palette

Discover proven methods for storing oil paint to extend its shelf life and maintain optimal quality. Learn practical tips and techniques.

Explore how Joaquín Sorolla's color technique in Visions of Spain revolutionized the use of light and color to depict the Spanish landscape and culture. A deep dive into his artistic vision.

Explore the use of pigments in Van Gogh's art, including his revolutionary techniques and the potential risks associated with his use of toxic materials. Discover the ways in which scientists have analyzed and studied the pigments used in his iconic paintings.

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, known as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired worldwide for its form, composition, and visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of the human form. This article discusses his painting materials, such as supports, grounds, imprimatura, binders, pigments, and his use of glass powder.

Gilbert Charles Stuart (born Stewart) (December 3, 1755–July 9, 1828) was an American painter from Rhode Island. According to evidence from various sources, his palette mainly consisted of the colors described in this article. All of the pigments on Stuart’s palette have been identified in literature and studies of his paintings. Unfortunately, “Antwerp blue” is an imprecise term, and we cannot determine precisely what it meant in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669) was a Dutch painter and etcher. He is considered one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art history and the most important in Dutch history. The range of colors Rembrandt employed falls firmly within the mainstream of painting practice in Holland in the seventeenth century. His palette is entirely made up of widely available pigments and, by that time, well understood in their qualities and drawbacks. Seventeenth-century Holland was a center for manufacturing pigments on an industrial scale. The technologies required had evolved enough to remove the uncertainties in preparing standard products.

The palette is one of the most essential tools in the history of oil painting, and its effect is one of the most minor studied aspects in art history. Setting the palette has a significant history; its development is relatively easy to trace in pictures of artists at work. The use of a set, limited palette, a portable surface upon which colors are arranged according to their tonal value, and its implications in painting is the subject of a lecture by George O’Hanlon, Technical Director of Natural Pigments. The first part of the lecture is featured in this article.

Besides an artist's notes or treatises on painting of the period, the systematic arrangement of separate colors and mixtures on the palette, which the painter prepared before he began his work, can be used to study the artist's painting procedures. Such palettes can be found in portraits or self-portraits, where the palette is held in hand with the rows of colors and tints visible.

For some years, I have been studying the palettes of medieval and Renaissance painters and, with many of the same pigments available to me, have started to reproduce their palettes, many of which are depicted in portraits and self-portraits described in painting treatises. This work has led me to more clearly see the tonal and color arrangements in the work of the old masters, which I will be publishing at Natural Pigments.

Jacques Maroger claims that Rubens limited his colors to little more than brown, black, white, and red. He states, “But from a distance, one has the illusion of perceiving blues, greens, violets... The greatest colorists have always obtained the maximum brilliance and vibration with a minimum of colors.” We examine the palette Rubens used throughout his career in the 17th century.