Figure 2. William Holman Hunt sculpting a
model of Christ's head to aid him in the
painting <if The Light of the World, ca.
1900.
Figure 3. William Holman Hunt, The
Finding of the Saviour in the Temple,
1854-1860. Courtesy of the Birmingham
Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham,
England.Figure 4. Johl1 Ballantyne, William Hol
man Hunt in his Studio Working on a
Version of "The Finding of the Saviour
in the Temple." Courtesy of the Natiolwl
Portrait Gallery, London.the product, a salesman motivated by the need fo r profit and immediate short
term customer satisfaction rather than long-term stability.The evolution of the art nurket also brought with it an expansion of materials
available fo r sale, aided by advances in scientific fields that greatly expanded
the range of available pigments and dyestuffs. The artist's palette roughly dou
bled in the nineteenth century, each decade bringing new colors, starting
with cobalt blue and lemon yellow. In the early part of the century, iodine
scarlet, chrome yellow, and emerald green were introduced; and, in the 1820s,
synthetic ultramarine became available. Zinc oxide (Chinese white) and vi
ridian came in the 1830s, and cadmium yellow and orange fo llowed in the
1840s. The 1850s brought the aniline dyes, brilliantly colored and wildly
impermanent coal-tar derivatives. The 1860s saw the dawn of aureolin yellow,
chromium oxide green, synthetic alizarin, manganese violet, cerulean blue,
and so on (1). The colors produced by these new pigments were often daz
zling, but also alarmingly unstable.The evolution of artistic practices paralleled that of artists' materials, spurred
by recent technological advances. The proliferation of the hobby of water
color painting among fashionable English ladies and gentlemen dates directly
from the invention of watercolor paints in handy dry-cake fo rm by Reeves
in 1766. The explosion of thick impasto and sculpted paint at mid-century
follows the introduction of the flexible palette knife and the metal-ferruled
flat brush. Perhaps the greatest revolution came in the 1840s in the fo rm of
premixed oil colors in collapsible tin tubes (2). Prior to this, outdoor painting
was hampered by the need to transport messy, runny oil paints in animal
bladders, which were both fragile and awkward to carry (Fig. 6).John Ruskin
may have had good reason to call fo r the direct study of nature by artists, but
the painter could not be freed from his studio until the studio could be
brought outside with him.Commercial tube paints required uniform consistency and pleasing handling
properties, not to mention a good shelf-life, resulting in the introduction of
all manner of fillers to the basic oil paint. Along with the pigment and binder
were added a host of driers, stearates, waxes, petroleum jelly, preservatives, and
extenders, added at best to improve handling, tone, and gloss and at worst
merely to bring down the wholesale price of the product by reducing the
amount of actual pigment used. With no regulatory authorities to ensure
purity, no concept of consumers rights, and indeed little awareness of the
detractions of mass production, the quality of artists' materials plummeted.Simultaneously, a lust fo r profit led to the substitution of cheaper materials
fo r pure pigments throughout the art market. Often, the colors named on
labels were approximate descriptions, not guarantees, of the paint color. So
widespread was this adulteration that in 1886 H. C. Standage published a
popular handbook called The Artists ' Manual of Pigments, which rated each
pigment by artistic qualities, conditions of permanency and nonpermanency,
and general adulterations, as well as providing general remarks and results
from tests fo r purity and the nature of adulterants (3). For instance, Standage
warned of false ceruleans made from the following: artificial ultramarine and
Naples yellow; cheap Naples yellows bulked out with yellow ochres; yellow
ochres adulterated with china and china clay; turmeric, Indian yellow, and
aniline dyes, and so on; the chain of adulteration seemingly endless. Expensive
madder lakes, he wrote, "are often adulterated with brick dust, red ochre, red
sand, clay, mahogany sawdust, log wood, sandal and Japan wood, and bran;
whilst the French madders have gum, sugar, salts, and other soluble bodies, as
likewise lac, cochineal, and carthamus or safHower" (4). Corruption extended
to drying oils and varnishes as well as pigments, and to raw as well as processed
materials.This is the dragon Hunt set out to slay, and the crusade spanned the last fifty
years of his life, although widespread reforms were not seen until our own
century. He began to write articles and to lecture in public. He correspondedKatz 159