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.
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.
Cave painting of a Bison painted in the wall of the cave of Altamira, Spain 11,000 BC
Red
The first colour used in art was red - from ochre. And the first known example of cave art was a red ochre plaque, which contains symbolic engravings of triangles, diamond shapes and lines, dated to 75,000 years ago.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, the most popular red pigment came from a cochineal insect, these white bugs produced a potent red dye so sought-after by artists and patrons that it quickly became the third greatest import.
Blue
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.
For hundreds of years, the cost of lapis lazuli rivaled even the price of gold.
Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer (1665)
This precious material achieved global popularity and was seen later in the headdress in Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665).
In the 1950s, Yves Klein collaborated with a Edouard Adam, Parisian paint supplier to invent a synthetic version of ultramarine blue, and this color became the French artist’s signature.
Approach to Venice by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1844)
Yellow
Turner used the experimental watercolor Indian Yellow—a fluorescent paint derived from the urine of mango-fed cows. For brighter touches, Turner employed the synthetic Chrome Yellow, a lead-based pigment known to cause delirium.
Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh also painted his starry nights and sunflowers with this vivid and joyful hue. He loved yellow colour and used it liberally in his early paintings like The Potato Eaters and Lane with Poplars.
Carl Wilhelm Scheele
Green
In 1775, the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele invented Scheele’s Green, a bright green pigment laced with the toxic chemical arsenic.
Scheele’s Green by Carl Wilhelm Scheele
Scheele’s Green cheap production became a sensation in the Victorian era, even though many suspected the color to be dangerous for artists.
William Henry Perkin
Purple
The first colour to come in synthetic form was purple. In 1856, William Henry Perkin, an 18-year-old chemistry student, was told to conduct an experiment using coal tar to find a cure for malaria.
He failed but was intrigued with what happened when he dipped a piece of cloth into his mixture of coal analine and chromic acid: it came out purple and held its colour.
Black
The darkest pigment found was “bone black,” and is produced by burning animal bones in an air-free chamber.
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II. by Frank Stella
Frank Stella, Richard Serra, and Ad Reinhardt all created monochromatic black paintings. Taken together, these painters prove that black is as similar as any other color, capable of many permutations, tones, and textures.
White
Lead white could capture and reflect a gleam of light like no other, it was banned later. In this era, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Ryman, and Agnes Martin turned to titanium and zinc whites to create monochromatic white paintings.
French artist Henri Matisse loved using Red colour in his palette. This painting is an example of Impressionism with the overall lack of a central focal point.
The Dessert: Harmony in Red by Henri Matisse, 1908
Gathering pollen from trees and plants, he puts the pollen in bottles and flies to distant places around the world to create ephemeral installations of yellow dust on museum and gallery floors and inseminate the minds of viewers with thoughts of harmony between human civilization and nature.
Pollen from Hazelnut by Wolfgang Laib
Gustav Klimt liked to use real gold, which doesn’t actually have a color in itself. “The Kiss” or “Adele Bloch-Bauer” – which appear with a deep yellow gold or golden yellow.
The Kiss by Gustav Klimt
Orange and Yellow by Mark Rothko, in which two or three rectangles are set within a background that surrounds them all, but divides them gently from one another. He did an entire series of colour Yellow.
Orange and Yellow by Mark Rothko
Francis Newton Souza is the first post-independence Indian artist to achieve high recognition in the West. He often used Yellow in his colour palette.
