Foundations/Colour/The Palette

The Palette

Every colour is a substance before it is a value. Press one and you get the rock it was ground from, the process somebody worked out to make it, what it cost them, and the numbers.

55 colours·54 photographs·63 films·90 verified sources

What you are looking at

There is no blue earth. There is no good green earth either. Red, yellow, brown and black are lying in the ground on every continent, which is why the oldest paintings in the world are those four colours and nothing else. Everything beyond them had to be mined at a gemstone's price, fermented out of a plant, boiled out of an animal, or invented, and the sequence in which those became possible is most of the history of what pictures could look like.

So the wall below is ordered oldest first by default. Read it that way and it is a timeline: a hundred thousand years of ochre, one manufactured blue in Egypt, a long middle of ground rock and crushed insects moving along trade routes, and then 1706, when a Berlin dye-maker contaminated a batch and got Prussian blue, after which almost everything is a factory. 28 of these 55 are manufactured, and nearly all of those arrived in the last three hundred years.

Switch the order to hue and the same swatches become a spectrum and the history disappears. Both orderings are honest. Which one you choose is an argument about what a colour is.

The two labels on the wall

Toxic · 16 of them: Arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium. Not a historical curiosity, people making these died of them, in numbers, and everybody involved knew.
Fades · 7 of them: Marked where the colour leaves. Any painting or textile made with one of these is already less than it was, and a good deal of what we take for the taste of a period is just the surviving half of a mixture.

55/55

A hundred thousand years of earth, then chemistry.

100k BCRed ochre#913831 · PR102The oldest colour humans used, the oldest evidence of symbolic thought, and still the cheapest pigment you can buy.40k BCYellow ochre#CC7722 · PY43The dull, free, indispensable yellow: in every cave painting, every flesh tone, and every convincing landscape ever painted.30k BCSienna#8A3324 · PBr7An iron earth with manganese in it, and the single most useful brown in painting because it is transparent where other browns are mud.30k BCUmber#635147 · PBr7An iron earth with a lot of manganese, which makes it the fastest-drying pigment there is, and the cause of a great many cracked paintings.30k BCLamp black#211F1E · PBk7Collected soot. The oldest manufactured pigment, the base of Indian ink and Chinese ink, and still the black in your printer and your tyres.20k BCChalk#EDE8DA · PW18Crushed marine microfossils. Useless as a white in oil and indispensable as everything underneath it.7k BCToxicVermilion#E34234 · PR106The brightest red available for four thousand years, and it is mercury sulfide, so a great deal of it was made by people it was killing.4k BCIndigo#00416A · NB1 / PB66The blue that is green in the vat, yellow in the bucket, and only becomes blue in the air, and the one Britain ran an empire on.4k BCToxicMalachite#45886AThe green half of the same rock that gives azurite, ground from a banded stone and used as eye paint before it was ever used as paint.3k BCEgyptian blue#1034A6 · PB31The first colour humans ever manufactured, invented because the earth does not make blue.3k BCToxicOrpiment#EFC81AA brilliant golden yellow that is arsenic sulfide, was believed to contain actual gold, and cannot be used next to lead or copper without destroying both.2k BCGold leaf#D4AF37Beaten to a ten-thousandth of a millimetre, thin enough that a gram covers half a square metre, and thin enough to eat.2k BCAzurite#2C6BA0 · PB30The blue most old paintings are actually made of, because it was the one a normal person could afford.2k BCToxicRealgar#D9381EOrpiment's orange twin, equally poisonous, and it slowly disintegrates into orange powder under light.2k BCFadesTurmeric#E1AD01The yellow in your kitchen, your wedding, your mustard and your pH indicator, and it will not survive a week on a windowsill.2k BCTyrian purple#66023CSqueezed out of the glands of sea snails at roughly ten thousand snails per gram, and restricted by Roman law to the emperor's own cloak.2k BCFadesSaffron#F4C430The most expensive substance on earth by weight, and it takes about a hundred and fifty thousand flowers to make a kilogram.1k BCFadesMadder lake#A02A3C · NR9A dye from a root, precipitated onto chalk to turn it into a paint, the cool crimson that Turner could not stop using and that fades if you look at it too long.1k BCLac#9E3039The Indian insect red that gave the English language the word 'lake' and gave furniture its shellac, from the same bug.1k BCToxicNaples yellow#FADA5E · PY41The soft, slightly pink, opaque yellow of eighteenth-century flesh and sky. One of the oldest synthetic pigments, and named after a volcano it has nothing to do with.1k BCBone black#241F1C · PBk9Charred bone. Warmer and browner than soot black, and the only black most painters will use.1k BCSilver leaf#C4C6C8Cheaper than gold, brighter than gold, and it turns black, which is why almost every historical silver surface you have seen is now a dark stain.1000 BCCarmine#960018 · NR4Seventy thousand insects to the pound, the second most valuable thing Spain took out of the Americas after silver, and it is in your yoghurt.500 BCHan purple#5218FAA synthetic barium copper silicate made in China two and a half thousand years ago, and it does something at low temperature that no other pigment does.400 BCSepia#704214Cuttlefish ink, and the reason every old photograph in the world is brown.350 BCToxicLead white#F3F1E7 · PW1The most important pigment in the history of European painting, made by corroding lead over vinegar and dung for three months, and it poisoned everyone involved for two thousand years.300 BCToxicRed lead#E25822 · PR105The orange-red of illuminated manuscripts and of every rusting bridge until the 1970s, and the reason the word 'miniature' exists.300 BCToxicVerdigris#43B3AECopper corroded with vinegar. The brightest green available for fifteen hundred years, and it eats the paper it is painted on.100 BCTerre verte#6E7F52 · PG23A weak, dull, grey-green earth, and the reason every saint in a medieval panel has a slightly green face.550Ultramarine#120A8F · PB29Ground out of a gemstone from a single Afghan valley, and for eight hundred years the most expensive substance in a European painter's studio.700ToxicGamboge#E49B0FTree sap tapped like rubber, used to dye Buddhist monks' robes, and a laxative strong enough to be dangerous.800Maya blue#73C2FBA plant dye locked inside a clay so it cannot fade, the only ancient blue that survives being buried in a tropical jungle.1200FadesSap green#507D2ABoiled buckthorn berries, stored in a pig's bladder, and gone within a generation of being painted.1400FadesBistre#3D2B1FBoiled soot from a wood fire: the drawing ink of Rembrandt and Claude, and it fades to nothing given a window.1450Indian yellow#E3A857Balls of dried urine from cattle fed only mango leaves, probably. The supply was suppressed around 1908 and nobody fully documented it before it went.1550Mummy brown#6B4A35Made from ground-up Egyptian mummies (human and animal) and sold in London art shops until about 1964, when the supplier ran out of mummies.1706Prussian blue#003153 · PB27The first modern synthetic pigment, made by accident in a Berlin dye works, and the reason The Great Wave is blue.1775ToxicScheele's green#6EA24AThe first cheap bright green, made of arsenic, and Victorian Britain put it on the walls, in the dresses, on the sweets and in the toys.1790Payne's grey#536878Not a pigment but a recipe: a blue-black mixed instead of used, named after a watercolourist, and the best argument for never using black.1802ToxicCobalt blue#0047AB · PB28The clean, cool, slightly dull blue that every glaze and every Impressionist sky is made of.1805ToxicCerulean blue#1D6FB8 · PB35The sky blue that stays blue under artificial light, which is why it was invented for painters working indoors.1809ToxicChrome yellow#FFB300 · PY34The loudest yellow of the nineteenth century, the colour of Van Gogh's sunflowers, and it is going brown while you watch.1814ToxicEmerald green#4DB56ABrighter and more stable than Scheele's green, more poisonous than Scheele's green, and sold simultaneously as artists' paint and as rat poison.1817ToxicCadmium yellow#FFF600 · PY35The first brilliant yellow that does not fade, does not blacken and does not go brown, it only poisons the water supply.1838Viridian#40826D · PG18The first bright green that will not poison anybody: cool, transparent, permanent, and it ended the arsenic era in a single generation.1856Mauveine#7F3F98An eighteen-year-old failed to synthesise a malaria drug, got a purple sludge instead, and accidentally started the chemical industry.1859Magenta#FF00FFA colour that does not exist in the spectrum. Your brain makes it up when red and blue arrive together and no green does.1868Alizarin crimson#E32636 · PR83The first natural dye ever synthesised, which is why madder farming died, and it still is not lightfast enough, which nobody likes admitting.1910ToxicCadmium red#E30022 · PR108The first bright red that is neither poisonous mercury nor a fading plant, and it is cadmium, so it is poisonous too.1916Titanium white#FAFAF6 · PW6The whitest white there is, non-toxic, and now so ubiquitous that it is in your toothpaste, your paper, your sunscreen and most of the paint on earth.1935Phthalo blue#000F89 · PB15Found as a blue crust in a failed industrial batch, and now the strongest blue anybody has. One part in a thousand is still visibly blue.1938Phthalo green#123524 · PG7Phthalo blue with chlorine bolted on: the strongest, darkest, coldest green available, and the one every painter warns beginners about.1957International Klein Blue#002FA7Not a new pigment: a new binder, invented so that dry ultramarine could keep its full intensity on a canvas.2009YInMn blue#2E5090 · PB86The first genuinely new inorganic blue in two centuries, found in 2009 by a graduate student who pulled the wrong thing out of a furnace.2014Vantablack#000000Not a pigment at all: a forest of carbon nanotubes that light falls into and does not come back out of, absorbing about 99.96% of what hits it.

Read the arguments

Colour, written down

Wheels and models, value against hue, contrast ratios, building a palette from a photograph, and why your screen and your printer will never agree.

How this page knows what it says

Every outside link, every film and every photograph on these 55 pages was resolved against the source that owns it before it published, Wikipedia's API for the articles, Commons for who photographed what and under which licence, YouTube's own endpoint for whether a film still exists and what it is really called.

No title, credit or licence on any colour page was typed by a person guessing. A link that stops resolving fails the check rather than rotting quietly, and a picture that comes back NonCommercial or NoDerivatives is dropped, because this site sells something and resizes everything.

90/90 links live·63/63 films live·checked 2026-09-12