COLOUR THEORY
BELOW Unknown
artist, Still Life with
Pears and Cherries,
oil on panel,
23x30cm
“Warm and cool
were skilfully
described here
by playing off fully
chromatic earth
colours against
neutral variations
made by mixing
with Ivory Black.
The purples were
variations of Indian
Red mixed with
black and white.”
Egyptian art, red and yellow clays, white chalks and black
carbons were the primary colours in most images. Such
bright colours as “Egyptian Blue” (a bright blue similar to
Cerulean Blue in colour) or Malachite Green (made from
the ground stone Malachite) were added as high notes of
decorative colour in frescoes and illustrated documents.
Even so, the earth colours were the binding element of
the whole image.
The Greeks and Romans of the classical world inherited
the craft of making colours of all kinds from the Egyptians
and Ancient Near Eastern cultures. A part of this
transmitted craft was the continued tradition of using the
earth colours as the basis of art making and decoration.
A development of the classical Greco Roman world that
would bear fruit for many centuries to come, even to this
day, is the use of the earth colours in painting the
naturalistic colours of portraits and landscapes and
coloured statues. A naturalism and observational realism
unseen in the other cultures of the ancient world
flourished in Greece and Rome from the 4th century
BC to the 5th century AD.
Classical Greek sculptures, showing the idealised form
of the gods, goddesses and athletes, were typically
painted in naturalistic colours, with earth colours used
to paint the colours of skin and hair, and bright colours
added for colourful clothing. The Romans continued this
practice in their beautiful frescoes and portraits. The
frescoes of Pompeii depicted remarkably naturalistic
figures, landscapes and still life that depend on the earthpalette for their basic form, design, shading and details.
The 1st century AD “Fayum” portraits of Roman citizens
living in the province of Egypt utilised earth palette
pigments mixed in heated wax – encaustic – and applied
quickly to small wooden panels. Bright colours and gilding
were added to these paintings as embellishments, though
the flesh colours, drawing and tonality were dependent on
the earth palette. These lovely funerary portraits prefigured
the elegant naturalism of 16th-century Italian portraits.
The ancient tradition of the earth palette as a basis for
describing form, structure, tonality and design continued
in Western painting history through the Renaissance and
Baroque eras, and into the 19th and 20th centuries.
Ideally suited for describing most things in nature, the use
of the earth palette was taught to oil painters as a primary
tool in their paint box. From portrait painters such as the
Spanish Baroque master Diego Velázquez to the English
Romantic landscape painters such as John Constable to
19th-century figure painters like Gustave Courbet, the
earth palette provided the foundation of the visual
language of form, depth and naturalistic colour.
The colours of the bright “prismatic palette”, identified
by American painter Frank DuMond, worked hand-in-hand
with the earth palette to additionally provide an enormous
array of subtle colour shifts, tones, mixtures and tints.
Most Impressionist painters included the earth palette in
their repertoire of atmospheric mixtures, with the ancient
earth palette list, including black, providing their basis of
training and painting practice.