The Strange and Gruesome Origins of Five Famous Pigments

Feature image: Odilon Redon, The Chariot of Apollo, 1905–16 via The MET

Before paint came in tubes, a color was a raw material with a source, a price, and a supply chain. Painters and their assistants ground stones, crushed insects, dissolved metals and, for a time, pulverized human remains to fill their palettes. Some of the most famous pigments in art history traveled thousands of miles before reaching a workshop, and a few left a trail of poisoned workers and plundered tombs. Five of them, a blue, a green, a yellow, a red, and a brown, carry histories as vivid as the colors themselves.

The deepest blue of the Renaissance began as a stone in the mountains of northeastern Afghanistan. Lapis lazuli from the mines near Sar-i Sang was already traveling to Mesopotamia and Egypt as a precious stone in the third millennium BCE, and painters in Buddhist and Zoroastrian cave temples in Afghanistan were grinding it into paint by the sixth and seventh centuries. When Italian merchants carried the stone west in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the color took its name from the journey. Ultramarinus means beyond the sea.

Turning the stone into pigment was slow and wasteful. Painters followed a recipe set down by Cennino Cennini at the turn of the fifteenth century. The crushed stone was kneaded into a dough of melted wax, resins, and oils, wrapped in cloth and worked in a mild lye until the blue particles sank free of the rest. Each extraction yielded a paler grade. The first was the finest, and Cennini judged the last ones "worse than ashes."

The result was at times as costly as gold. In mid-fifteenth-century Florence, high-grade ultramarine sold for ten to fifteen times the price of azurite, the ordinary blue, and patrons often supplied it separately in their contracts alongside the gold leaf. Painters often saved it for the Virgin's robes and other focal passages. In 1824, a French society offered a prize of 6,000 francs for a synthetic version; Jean-Baptiste Guimet found a method in 1826 and claimed the prize in 1828, the same year Christian Gmelin published his own process, opening the way for the affordable French ultramarine still sold today.

The most poisonous color of the nineteenth century was also one of its most fashionable. In 1775, the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele created a bright green from copper and arsenic, and Scheele's green soon colored wallpaper, fabric, candles, toys, and even sweets. It darkened on contact with sulfur, so in 1814 two paint makers in the German town of Schweinfurt, Wilhelm Sattler and Friedrich Russ, developed a brighter, more stable copper-arsenic compound. The new pigment traveled under many names, among them Schweinfurt green, Vienna green and emerald green.

Victorian homes were soon lined with arsenic. The pigment flaked from wallpaper and dusted the artificial flowers and gowns of the era, and the workers who handled it suffered first. In 1861, Matilda Scheurer, whose surname is spelled Scheueur in some accounts, a nineteen-year-old who dusted artificial leaves with green powder, died of arsenic poisoning, and her autopsy found green stains in her eyes and under her fingernails. Napoleon spent his final exile on St. Helena in rooms decorated in bright green, and the arsenic later found in his hair fed decades of speculation, though more recent research concluded that he died of stomach cancer. From 1867, the Devon Great Consols mine in England refined arsenic on such a scale that it became the largest producer in the world. William Morris, whose father was one of its founding investors, sat on its board from 1871 to 1875.

The same chemistry made the pigment a pesticide. Used against rats in the sewers of Paris, it gained the name Paris green, and by 1867 farmers in Illinois and Indiana were spraying it on potato beetles. Painters including Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat kept it on their palettes for its intensity.

Indian yellow carries the most contested origin story in the painter's box. The pigment reached Europe from India as hard balls called purree, and its luminous, slightly fluorescent yellow glows strongly in sunlight. In India, it was used for centuries, most famously in Mughal and Rajput painting from the late sixteenth century onward, and by the nineteenth century European artists were buying it too.

Its source puzzled European chemists for decades. In 1844, the chemist John Stenhouse guessed that it came from the juice of a tree or plant. Then, on August 27, 1883, T. N. Mukharji of Calcutta published an account in the Journal of the Society of Arts at the request of the botanist Sir Joseph Hooker. Near Monghyr in Bihar, he reported, cows were fed only mango leaves and water, and their urine was collected, dried, and formed into the yellow balls. A story later spread that the practice was banned as cruel in 1908.

The evidence on each part of that story conflicts. Historians have searched the legal record for the 1908 ban and come up empty, and in 2002 the writer Victoria Finlay traveled to Mirzapur and found that the trade had left no trace in local memory. In 2017, a study by Ploeger and Shugar pointed to the liver chemistry that could turn a mango-leaf diet into the pigment's key compound, euxanthic acid, and in 2018 a re-examination of the sample Mukharji had sent to Hooker detected hippuric acid, a marker of urine, supporting his account. The genuine pigment was commercially unavailable by about 1921, and the tubes labeled Indian yellow today hold synthetic blends.

The crimson of British officers' coats and countless Old Master glazes came from a tiny insect living on prickly pear cactus in the Americas. The cochineal insect produces carminic acid, a deep red compound, and peoples of Mesoamerica and the Andes were dyeing with it centuries before the Spanish arrived. In Mexico, it was among the valuables collected as tribute under the Aztecs, and in Peru, textiles dyed with it date to between 600 and 1000 CE.

After the conquest, cochineal became one of Spain's most valuable exports. By the early seventeenth century, between 250,000 and 300,000 pounds of dried insects crossed the Atlantic each year with the treasure fleets, and in the eighteenth century only silver earned more. Its price was quoted on the Amsterdam exchange from 1589. Spain guarded the source closely, banning the export of live insects and routing the trade through Seville and Cadiz, and a 1777 attempt to smuggle insects and cactus pads to Saint-Domingue failed to break the monopoly. The Mexican monopoly held until the War of Independence of 1810 to 1821.

For generations, Europeans argued over what cochineal actually was. Many took the dried grains for seeds or the product of a berry, and in 1704 Antoni van Leeuwenhoek turned his microscope on them and argued, against an Amsterdam merchant, that they were animals. It took about 70,000 insects to make a single pound of dye. In the studio, painters turned it into carmine and crimson lakes prized for their translucent glow, though the color faded and browned in sunlight. Cochineal still colors food and cosmetics today, listed on labels as carmine or E120.

The most gruesome pigment of all began as medicine. The Arabic and Persian mūmiyā first described a medicinal bitumen, and from around the twelfth century European translators confused it with the dark residue of embalmed Egyptian bodies. Apothecaries soon sold ground mummy as a remedy, the trade from Egyptian tombs grew lucrative, and when Egypt banned the export of mummia in the sixteenth century, European dealers began embalming fresh corpses to fake it.

Painters inherited the supply. By 1712, a Paris shop called À la momie sold paints, varnish, and powdered mummy side by side, and in 1797 a London guide to colors praised a brown glaze used by Benjamin West, noting that it "is the flesh of mummy." Ground from Egyptian mummies mixed with white pitch and myrrh, mummy brown was a warm, transparent brown suited to glazes, shadows and flesh, and the Pre-Raphaelites counted it among their favorites. Eugène Delacroix, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Martin Drolling are all thought to have used it. Testing a painting for it means destroying a sample, so few works have been analyzed, and those attributions rest on appearance and documents.

Its end came through squeamishness and scarcity. According to his wife Georgiana, Edward Burne-Jones dismissed the name as a figure of speech until Alma-Tadema described seeing a mummy in a colorman's workshop waiting to be ground, at which point Burne-Jones fetched his only tube and insisted on giving it a decent burial in the garden. By 1915, a London colorman remarked that a single mummy could supply his customers for twenty years. In 1964, Time reported that the London supplier C. Roberson had run out of mummies a few years earlier. The paint sold as mummy brown today is a mixture of kaolin, quartz and iron oxides.

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