7

COLOURMAN: ‘THE DANGEROUS SYMPTOMS HE LABOURS UNDER’

In the late eighteenth century artists bought their colours, just as they had for 200 years, in powder or lump form, dried and ground and contained in glass or pottery jars. Alternatively they might be supplied in screws of paper, like boiled sweets used to be, or as pastes to be squeezed out of bags made from pigs’ bladders. This was a long tradition; pigs had been giving their bladders to art for centuries. Cennino Cennini, the early fifteenth-century painter and author of Il Libro dell’Arte, a manual for painters and craftsmen which was not published until the 1820s, recommended skins and bladders as the most convenient receptacles for dry or damp pigment. He also made it clear that the preparation of good colour was a slow, laborious, back-breaking and dangerous job. On grinding the highly toxic mercury-rich mineral cinnabar to make vermilion (red), he instructed the artist to put the cinnabar on a porphyry slab, ‘grinding it with clean water as much as you can – if you were to grind it for twenty years, it would be but better and more perfect’. Orpiment (yellow) had further hazards and was no less time-consuming:

It is the most difficult colour to grind of any used in our art; therefore when you are going to grind it . . . gently press it between the stones, mixing with it a little broken glass, because the powdered glass, by its roughness, assists in grinding the orpiment. When you have broken it to pieces, put clean water to it and grind it as much as you can, – and if you were to grind it for ten years, so much the better would it be. Beware of letting it touch your mouth, lest you should poison yourself.

Colour preparation, naturally messy and dangerous, involved the artist or assistants in complex preparation before the resulting colour could be mixed with water or oil, and the painting begun. This essential activity made the workplace busy, allowing little space for the quiet reflection that in the mid-nineteenth century became the Romantic artist’s dream. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a large and continuous output of paintings could only be achieved with the help of support staff, servants, apprentices or assistants. Gradually, however, attitude, industry and economics caused this to be discarded, and in a romantic shift colourmen went off into business on their own in one direction, and frame- and stretcher-makers in another, while the artist was left alone with subject and canvas. ‘Classic’ might describe the ideal, ordered life of an artist such as Rubens or Reynolds, good at management and subtle in business; ‘romantic’ describes the chaotic lives of George Morland, Benjamin Robert Haydon and Joseph Gandy – talented, imaginative, but bedevilled by disorganization, debt and drink. Paintings such as the anonymous watercolour of Fuseli’s workroom in the Royal Academy (c.1810) may reflect the organized ideal, but it was also an expression of a romantic dream. The dull reality of Morland’s painting of himself and his servant, Gibbs, in the studio (c.1802), or Turner’s remarkably similar Artist’s Studio (c.1808), are probably nearer the truth. It is interesting to reflect that from the early twentieth century ‘picture’ has also meant a cinema film, a production achieved, like the production of a successful painter, only through the marshalling of large forces: huge cast, big business.

The painting of a picture came as the end product of a long and laborious craft process in which not only had the colours to be ground and combined, but also the associated carpentry, metalwork and fabric handling had to be carried out. For the painter, the wooden stretcher for the canvas had to be made, and the canvas stretched and nailed across it, prepared with a suitable size or ground to accept the paint. Artists shared suppliers with coach painters, house decorators, cloth dyers and printers, and pottery painters; canvas supply with ship-builders and riggers, haberdashers and upholsterers; stretcher- and frame-making with carpenters and plaster modellers. In a gradual refinement of their activity in the eighteenth century, painters moved away from the colour-makers’ and grinders’ premises and into studios of their own.

And just as well: colour-making remained a pretty sordid business, as Robert Campbell, the author of a mid-eighteenth-century treatise on the trades of London, made clear. Nothing much had changed since the days of Cennini:

[The colourman] is, in some shape, the Apothecary to the painter . . . He grinds such as requires grinding, and adds that expense to the prime cost . . . A painter may go into his shop and be furnished with every article he uses, such as pencils, brushes, cloths ready for drawing on, and all manner of colours ready prepared . . . They employ labourers to grind their colours at the common price of ten or twelve shillings per week: so that I would not chuse to breed my son to this branch . . . There are some others employed in preparing colours, such as in making powderblue, commonly called Prussian Blue, from that Mystery being invented in that Kingdom. It is made from bullocks’ blood by the operation of fire. The work is chiefly carried out in the Borough of Southwark; is an odious stinking business, and by the secrets of the preparation being public, the profits are dwindled to a trifle . . . There are some who prepare that beautiful colour called Carmine, which is prepared by extracting the dye from scarlet rags. This is but in few hands, and no apprentices are bound to the mystery . . . There are works at Whitechapel, and some other of the suburbs, for making of White and Red Lead, with the rest of the preparations of that metal. But the work is performed by engines, horses and labourers, who are sure in a few years to become paralytic by the mercurial fumes of the lead; and seldom live a dozen years in the business. They take no apprentices.

Raising their discipline from a trade to an art and a profession, painters also removed themselves from the filthy business of producing the beautiful material from which they made their work. Turner’s curious painting An Artists’ Colourman’s Workshop of around 1807 shows the old dispensation, before the introduction of more convenient ways of delivering colour. An aged colourman, the ‘apothecary to the painter’, as Campbell put it, is grinding red pigment, probably the poisonous vermilion, and is surrounded by bottles and jars of all sizes. His donkey rests beside the set of large grinding wheels which he daily pulls round for hours on end. The colourman is shown to be old and doddery, probably prematurely aged through the vicious tyranny of his infernal profession.

An illustrated trade flyer of another mid-eighteenth-century colourman, Joseph Emerton, who had his works near the Strand, reveals both ends of the colour-making process: to the right of the decorative engraving a horse drives a pigment-grinding machine, while on the left a portrait painter and his subject sit face to face with each other. Emerton, according to his advertisement, was fully diversified in the colour trade. He sold paint equally for house painters, to be applied ‘by the help of a printed Direction which he gives with his Colours’, and

Water Colours and Varnish, with everything necessary for the New Japanning; and gives a printed Direction, for the doing of it to the Greatest Perfection, to those that buy Colours. Also Italian Powder for Cleaning Pictures, and fine Picture Varnish. He deals only for Ready Money.

In the margins of Emerton’s advertisement are images of palettes, brushes and paint pots, and bladders hanging like the offal they once were.

Sebastian Grandi of Long Acre was a colourman who came from the generation that tried to overcome the apothecary label, while still using apothecary methods. In 1806, having asked Farington to support his application, Grandi won the silver medal of the Society of Arts and 20 guineas for his method of preparing panels for painters. His portrait, by John Opie, shows the medal tucked inside his coat. Despite the prize-worthiness of his approach, his technique was nevertheless another reason why painters wanted their materials to be made as far away from their studios as possible:

Take the bones of sheep’s trotters, break them grossly, and boil them in water until cleared from their grease, then put them into a crucible, calcine them [i.e. heat them up until they break down], and afterwards grind them to powder.

White was made by this method, while brown had a similar genesis, ‘only calcining [the bones] in a crucible instead of an open fire’.

Success at exhibition and selling depended on artists having some special ingredient in image, colour or technique that would lift them above the general mass of paintings on show. ‘Colouring,’ said Opie, ‘is the sunshine of the art.’ There was a brief flurry of excitement at the Academy in 1797 when the miniaturist Ann Provis, ‘a very young lady, scarcely in her teens’, persuaded some Academicians that she had inherited a colour recipe purporting to be one used by Titian and other sixteenth-century Venetian artists. The value of knowing this ‘Venetian Secret’, as it came to be called, caused some artists to pay Provis 10 guineas each for sight of the recipe. Their eagerness, notably in the case of the president Benjamin West, to know and to try the method smacks of desperation to find an answer to the problem of paintings fading and cracking that had bedevilled Reynolds and others for years. Nevertheless, as John Gage suggests, had the Academicians read sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatises on painting, they could have pieced it together from there and saved themselves some money.

The ‘Venetian Affair’ was mercilessly lampooned by James Gillray in his engraving Titianus Redivivus, – or – The Seven Wise Men Consulting the New Venetian Oracle (1793). The seven – Rigaud, Smirke, Stothard, Hoppner, Westall, Opie and Farington – queue up for instruction, each with a question. Farington’s is:

Will this secret make me paint like Claude?
Will it make a Dunce, a Colourist at Once?

A thousand other artists wave their palettes and clamour for the miracle. Sir Joshua rises from the dead with the words:

Black spirits & White, Blue spirits & Grey
Mingle, mingle, mingle! You that mingle may.

Martin Archer Shee, an ambitious portrait painter who would one day be president of the Royal Academy, continued the merciless criticism of those artists sucked into the affair. In his long and tedious poem Elements of Art (1809), which followed the canto form that Byron was to celebrate, but would be no rival to the author of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, he (Shee) opined:

How many fondly waste the studious hour,
To seek in process what they want in power!
Their time in curious search of colours lose,
Which, when they find, they want the skill to use!
Till all in gums engross’d, macgilpts and oils
The painter sinks amidst the chemist’s toils.

Shee enlarged on his lines in a footnote: ‘The process-hunter is the alchemist of the palette . . . The Artist who has been once visited by the mania is restored with great difficulty to the rational path of progress.’

The Venetian Affair, with its controversial public platform, was a symptom of the relentless search by artists’ colourmen to find pigments of chemical compositions that would heighten the tone of paintings, not only to create a brighter effect of nature, but also to stand out at public exhibitions. Turner’s Opening of the Vintage of Macon of 1803 attracted criticism from Sir George Beaumont, who objected to the brightness of its tones and announced that ‘the subject was borrowed from Claude, but the colouring forgotten’. In other words, as Beaumont had spotted, Turner’s colouring here was revolutionary, though the connoisseur could not quite give up his allegiance to his own generation’s way of judging modern art by the standards of an old master’s palette. Likewise, a few years later, John Martin’s startling red and orange Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion jumped out from its green and brown neighbours in the 1812 Academy exhibition and found a buyer, William Manning MP, a merchant of the West Indies. New ways of making paint were offering new tones and colours to young masters’ palettes and generating new pictorial confidence. Seeking new directions of their own, painters were naturally secretive about how they made their effects. Augustus Callcott, cautiously ambitious, talented and enquiring, noticed with frustration how his fellow artist William Owen ARA would not talk freely about his methods:

Dined at Hoppners with Owen and [Henry] Thomson. Talking of colours H said he was convinced Rubens and the Flemings had a yellow we know nothing of. Owen gave us an account of a picture he had painted on a wax ground. Whether it is that Owen is cautious of not talking but he should commit himself or that he is close I cannot determine it. Have frequently had occasion to observe that the information he communicates is rather drawn out of him than voluntarily given.

A revolution in the new commercial production of paints and pigments was made by the entrepreneurial chemist George Field. He had early practised his organizational skills around the first years of the century when in 1803 he was a co-founder of the ambitious ‘British School’, a permanent display gallery for British artists in rooms in Berners Street, north of Oxford Street. This initiative was intended to be an alternative to the Royal Academy, seen by many to be an exclusive self-selecting organization, already encrusted by rules and hedged about by committees and officers. Five hundred paintings were on the walls at the British School’s first, and only, exhibition. Not enough were sold, however, at 5 per cent commission, and the British School rapidly folded. Nothing daunted, Field continued with a more promising scheme which built on his interest in botany and chemistry, and in particular on his successful cultivation of madder (Rubia tinctorum), a plant from which red dye and madder lakes are made. The wartime activities of the British army demanded a constant supply of red dye for uniforms, and the textile industry required colour for printed frocks. As a result of cleverly managing to make supply fit demand, Field made a fortune. This he ploughed into realizing his inventions, and in 1808 he built a circular factory for the efficient commercial production of madder and other lakes, at Conham outside Bristol. Conham had been an industrial site for many generations, notably for processing lead, and as a by-product it developed the large-scale manufacture of Prussian Blue (ferric ferrocyanide), which Robert Campbell had described, for use in the Bristol blue-glass industry. At Conham, Field also manufactured Lemon Yellow (from barium chromate), and thus was able to create the three primary colours, red, blue and yellow, in one factory. Theoretically, therefore, he could now mix whatever colours he fancied, though in practice many of these chemicals would react together destructively.

Field came to notice in the world of invention with his chromoscope, otherwise known as the metrochrome, and in 1806 he won a silver medal at the Society of Arts for his design of a stove ‘for heating rooms or drying different articles’. It is a sign of the times changing both rapidly and reluctantly that in the same year the Society of Arts should honour both a practitioner of the old boil-the-bones technology, Sebastian Grandi, and a member of the up-and-coming new generation of colour chemists, George Field. ‘I have dried cherries, plums, and other fruits,’ Field explained of his new stove, which he demonstrated had many interchangeable and profitable applications:

I have repeatedly dried colours and most delicate substances without the slightest injury to them, even though the operation proceeded quickly . . . Extremely serviceable in drying japanners’ goods . . . it has been shown to be useful in the confectioners’ art, and probably it may be equally so in baking biscuits for the navy; nor less so in drying linen for the laundress, dyer, calico-printer, and bleacher. I have myself found it well accommodated for a chemical elaboratory . . . it is needless to enumerate the many economical [i.e. domestic] and philosophical [i.e. scientific] uses to which the stove may be applied.

Field moved to Hounslow Heath around 1812, where he finally killed off the notion of the colourman being the ‘apothecary to the painter’. His business of manufacturing colour for artists thrived in a utilitarian commercial manner, but with modern production techniques. Field was a leader among those – including Charles Roberson, William Reeves, and Winsor and Newton – who brought colour manufacturing into the modern age, built factories out of town, and created a sense of competition that kept prices low and maintained a healthy supply of goods to artists. During the following three decades Field also wrote treatises on colour and their usage, and created new systems of colour measurement through the chromoscope.

In his old age, however, the pace of change was such that even George Field had become a mere curiosity, apparently out of touch with the subject that he had so fruitfully advanced. The writer Henry Crabbe Robinson described him in 1846 as

an old gentleman who lives in retirement in Isleworth where he writes philosophical books which no one reads. He is a metaphysician of the Greek School and is a sort of unconscious partisan of the German philosophy of which he in fact knows nothing – But he has written practical works on Chromatics and has earned an independence by preparing colours for artists – He is a man of simple habits & lives a sort of hermit life attended by a middle aged female servant.

With such growing professionalism, tied to profit and purpose, old-style colour-grinders had a hard time and gradually died out. Sebastian Grandi was deeply disliked by George Field, who called him ‘a most ignorant Italian quack in colours, absorbent grounds and vehicles. A mountebank and a droll.’ This, one might suggest, was inevitable from one of the new breed of industrial colour chemists, disparaging the old regime with its kitchen chemistry and whiffs of alchemy. Farington nevertheless seems to have appreciated Grandi’s advice for years. Having bought artists’ materials from him in 1796, Farington noted down what might well have been an old-fashioned tip from Grandi himself: ‘Orpiment calcined & made into paste, if laid upon a picture that is greasy will take off the grease in 2 or 3 days.’

Grandi seems to have been quite an ebullient fellow, good-humoured and extrovert, with hot-blooded Italian characteristics that might have made a more stuffy Englishman uncomfortable. Farington reported how Grandi had broken both his legs at the Westminster Regiment Field Day on Dulwich Common in May 1806, ‘leaping with others for amusement’. Had he and his friends been jumping for joy at the sight of some spectacular military manoeuvre, or performing acrobatic leaps and twirls to entertain the crowd and come a cropper? ‘The pain He sd. was not greater than a man could well bear; but the [ten weeks’] confinement which followed was a punishment.’

Grandi tended to get himself into scrapes, becoming, six months later, involved in a brawl near his premises in Long Acre, in which a man died. ‘I am sorry to inform you’, wrote another Grandi, perhaps his wife, to a supportive customer of the older generation, James Northcote,

Grandi is in trouble. He was on Wednesday in company with an Italian which is not in his proper senses. He wished to see him home and in coming down Long Acre a man followed them. Having Paul’s colours in their hats they were insulted by the opposite party. In consequence the man that was with Grandi cut a man in the arm. They have detained Grandi being in his company and is in the house of correction until the man is out of Danger. His situation is shocking. Sir, I shall be humble obliged to you when he has a hearing if you will speak for him for his character.

Grandi and his friend Giovanni Andrea Nardi, the ‘Italian which is not in his proper senses’, got themselves into this fight when they were dressed up like popinjays in colourful support of the radical James Paull’s candidature in the by-election for the parliamentary seat left vacant by Charles James Fox’s death in 1806. They were both sent for trial at the Old Bailey on what became a charge of murder; Grandi when arrested was ‘fantastically dressed, with flowers and feathers in his hat, and a [red] sergeant’s sash across his shoulder, he had a common mop stick in his hand and something like a medal hanging at his button hole’. This medal, as it turned out from Grandi’s own testimony, was ‘a silver medal under my great coat’. Nardi was found guilty but insane, while Grandi received character references from ‘seven respectable gentlemen’, among them probably his friends Farington, Opie and Northcote. They gave him ‘the character of a humane, honest, simple, easy, and inoffensive man’, and he was acquitted. Ironically, the red sergeant’s sash that Grandi was wearing when he was arrested would most likely have been dyed using madder processed in Field’s factory; and presumably the silver medal he was wearing was the very one he had recently been awarded by the Society of Arts.

The rapid development of pigments in the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth was a lucrative by-product of the increase in the understanding of chemistry. Humphry Davy went to Rome and Pompeii in 1814 to find out what pigments the ancients had used, and by chemistry he analysed what he found. Little had changed, as Maria Callcott recalled:

[I have] a clear recollection of a conversation I had with Sir Humphry Davy . . . just after he had been engaged in examining several jars of antique pigments that had been discovered . . . He told me that none of those he had examined differed in substance from those now used for the same purpose.

Prussian Blue, however, was a relatively new compound. It was made by a process discovered in Berlin in the early eighteenth century and soon widely industrialized. As Robert Campbell recorded, it was produced in quantity in Southwark in an ‘odious, stinking business’ and, to George Field’s benefit, in Bristol. Faraday’s lesser-known mentor at the Royal Institution, the chemist William Brande, perfected the pigment’s production in the laboratory by heating dried blood or horn shavings with potassium carbonate to red heat in a crucible. As he expressed it:

After mixing with alum and iron sulphate, a precipitate falls, at first with a dingy green hue, but which, by copious washings with a very dilute muriatic acid, acquires a fine blue tint . . . Prussian Blue.

To make this stuff, the colourman had to know his chemistry. A painting signed with an ‘R’ or ‘LR’ monogram, dated 1827, in the Oxford Museum of the History of Science shows two chemists, quite possibly Brande and the young Faraday, precipitating Prussian Blue. Their laboratory has a historicising look, like a Dutch seventeenth-century subject, but the painting nevertheless indicates that creating new pigments was an exciting and satisfying event, not a mundane process.

The variety of new colours emerging out of chemistry grew from discoveries made independently and in co-operation between chemists across Europe and Scandinavia, a process further promoted by the regular distribution and exchange of scientific journals. The Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered in 1775 a new green by reacting copper and arsenic together to make the salt copper arsenate. ‘Scheele’s Green’ was brighter and more durable than the old green from copper carbonate, and it became a standard colour. A new yellow, lead oxychloride, was discovered by James Turner of Millbank, who in 1781 successfully ground together red lead and sea salt. Under the somewhat flimsy protection of a patent, Turner manufactured and sold this pigment to the trade as ‘Turner’s Yellow’. While he may have been able to protect his income by means of his patent, he could not prevent common parlance from transferring the name of the pigment away from himself as manufacturer. ‘Turner’s Yellow’ is now more generally but erroneously understood to be a pigment that J. M. W. Turner used, rather than one that James Turner invented. Indeed, so much did J. M. W. Turner use yellows that he was referred to as ‘the author of gamboge light’.

As early as 1818 James Ward noticed how yellows were creeping into Turner’s paintings: ‘Turner becomes excessive[.] Brimstone is not the colour of nature.’ Eight years later, a critic wrote of Turner’s exhibits in the 1826 Royal Academy exhibition: ‘We find the same intolerable yellow hue pervading every thing. Yellow, yellow, nothing but yellow, violently contrasted with blue.’ Later still, in 1838, Turner cranked the chromatic volume up to screeching pitch:

Mr Turner is in all his force this year . . . through such a medium as yellow, and scarlet and orange, and azure-blue, as only lives in his own fancy and the toleration of his admirers.

There were now enough yellows around for J. M. W. Turner and others to be selective in their use of them. Chrome yellow had been isolated in 1797 by the French chemist Nicolas Vauquelin from the mineral crocoite, a lead chromate found in Russia; and cadmium yellow independently in 1817 by the German chemists Friedrich Stromeyer and Karl Samuel Leberecht Hermann.

The evil that paint could potentially do to artists was profound. Lead white caused pallor, blue marks to the skin and ultimately kidney failure; Scheele’s Green caused cancer of the bladder and kidneys; chrome yellow caused delirium, seizures and ulcers; while cobalt blue shares a toxin with snake venom which causes heart failure. This was all well known. The health of William Owen, by then an RA, was a particular concern to his friends. He had severe spinal problems and as a result had to give up painting. The physician Anthony Carlisle gave his diagnosis, as Farington reported:

Carlisle says there is only one chance of Owen’s recovery, which is, whether the Colour Owen uses may not be the cause of the dangerous symptoms he labours under. – Thomson observed, that the white, the only dangerous colour, he uses in such small quantities that it cannot be the cause of such effects.

Owen did eventually die of poisoning, not through the effect of paint, however, but because he was given a bottle of opium, in error, to take as medicine. As late as 1878 the curse of colour was very much a reality for artists, as Dr Ure’s Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures and Mines made all too clear. Citing orpiment, or ‘King’s Yellow’, and verdigris as strong poisons, he lists others which

occasion dreadful maladies, such as white lead, red lead, chrome yellow and vermilion . . . [and cannot] be safely ground by hand with the slab and muller, but should always be titurated in a mill. The emanations of white lead cause, first, that dangerous disease the colica pictonum, afterwards paralysis, or premature decrepitude and lingering death.

One particularly fugitive but popular colour was indigo, derived from the leguminous shrub true indigo (Indigofera tinctoria), found in Asia and Africa. This was the source of a rich blue which could evoke shades between a dark midnight-blue sky to the softly touched palest blue of the noon sky at the horizon. A contributor to The Builder wrote in 1857 of a collector who had noticed how the grey clouds that he enjoyed in one of his Turner watercolours had surprisingly become red. When he showed it to the artist, Turner made the shocked response: ‘I will never make another watercolour drawing!’ He did not of course stick to that line, but on being asked if he would work his magic on the suffering watercolour and blend the faded and unfaded colours together, he retorted: ‘Oh no! If I were to do that I should have all my drawings brought to be restored.’ Richard Redgrave remembered how risky it was thought to be to use an ultramarine blue from France:

[Clarkson Stanfield’s assistant] was about to give [his palette] into Stanfield’s hand on this particular varnishing day, when ‘Stanny’ saw Turner, palette knife in hand, about to make a swoop upon a tempting lump of ultramarine. Just as the old painter was advancing his hand, Stanfield called out ‘French’, and Turner gave up his intention.

The critic and painter Thomas Wainewright, who wrote under the pen names Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot and Cornelius van Vinckbooms, exaggeratedly dismissed Turner’s colour in 1820 when the artist exhibited his Rome, from the Vatican in London:

Ho! Ho! This is Mr Turner’s Rome is it? Well now, what do you think of it? It appears to me that the foreground is not half finished: it will take three bladders of ivory black and a gallipot of asphaltum before it will advance from its modest retirement in the background.

In advising Turner to use more ivory black and the browny-grey mineral pigment asphaltum, Wainewright is advocating a disastrous method of articulating the complex foreground detail, on the grounds that black accompanying white will allow a detail to advance to the eye. However, had he used asphaltum as Wainewright had suggested, Turner’s shining Rome, from the Vatican might now have been a wreck. Wainewright, hotheaded and volatile, was in 1837 arrested and tried for poisoning his sister-in-law, and others. It was not paint that he was alleged to have used, but strychnine, then undetectable as a poison. The poisoning charge not being proven, Wainewright was transported to Tasmania for forgery, where he spent the rest of his life becoming a remarkably good and locally appreciated portrait painter.

Such were among the recipes and anecdotes, temptations and dangers that developed around the use of colour in painting since Charles-Alphonse du Fresnoy wrote his extended poem De arte graphica. Translated into English in 1783 as The Art of Painting, this became well known to artists who read that sort of thing. The wider availability of varieties of colour prompted new courage in the work of artists, of whom Turner was the boldest. In his book Colour as a Means of Art (1838), the painter Frank Howard invoked what he described as the ‘Principals’ of Turner in the management of colour on canvas, in particular Turner’s practice of contrasting:

rich autumn yellows in the foreground, with a brilliant Italian blue sky, graduated through a series of exquisitely delicate pearly tints, to meet the cooler green tints of the middle ground. The warm colours in the foreground are qualified by purply half-tints, and supported by warm shadows and some rich crimsons; or sometimes reduced to comparative sobriety by the opposition of the brightest orange and white.

This passage brings a kaleidoscope of colour to the mind’s eye, an experience that in the 1830s was entirely new and dependent entirely on the new palette of bright colours that was now becoming available. Turner was the only nineteenth-century artist whose work as a colourist Howard used to illustrate his thesis, alongside Titian, and Rubens, Cuyp, Jan Both and other Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century masters. Of the Venetian School ‘founded by Titian’, Howard wrote that it

adopted a combination of rich warm browns, yellows and greens, supported by crimsons, all deep in tone, overspreading two-thirds of the picture, opposed by very rich, almost warm, blues, and animated by a point of white, sometimes accompanied by black in the front of the subject. No violent contrasts are admitted, no crude colours.

The caution that Howard observes in Titian, no less a revolutionary in his day than Turner, is an indicator of the distance travelled in the early nineteenth century by the pioneering experimental colour chemists:

Turner has controverted the old doctrine of a balance of colours, by shewing that a picture may be made up of delicately graduated blues and whites, supported by pale cool green, and enlivened by a point of rich brownish crimson. It requires some care in the gradation and shapes of the masses of blue and white, and in the situation of the point of colour.

As Turner himself put it to a young friend, later Mrs Mary Lloyd:

[A]lways remember that as you can never reach the brilliancy of Nature, you need never to be afraid of putting your brightest light next to your deepest shadow, in the centre, but not in the corners, of your picture.

While he positioned Turner in the company of the greatest old masters, Howard nevertheless dedicated his book to the recently knighted Sir Augustus Wall Callcott, whom he flatteringly described as having shown that ‘the capability to execute in the higher walks of Art does not depend . . . upon mechanical skill . . . but upon intellectual qualifications and mental refinement, which have ever been conspicuous in your treatment of the subjects generally adorned by your pencil’. Callcott, married by now to the intrepid but tubercular Maria, was already well established in artistic and administrative circles and admired by the new young queen Victoria, an achievement – two, with the added distinction of a knighthood – that Turner would never attain.

Nonetheless, a dedication to Turner would have been more honest, as Turner’s own dedication to colour-making was profound. His sketchbooks contain over twenty different recipes for colour and varnishes, and while they are not advanced as chemistry, they do reveal his staunchly practical bent and his diligent attention to studio practice; but they also betray his essentially outdated, pre-industrial approach. In style and expression they resemble the medical recipes that Turner also scatters through his sketchbooks, suggesting that he was as rightly concerned with his own care as he was for the integrity of his materials. His last paint recipe transcription appears in a sketchbook dated 1828, from which we might draw the conclusion that after that date he began to go with the flow and use colours that he could buy commercially, rather than ones in which he found an interest in manufacturing for himself. However, his father, by now his studio assistant, died in 1829, so the loss of that ready and free source of labour and skill may have prompted him to take the commercial option when he did. The early 1830s, being the decade in which Winsor and Newton, Reeves and Roberson developed and expanded their own methods of production, was also the decade in which Turner could economically cease his.

Many pigment compounds in the nineteenth century were notoriously unreliable. What was grey one day could be red another; what was white could rapidly become black; what was a rosy flesh tint might within a year or two be death-pale white. This was a failing in Reynolds’s early portraits: Sir Joseph Banks refused to have his wife painted by Reynolds, ‘being of the opinion that the oil pictures of the present time invariably fade quicker than the persons they are intended to represent’. It became the life’s work of the colour manufacturers to create pigments that could be trusted to retain the subtleties created by artists’ dexterity of eye and hand, as pictorial aspirations confronted the need to experiment with paint.

The profundity of the changes in the nature of the colour available to artists in the 1830s and 1840s cannot be underestimated: it shines through their work. An hour in an art gallery with a collection as rich as the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, or the city galleries in Manchester, Birmingham or Bristol, or indeed Tate Britain, will make this amply clear. In eighteenthcentury paintings, by Hogarth, Stubbs, Joseph Wright or Reynolds, we see pinks, dusty blues, quiet yellows and decorous reds, with browns and greens in abundance. Where drama unfolds, it comes not in colour but in composition: thus, in the Walker Art Gallery, David Garrick as Richard III (1745) by Hogarth leaps from the canvas by virtue of Garrick’s theatrical gesture of terror; Stubbs’s Horse Frightened by a Lion (1770) screams in fear, but it is the shattered silhouette of the white horse, frozen against a dark background and below a blue sky, that conveys the emotion, quite as much as the stark white against dark that the artist has used. Stubbs has used his limited palette to masterly effect by his breathtaking composition. Even the fireworks in Joseph Wright’s Girandola at the Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome (1775–6) have a restraint in their explosive redness. It is the nature of the paint that is decorous, not the character or abilities of the artist. Pink flesh in Baroque nudes and martyrdoms can cover many square feet of canvas, but there is an economic imperative here as expensive and poisonous red can be thinned down into a multitude of pinks with more modestly priced white.

When the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – Millais, Holman Hunt, Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown – first exhibited together in 1849, the sharpness of their colour was a vivid public statement of how fundamentally chemistry and the commercial production of paint had changed the way the world could be reflected in the mirror of art. While clarity of detail in a painting is a function of the fineness of the brush, the steadiness of the hand, the thinning of the paint, the smoothness of the canvas or paper, it is also as much a function of the variety and strength of colour and the artist’s ability to create subtle and inventive mixtures and juxtapositions of line and tone. The vicious kick at the hound in Millais’ Isabella (1848–9) would not be half so dramatic were it not for the snarl of the young man who delivered it; the snarl would not have appeared half so fierce had not Millais used bright modern pigments with their subtle variation to express it, and surrounded it with reflecting silver, high incidental detail, and the threatening interplay of serial profiles in the surrounding protagonists. And none of this would have had such an iron punch without the luminous white ground that the Pre-Raphaelites determined to paint upon.

Nevertheless, the new materials brought new responsibilities in preparation and colour management. The painter Albert Goodwin noticed how Ford Madox Brown adopted a ‘slow and laborious’ practice: he ‘made a practice of cleaning his oil work every night – brushes, palette – everything . . . the secret of all good oil painting was a good turpentine dipper’. Taking great care, the Pre-Raphaelites avoided the trap that the older generation blundered into – over-reliance on two widely available mixers, asphaltum and megilp. Asphaltum, a bituminous material from the Middle East, was better employed in its primary application, being laid on roads and pavements, rather than being painted onto canvas as an underlay. This failing in paintings by artists such as Maclise and Wilkie, both represented in Robert Vernon’s collection, has been described lucidly by Leslie Carlyle and Anna Southall:

Despite the warnings, the delicious working properties of their paint and the hope that their own work might escape the destructive effects, encouraged many to continue using them.

George Field made a concerted effort to use the reason of science to overcome the dogma of alchemy. Nevertheless, he issued stark warnings in his pioneering book Chromatography, published in 1835:

Most of the resplendent pigments, fruits of the fecundity of modern chemistry, have been found deficient of the intrinsic and sterling excellencies which have given value and reputation to some of the ancient and approved . . . Yellow chromates of lead . . . become by time, foul air, and the influence of other pigments, inferior even to the ochres . . . Reds of iodine are chameleon colours, subject to the most sudden and opposite changes . . . Blues of cobalt . . . are always tending to greenness and obscurity.

He warned that Iodine Scarlet should not be used with iron colours, such as Prussian Blue; Scheele’s Green is destroyed by Naples Yellow; indigo is ‘injured by impure air’, and so on. Of asphaltum he wrote:

[Its] fine brown colour, and perfect transparency are lures to its free use with many artists, notwithstanding the certain destruction which awaits the work on which it is much employed.

Megilp, an improvised mixture of varnish, resin, plant oil and white lead, caused rapid cracking, drying and darkening, creating islands on the canvas which shrank and split away like landmasses in continental drift. The painter William Muckley observed: ‘So pleasant [it was] to work with, that it allured many painters to the indiscreet use of it.’ Field’s contribution as a scientist and entrepreneur to advances in colour chemistry enabled artists to achieve the sharpness, brilliance and clarity that mark out painting from the 1840s. William Holman Hunt paid particular tribute to Field’s professionalism and skill not only as a chemist, but as the agent through whom new and more reliable colours came to be available. The yellow in Turner’s Approach to Venice, Hunt asserted, ‘you will recognise as Field’s lemon yellow, and so it is a justification of the maker’s boast that it was absolutely permanent’. Field, he said,

much improved the range and the beauty of the colours to choose from. His madders were far superior to those which preceded them. His lemon-yellow was believed to be a perfectly permanent dandelion-tinted pigment, destined to entirely supplant the light chrome . . . his orangevermilion won so good a reputation that the tint is still always sold with his name as its best recommendation . . . The pictures of forty, thirty, twenty years ago gained the advantage of this careful chemist’s scientific labours, for the colourmen were discriminating enough to value the products of his laboratory, and the artists, without care, were fortunate enough to be supplied with what would now be above price.

However, despite Field’s new scientific methods and those being adopted by rival colour-making companies, the application of paint to canvas could still present unpredictable outcomes. The making of a painting, despite centuries of practice and improvement, remained a laboratory experiment in which the artist toyed more or less innocently on a vertical bench with a series of chemicals, some of which might be self-destructive, and many poisonous. In a long and passionate paper given to the Society of Arts in 1880, Holman Hunt set out some of the dangers that artists faced, if not to themselves, then to the long-term stability of their works. Asphaltum and megilp were among the materials he castigated, while both remained in active commercial production. Concerning the use of asphaltum, Hunt described the dangers that he and his generation could avoid:

Hilton, and more lamentably Wilkie, both adopted this Dead Sea product from the beginning to the end of their careers. Indeed, in their generation, the use of this pitch was almost universal. . . . Maclise and Landseer were, with others of their time, seduced into its use. The misfortune was greater, because all of these painters had such a passion for the rich tint it gave on a white ground, that they never began their paintings without it . . . [Maclise] has left laborious works which, even within 40 or 30 years, or less, are so ruined, from his ignorance of the art of painting, that the uninformed observer would be led to conclude that they had been done by a process – not which had before been tried for 400 years, but which had never before been put to the test.

Hunt noticed that the issue was particularly regrettable, since the effect was slow to occur and its evil ‘may not manifest itself before the death of the artist’. Adding fiction to speculation, it may be that the portrait that Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray consigned to the attic was painted with an over-reliance on asphaltum and megilp.

Speaking of the speed at which new and untried colours were being marketed, Holman Hunt asserted:

The evidence given amounts, I think, to this, that in the day – 150 years after the commencement of English art – we have no more mastery of our craft, as such, than that with which Hogarth, Gainsborough and Reynolds commenced their careers. Reynolds’ very mistakes testify to his anxiety to establish some certain knowledge of the matter as much as to the blankness of the guidance he had received.

In speaking to the Society of Arts, Hunt was sounding a warning as the colour market – a product of a successful and energetic capitalist society – galloped away. The largest companies of colourmen were William and Thomas Reeves (founded 1766), Charles Roberson (founded 1810) and Winsor and Newton (founded by William Winsor and Henry Newton in 1832). All were still in business in 2014, clear evidence of the demand for and purpose of artists’ materials in a civilized society. Together, the colourmen manufactured not only the standard colours for the artist’s paintbox, but additional confections of their own on an increasingly industrial scale. Winsor and Newton’s catalogue, published from their showroom at 38 Rathbone Place with an illustration of their busy North London Colour Works in Kentish Town, offered more than fifty different tints for watercolour cakes, including three Chrome Yellows, Orpiment, Dragon’s Blood, Hooker’s Green, Payne’s Grey, Chalon’s Brown and Prout’s Liquid Brown. The company sold everything from the finest sable paintbrushes to pencils, palettes, easels, paper – including ‘Solid Sketch Books’ whose pages were pressed together and could only be separated with a sharp knife – and japanned tin paintboxes for sketching out of doors. The selection of colour cakes for paintboxes could be varied according to whether the artist intended to paint landscape, figures or flowers, and paint was also supplied in rudimentary glass syringes and in the more successful ‘patent collapsible tubes’. These are almost identical in form to the paint tubes supplied today: they had the same small screw-cap, and the same turned-over and pinched ends. The evolution of the paint tube ran swiftly, like the pen-nib, from experiment to perfection.

Nevertheless, the paint companies did not have it quite their own way. John Sell Cotman had his own little colour manufactory in London, selling cakes of watercolour to whomsoever might buy. Writing to John Hornby Maw, he advertised:

Our Articles are all Town Made from the Raw Materials & warranted on the best principles with due allowance to be made for theft from olden time, sanctioned by Apelles & by all artists of high talent to the present day – for there is but little new under the Sun.

Samuel Palmer recalled that William Blake had other sources:

glue as a vehicle was recommended to [Blake] by St Joseph in a dream or vision . . . Don’t think I’m laughing: I have not yet shrunk into such inspissated [sic] idiocy who grins at everything beyond its own tether.

Palmer insisted on following Blake’s method of making a hard white:

Get the best whitening – powder it. Mix thoroughly to water with the consistency of cream. Strain through double muslin, spread it out upon backs of plates – white tiles are better – kept warm over basins of water until it is pretty stiff . . . Mr Eatwell, Artists Colourman of Dorset St, Portman Square, W, will grind the whitening as above and send it you in a bottle . . . On him you can depend.

Palmer was generous and free with his advice; paint suppliers might have been concerned. He wrote to the Oxford physician and collector Henry Acland:

I enclose a little washed gamboge purified from its green tint & semiopaque, a colour which stands alone for brilliancy here & there but not answering the valuable purposes of common gamboges in transparent vegetation. I wish I had a little of the washed G: for the light round the sun in the little drawing I did with you. No pigment has so much colour with so little loss of light – but if kept upon the palette in any quantity it will put the eye wrong. Should the paper become damp it can be soaked off. It easily dissolves in water & can be rubbed up on a saucer by the finger but has a strange trick of coming out of any paper in which it is wrapped – so I keep it in a bottle.

To develop their market, colour manufacturers sought to develop mutual admiration and commercial relationships with well-known artists. This drew Winsor and Newton and the watercolour painter James Duffield Harding together to advertise Harding’s book Principles and Practice of Art and to publish their own edition of Harding’s Art Lessons. They also marketed ‘Mr Harding’s Lesson Desk’, a wooden contraption Harding had patented to enable students to copy drawings and watercolours. Ignoring an evident personal loathing between Harding and Prout (see page 274), Winsor and Newton also advertised ‘Prout’s Liquid Brown’. In a further example of clever entrepreneurship they teamed up with the artist and inventor William Brockedon to market Brockedon’s ‘Patent Pure Cumberland Lead Pencils’. All this inventive marketing with celebrity endorsement carries its echoes into the twenty-first century. Like all the colour manufacturers, Winsor and Newton sought the imprimatur of science. In introducing a new Chinese White, they made the claim:

The White Oxide of Zinc is pronounced by the highest chemical authorities to be one of the most unchangeable substances in nature. Neither impure air, not the most powerful re-agents, affect its whiteness. It is not injured by, nor does it injure, any known pigments . . . Winsor and Newton’s Chinese White, by combining body and permanency, is rendered far superior to those whites known as ‘Constant’ or ‘Permanent’ White; and not having their clogging or pasty qualities, it works and washes with freedom.

Winsor and Newton encouraged testimonials from artists, such as this from Harding:

The Art of Painting in Watercolours has been greatly assisted by improvements in the preparation of the pigments; the greatest advantage, however, has been the introduction of Moist Colours, which, I believe, are a French invention, but greatly improved by Messrs Winsor and Newton.

Further testimonials were elicited from a host of artists, including Clarkson Stanfield, Daniel Maclise, David Roberts, John Constable, John Martin, R. R. Reinagle and William Brockedon. Turner, however, was not among them: significant, perhaps, is Turner’s reported remark to a persistent William Winsor, hoping to influence the artist’s choice of colours: ‘Your business, Mr Winsor, is to make colours for artists, mine is to use them.’ Products listed in the 1863 trade catalogue, the last published before the death of William Winsor the following year, showed how the company sought out new trends in the use of artists’ paints. They now included colours for ‘Illumination and Missal Painting’ and ‘Heraldic Blazoning’, as well as noting a new-fangled technical development in image-making by selling ‘Photographic Cut Out Mounting Board’; these were alongside the more traditional products which carried personal endorsements, such as ‘Etty Boards’ and ‘Cattermole Drawing Paper’, or suggested commercial exploitation such as ‘Imitation Creswick’s Drawing Papers’.

Winsor and Newton, and their main rivals Reeves and Roberson, benefited from the lucrative trade in art materials generated not only by the growing middle classes and the extended leisure that many enjoyed, but also by increasing demand from the military, whose tasks included official survey work in Britain and abroad. Not for nothing did Winsor and Newton market for peripatetic artists and surveyors a ‘Sketching Tent’ – weight under 8 pounds, including iron spikes for pitching – initially at 31s.6d, increased later to 42 shillings. After the end of the wars with France in 1815, the need for cannon and ships for a large standing army and an expensive navy began gradually to decline: up-ended cannon used as bollards in mid-nineteenth-century civic development is evidence of the imaginative reuse of redundant military hardware. Many can be seen in Albert Dock in Liverpool, for example. The requirement for paintbrushes and colours expanded greatly as the armed services developed new roles as agents for scientific and territorial exploration and land surveying and as the policeman of the world. The companies also were at pains to stress the suitability of their products for the tropics. Winsor and Newton proclaimed that their

Moist Water Colours retain . . . their solubility and dampness for an unlimited period . . . These qualities are preserved to the fullest extent in the hottest climates . . . particularly adapted and recommended to parties going out to INDIA . . . dry cake colours . . . generally break up and crumble into small pieces, when they are of course useless; this never occurs with the Moist Colours.

The military academies at Woolwich and Addiscombe, the latter run by the East India Company, employed drawing masters, including William Wells (the painter, not the ship-builder), J. C. Schetky, George Bryant Campion and Theodore Fielding. The academies ran compulsory courses in landscape drawing, in which each student had a pocket paintbox, palette and paints, and many of the keener ones might even have invested in a Sketching Tent. The ledgers maintained by Charles Roberson’s company from 1820 give clear indication of the exponential rise in sales of paints and art equipment, a growth reflected across the whole of the colourmaking industry. Roberson’s clients included established artists such as Francis Danby, Sir Charles Eastlake, W. P. Frith and William Holman Hunt; amateur artists of military, aristocratic and ordinary background; art dealers; art schools; theatres; and agents for military or government institutions in the empire. Benjamin Robert Haydon bought material from Roberson briefly in 1841–2, as did Edward Lear, with greater reliability, from 1850 to 1886. The great colour chemist himself, George Field, was a customer between 1841 and 1853. Artists meant business, as the young Augustus Callcott had already contemplated as early as 1805:

In the evening [John] Opie dropt in – conversing on the singularity of Girtin’s never being able to execute anything worth seeing till he got Cartrage paper. O— observed that Painters were as much governed by their tools as their tools were by them, seeming to consider that much of the art was dependent on the materials.

Modern colour chemistry was opening a whole new range of possibilities for artists. ‘What a fine broad fleshy colour you can get by mixing Indian Red & White & Ultramarine White’, Haydon wrote at the start of the second volume of his diaries in January 1809. Chemistry, in colour, was king, and scientists and artists were beginning to realize that if they worked together, and if artists learned something of the new language of science, they would be able to weave the rainbow together again. In Rome, Thomas Lawrence borrowed samples of colour from the paintbox of the German artist and amateur colour chemist Anton Raphael Mengs, and sent them to Field for analysis when he returned to London in 1820. ‘The Red I find’, Field reported,

to be a Sulpheret of Mercury or Cinnabar, having all the qualities of the best Vermilion. The two others are Sulpherets of Arsenic or Realgar which have all the properties of orpiment in painting. They differ however considerably from those pigments as we usually find them, and as Mengs was addicted to Chemistry I think it probable that they may have been his own productions. And no doubt it may be possible to reproduce them.

Field’s laboratory reports have all the fluidity and clarity of those written by Faraday for industrialists and government agencies at about the same time. From his analysis of Mengs’ colours, Field set about creating his own vermilion, which by the mid-1830s was in general use. However, this was not without time-consuming experiment which, as Field later told Holman Hunt, had cost him ‘so much time it was so thoroughly an invention, that he had applied to the Government and to learned bodies for an award of £100 in return for the mode of preparation, which not one had consented to give’. Hunt added: ‘I believe he carried his secret to the grave.’ It was not surprising that many artists were unable to keep up with, or even care about, the chemical subtleties of the paint they used. All they required was that the colour should remain stable, and preferably not poison them. The artist and writer Philip Hamerton quoted a remark of Samuel Palmer’s which expresses something of the frustration that artists felt about the new language of chemical colour that not all of them were able wholly to understand:

painting is a matter of such chemical complexity and intangible subtility, that, as I have heard Mr Mulready say more than once, two men shall paint off the same palette with the same vehicle, A’s picture shall dry, B’s picture shall not dry. A’s picture shall stand, B’s picture shall fade.

After fifty-seven years in Somerset House, the Royal Academy moved in 1837 to the eastern half of the National Gallery building in Trafalgar Square. Twenty years later the Royal Society moved to new premises in Burlington House, Piccadilly. Thus the quasi-university of the liberal arts that Somerset House had been in its early nineteenth-century heyday was falling apart, with the Society of Antiquaries, the Geological Society and the Royal Astronomical Society following the procession from Somerset House to Burlington House in 1874, as competition for space in the former building grew from government departments in the increasingly bureaucratized Victorian state. The slow fragmentation of scholarly disciplines at Somerset House, just as much as galloping increases in knowledge, led to a diminution of collective interest and a shift in the centres of gravity of art and science in London.

For painters, it is a short step from a mixture of interest, opportunity and confusion in the face of new scientific developments in colour-making, to a collective excitement at the possibility that scientific instruments could sharpen perceptions of the world. The key purpose of the manufacture and trade in scientific instruments was to enhance observation and understanding. While artists, armed with pencils, brushes and an infinite variety of colours, prepared the way through art and diagram, the ingenuity of inventors, engineers and instrument-makers enabled observation of the world and its horizons to go closer, wider and deeper. In his treatise on the microscope published in the 1760s, Micrographia illustrata, a catalogue of all the optical products he made or could supply, the instrument-maker George Adams described his variation on the camera obscura: an instrument where art and science met, the ‘New Camera Obscura Microscope, designed for drawing all minute objects, either by the light of the sun, or by a lamp in winter evenings, to great perfection’. Here the requirements of art are met through the perseverance of science. Where Adams had prospected, artists followed: improved variations of the camera obscura – the camera lucida and the graphic telescope – were made in the nineteenth century by the watercolour painter Cornelius Varley, brother of the incautious John.

In the 400 years between the days of Cennino Cennini and Sebastian Grandi, the practice of commercial colour manufacture had moved forward through the ingenuity and invention of chemists. The practice of scientificinstrument making also gathered pace to keep up with and affect the discoveries that shaped the modern world. In Cennini’s day, when he was advising on the grinding of cinnabar, knowledge of electricity was limited to the curious properties of amber when rubbed; by the time Grandi was grinding and boiling sheep’s trotters and filling pigs’ bladders with pigment, electric current could be created at will in batteries, measured, stored and put to work, or released in a dramatic discharge. If the modern world had had to wait for the development of colour manufacture to get going, we might be in the steam age still. The largely untested riches of newly available colour clarified artistic expression and productivity; while the possibilities opened up by the development of scientific instrumentation enhanced receptivity, information gathering and ideas, and broadened the landscape of knowledge.