are perhaps nowhere better exemplified than in the work of Nicolas-Louis Vauquelin, who in 1797 discovered an orange mineral in Siberia. In 1809 another source was found in France, and Vauquelin immediately set about the task of preparing a pigmentary form in the laboratory. The result was the lead-containing chrome yellow, much admired by painters for its dark-lemon-yellow hue, and later followed with other pigments containing different metals in combination with chromate. The Sunflowers of van Gogh was painted with chrome yellow, a color that degrades over time, and certainly van Gogh was aware of the instability of chromes and other pigments. It was for this reason that earlier in the nineteenth century Field had warned strongly against their use by artists.

This brings us to the problems of how colors degrade. Ball peels away layers of time to show how the blacks in Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne were originally blue, and blacks in many other important paintings were originally browns. Techniques employed in pigment analysis and restoration indicate how these problems are, in part, overcome.

The novel synthetic pigments appearing around 1800 included the arsenic-containing emerald green and cobalt blue, the latter inspired by a pigment employed for glazing and developed for artists as a rival to ultramarine. As realism moved to Impressionism, so too did artists move from bright earths to synthetic organic chemicals, the so-called coal-tar dyes. This episode is used to show how artists' pigments were invariably spinoffs from chemical technology, in this case aimed at expanding the range of textile colorants. Moreover, Ball draws useful parallels between the challenges faced by both textile colorists and artists in fixing their colors, new and old.

Ball's errors of fact are few (for example, he refers...

pdf

Share