Artists

MASTERCLASSIn the 18th century, the beginnings of the IndustrialRevolution saw the development of a new world ofartists’ colours, materials and palettes of colours.Progress in the chemical and petroleum industrieswould, over the next century, not only produce cheapersubstitutes for older expensive and fragile colours, butalso a host of new hues.Classic palettes of eight or 10 colours continued tobe the basis of painting practice, but new colours suchas Cadmiums, Alizurans and Phthalos were added andexperimented with. By the middle of the 19th centuryChromium Green, Cadmium Yellow, Viridian, CeruleanBlue, Cobalt Blue and many others becameeconomically and readily available as artists’ paints.Some painters added so many new colours to theirpalettes that as many as 40 tube colours crowded theirmixing surfaces.Eugène Delacroix is one such artist who attemptedto match colours in nature directly with new tubecolours. Exotic pigments like Mummy (made fromground Egyptian mummy wrappings) and asphaltum(made from petroleum and tar) came and went withfashion. An important factor in this development wasthe prevalence of art supply stores by the end of the19th century, which began to replace the making ofartists’ materials. In many ways, the concept of the‘lost secrets of the Old Masters’ derives as much fromthis switch from the studio to the store as anythingelse. The recipes and practices that were part of theworkshop system were replaced by more standardisedpractices in the art academies, and so the myths andmisunderstandings of the practices of earlier mastersbecame part of the romance of art.English company Winsor & Newton was at theforefront of developing new materials for artists thatwere consistent in their high quality and permanence.Then, in 1839, the French scientist and man ofletters Michel-Eugène Chevreul wrote the simultaneouscontrast of colours based on his studies of colourcontrast at the Royal Gobelins tapestry works.Chevruel observed that spots of colour could opticallymix to provide illusions of other more subtle colours.For painters, especially landscape artists, this openedup a world of possibility when it came to capturing theeffect of different colours. This new approach to both``````the painting of atmosphere and colour mixing createdcomplex observational illusions in the works of theFrench painters Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, and others,that would not have been possible without the writingsof Chevruel.Curiously, it is from this time that we see new mythsand misunderstandings enter the canon of colourmixing and practice. Aristotle suggested that absoluteblack and white were the true absence of colour, andso some Impressionist painters recommended to theirstudents that all blacks should be mixed fromcomplements. Removing black from the palettes of artstudents became common. The same was true ofwhite. All light colours are tinted by the colour of theatmosphere and light sources, so in reality, there wasno such thing as ‘pure white’.The Post-Impressionist painter Georges Seuratutilised a pure, almost abstract, version of the newconcepts of colour mixing by limiting his palette to red,yellow and blue. As many painters became moreinterested in the pure properties of colour and colourexpression, the idea of colour itself as a subject tookroot. Post Impressionist, Fauvist and Modernistpainters explored as many avenues of colourexpression as there were individual painters.Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin embodied excitementamong painters for the new colour possibilities.``````LEFTA palette very similar tothat used by Rubens wasused to create this exampleof a 17th-century Dutchlandscape: Black, LeadWhite, Red Oxide, Terra Vertand Lapis Glaze``````ABOVEImpressionism caused anexplosion in the modernworld of colour; AdolpheBorie, Girl, 1890s, oil,51x40cm``````>Artists & Illustrators 7170 Al Gury.indd 71 10/06/2016 14:28