Color: A Natural History of the Palette (18 page)

Of course, Harvard’s eminent scholars were also hoping for something more concrete in exchange for their sponsorship dollars. They wanted a share in the archaeological loot that Europeans had been taking out of China by the donkey-load. The Hungarian-British archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein had started the looting when he arrived in 1907 to find that a few years before a monk had accidentally discovered a secret door, that revealed a secret library room, full of ancient documents. Stein took about eight thousand of them—everything from Buddhist sutras to early Eastern Christian writings to a timelessly useful model letter to send to your host apologizing for drunken behavior the night before. He was closely followed by the polyglot Frenchman Paul Pelliot, some Russians and a number of Japanese explorers, who seemed to be working for a mysterious cult. They all took souvenirs, which nowadays are in the proud possession of various national museums, but none of them actually gouged paintings out of the walls of Dunhuang.

Langdon Warner did. He cut out several paintings. Partly because that was the only way he knew to collect pigment samples. Partly because he was shocked at how a few years before a band of White Russian soldiers had covered the caves with graffiti, and he had the idea of saving art from vandals by becoming a vandal himself. But most of all he took the murals because he was determined that he had not gone all that way “Plodding beside my cart these weary months” to fail in his mission.

Not only did he cut out those ugly square holes, but—and the Chinese find this the hardest to forgive—just as he left Dunhuang he caught sight of an exquisite kneeling Bodhisattva. He was so taken by its beauty that he took it too, wrapping it up in blankets, sheepskin breeches and his undergarments. “If I lacked for underwear and socks on the return journey my heart was kept warm by the thought of the service which my things were performing when they kept that fresh smooth skin and those crumbling pigments from harm,” he wrote in his account of the journey.
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The Bodhisattva is, of course, the missing attendant in cave 16, and the gap where it used to kneel is pointed out to every tour group today to explain why China considers that the nation’s “heart was broken” (as an inscription in Chinese characters at Dunhuang asserts) when the foreign archaeologists took its art in order to learn more about the colors.

WHITER SHADES OF PALE

Rutherford Gettens, chief chemist at the Fogg Museum when Warner’s stolen Bodhisattva arrived, called lead white “the most important pigment in the history of Western painting” and was thrilled to find it lying “thickly” on the precious sculpture.
¹⁷
He was grateful to it—as many art historians are grateful—because x-radiography of old paintings depends on the artist’s generous use of lead. X rays are electromagnetic waves, just like light except they have a much smaller frequency than light and so can pass through more objects.
¹⁸
Lead, however, is dense, so it shows up in x-radiographs much more than, say, ochre. So, for example, in
The Death of Actaeon
by the sixteenth-century Venetian artist Titian, the painting shows Diana getting her terrible revenge on a hunter whom she has caught spying on her while she was naked. She transforms Actaeon into a stag, at which point the hunter becomes the hunted. With the benefit of x-radiography we can see that Titian had some problems with painting the poor hunter. In trying to portray that critical moment of the man changing form, the artist himself made many changes to the form of his painting, and there is a swirl of painting and overpainting in white lead over Actaeon’s area of the canvas, which presumably only stopped when Titian was satisfied with the effect of a no doubt extremely penitent peeping Tom being mauled by his own dogs.
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As Michael Skalka at the National Gallery of Art in Washington explained, conservators today rarely see a painting that is five hundred years old that hasn’t been damaged or had some restoration performed on it. “People who worked on paintings in the past had very little training—and there was no code of ethics to give them rules about the right things to do,” he said. They felt they had the right to do anything—scrub the paint, change garments or hat styles—which is very different from current practice, where conservators work on securing and preserving the original paints and supports, without adding anything new of their own. With techniques like x-radiography, art experts now have a “road map” of the past of a painting. For example, a sixteenth-century painting in the National Gallery collection titled
The Feast of the Gods
has been worked on by three artists. It was painted by Bellini and then altered by the court artist Dosso Dossi, and later by Titian, who added a dramatic mountain landscape to the left of the canvas, covering Bellini’s original band of trees. It is possible to see many of these stages of the painting’s development by looking at the x-radiographs, as well as making cross-sections and doing pigment analysis. “It’s like a geology of layers,” Skalka said, “and you need to use science to excavate it.”

It is undeniably useful for conservators, but if white lead did so much damage, why did so many artists use it? Certainly not to make it easier on future art historians. The simple answer is that there was very little else. In fact, in Europe at least, there was nothing else very promising in the white line for watercolors until the 1780s—and nothing to replace white lead in oils until just before World War I when titanium paint was invented.
²⁰

There was bone white (from burned lamb bones) but artists found it gritty and gray. Then there were the “shell” paints, made of seashells, eggshells, oysters, chalk
²¹
and even pearls. The Japanese and Chinese liked these whites, and they can be found on many woodblocks and paintings, even though they often believed the best white was the paper, unpainted. European artists often used chalky whites on frescos. In the early nineteenth century the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy travelled to Italy to examine the wall paintings at Pompeii. Most of the visitors (who had been including Pompeii on their Grand Tour of Europe since the site was opened in 1748) were full of wonder at the subject matter of the frescos that covered the walls of almost every wealthy home in that doomed Roman town. They showed beautiful objects, languorous gods, luscious gardens, and plenty of erotica. But Davy was more interested in the pigments they used, and he was disappointed to find that all the whites were made of chalk, not lead, even though “we know from Theophrastus, Vitruvius and Pliny that [lead] was a popular color.” But the ancients had been right in their choices: chalks and limes didn’t alter, and unlike lead white they could even be used safely with yellow orpiment. Those were the advantages. The disadvantages were that chalk whites look very transparent—anemic even—in oils, and don’t have the texture and shine of lead.
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In 1780 two Frenchmen started trying to find a good white that did not have corruption at its heart. Monsieur Courtois was a science demonstrator at the Academy of Dijon and Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau was a magistrate who would later be better known as one of France’s most innovative chemists. A spirit of social activism was raging through Europe in the wake of America’s Declaration of Independence (and nine years later both men would support the French Revolution, with Guyton de Morveau rapidly dropping his “de Morveau”) and this activism extended into paint. Lead white was made by the poor and it poisoned the poor. Was it not time to find an alternative?

They experimented for two years. The newly discovered element barium, when combined with sulphur (to make barium sulphate), made a non-poisonous paint that was reasonably permanent; indeed in 1924 it would be given the name “
blanc fixe
.” But barium was rare, and artists didn’t much like it as an oil paint as it was too transparent. So they turned to zinc oxide, a substance that the Greeks had used as an antiseptic. The first findings were promising: artists pronounced the color good and the absorption excellent. But the issue was cash: lead paint cost less than two francs a pound; zinc white was four times this amount. Nobody wanted to buy it.

For the two scientists this was the end of the story; as far as they were concerned their plan had failed. Courtois turned to saltpeter production and Guyton de Morveau to proving that all metals gained weight after heating—and perhaps they forgot about the joys of inventing paint. But not everybody did, and one of the people who remembered was probably Courtois’s own son. Bernard Courtois would grow up to become a great scientist. Like his father he would be best remembered for his own experiments with white powder, although his would be morphine. But in 1811 he also discovered his own paint: iodine scarlet. And when he found it, he surely cast his mind back to the days when he was a little boy of six, playing among the smells and solutions as his father and namesake stood above him, testing out paints.

Zinc white did have a future, if only Guyton de Morveau and Courtois could have known it. By 1834, Winsor & Newton were selling it as a watercolor, which they called “Chinese White,” even though they acknowledged
²³
it had nothing to do with China. The new paint met with considerable opposition. In 1837 a chemist called G. H. Bachhoffner criticized Chinese White, suggesting it was no more stable than lead white, and recommending his own “Flemish White” instead. Messrs. Winsor & Newton were furious and wrote an open letter to Bachhoffner refuting his claims and revealing some experiments of their own.

“Acting on a sense of duty,” they had mixed Flemish White with hydrosulphuret of ammonia and saw that it immediately blackened—just like the damage to the paintings I had seen on the cave walls of Dunhuang. “It exhibited the usual signs of being a salt of lead,” they wrote with barely concealed triumph, concluding that: “The extracts from your own work save us the trouble of remarking on the extreme impropriety of offering to the artist a pigment so destructive.”

From its days in the alchemists’ laboratories before the element was isolated, zinc oxide had been given many wonderful names, including “tutty” (from the Persian word “
dud
” for smoke), “zinc flowers,” “philosopher’s wool” and blutenweiss or “blood white.”
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Each name gives a different clue to the story of zinc oxide. The smoke refers to its genesis in the coal-fired ovens of brass furnaces and the flowers and wool describe the way in which it forms fluffily in the upper chamber of the oven. The blood white reference is the oddest of them all, a reminder of how this white paint starts off as red, having been colored in the ground by manganese.
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WHITE HOUSES

Today in England and Wales, lead white paint is only allowed on Grades I and II star listed houses—and even then it can only be on the outside. In the past, this paint was chosen because it was long lasting; the cheaper lime whites had to be repainted every year. This did have some advantages. In Hong Kong in the early 1900s lime washing was believed to be the best precaution against the plague, and the police would regularly raid the colony’s slum houses to make sure they were white enough.

The British paint company Farrow & Ball has made its name selling housepaints in historical hues. It has plenty of enticing colors like “Sudbury Yellow” and “Chartwell Green” (modelled on Winston Churchill’s favorite bench), and yet its most popular range is off-white—colors like “String,” “Pointing” and “Slipper Satin,” with “Dead Salmon” coming in fairly close behind (although that one is so “off” that it’s almost brown).

The company started as a small-scale project mixing paints for National Trust houses that needed to be redecorated. But within a few years it had become an international business: thousands of people, it seemed, wanted the colors in their sitting rooms to be just like the ones in British stately homes. Mostly people buy off the shelves, but some even send in specific color requests. What was oddest? I wondered, when I visited the company’s factory in Dorset. There were quite a few odd ones, admitted company director Tom Helme. He showed me a sample he had received a few days before. It was a minuscule dot of red, scarcely more than a millimeter across, which had been chipped out of a stately wall. “We’ve got a spectrometer for measuring color,” Helme said. “So we’ll be able to match it.”

They do not use the same ingredients that a Georgian decorator would have mixed—many of those colors are now illegal (including lead white, and chrome-based colors), and others, like Prussian blue, are simply unstable. Instead, Farrow & Ball mix other pigments (some ochres, some synthetic colors) to produce the same visual effect. As Helme pointed out: “Nowadays people want the color on their walls to stay constant. In the past, people knew it would change quickly, and they were resigned to it.”

The company is proud of its wonderful and eccentric paint names. “String” was originally called “Straw Left out in the Rain” and was designed by the 1930s paint genius John Fowler, who used both words and colors with enthusiasm. “Clunch” is named from the East Anglian slang for a hard chalk building block while “Blackened” is actually another off-white—in which soot is used to make a pigment with a silver tinge.

As for “Dead Salmon,” the name has nothing to do with death at all. It was inspired by an invoice for decorating a house in 1850: “It just means a dead flat finish,” Helme said. When people used lead paint it was sometimes too shiny, so they would “flatten” or “deaden” it with turpentine to make it look more matte. When he first proposed the name, the people from the National Trust were firm. “They said we can’t allow you that one, Tom, nobody would buy it.” But it was launched anyway, and became a big seller.

In the past ten years there has been a big increase in nostalgia for old paints in Britain—and particularly for one paint that the trade had almost discounted. “By the 1970s we had really forgotten how to use lime plaster,” Helme remembered. “And then people began to say, ‘Hey, if you want walls to breathe you’d better use this stuff,’ and they’re using it more and more often.”