Today’s post is about paint colors — with the growth of modern chemistry (particularly Germany in the 1800s and beyond), making artificial pigments of various hues has been relatively easy. But it was not always so. Purple of course was the most famously sought-after hue, but I am featuring two others here: ultramarine (as used in Vermeer’s _Girl with a Pearl Earring_, ca. 1665) and a Ragamala Rajput painting from northern India about 1700 dominated by a color Europeans called “Indian Yellow”.
Both were rare and highly valued in European history. Ultramarine means “beyond the sea” and came from the lapis lazuli stone, which came from the mountains of northern Afghanistan. It was more valuable than gold: Vermeer ran into debt partly because he used so much of it in his paintings.
“Indian Yellow” became popular in 17th-century Dutch paintings as well. Trading ships coming to Holland from India brought the pigment, which came in the shape of yellowish-green balls with a bright yellow center that smelled of urine. The Dutch had no idea what the pigment was made of, but a hypothesis explored by a 19th-century museum curator named T.N. Mukharji was that it did indeed come from urine. It was the precipitate of pee from cows that had been fed only on mango leaves.
It turns out feeding cows only mango leaves makes them ill, and India’s governmet made the practice effectively illegal by banning the making of “Indian Yellow” by the end of the 19th century.
Source(s): _The Paris Review_, “True Blue”, Ravi Mangle, June 8, 2015. _The Public Domain Review_ @publicdomainrev, Philip Ball, “Primary Sources: a Natural History of the Artist’s Palette”.
