The Palette/yellow/Taken from an animal
Indian yellow
Balls of dried urine from cattle fed only mango leaves, probably. The supply was suppressed around 1908 and nobody fully documented it before it went.
Also called piuri · purree · gogili · peori
- Hex
- #E3A857
- RGB
- 227, 168, 87
- First used
- By the 15th century in India; in Europe from the 1780s
- From
- Monghyr (Munger), Bihar, India
What it is
Magnesium and calcium salts of euxanthic acid, a compound the animal produces from mango-leaf metabolites.
How it is made
The account that reached Europe, and the one usually repeated, is this: cattle in a specific area of Bihar were fed a diet of mango leaves and water; their urine was collected, heated to concentrate it, strained, and the sediment rolled into balls and dried over a fire. The balls arrived in London smelling strongly and were ground into a transparent golden pigment.
The evidence for that account is one letter. In 1883 T. N. Mukharji of Calcutta was asked by the India Museum to find out where the stuff came from, went to Monghyr, watched the process and wrote it up. That single report is the basis for almost everything written about this pigment for the next century, which is a thin evidentiary base for a story told as confidently as it usually is.
Scientific analysis confirms euxanthic acid and a urine origin, so the broad story holds. The details (whether the mango-leaf diet was as restricted as claimed, whether the cattle were mistreated, what exactly caused production to end) are much less certain than the Victorian sources imply.
Indian yellow, Yellow-colored pigment. Wikipedia's description, not ours.
The history
The pigment was used in Indian painting, particularly Rajput and Pahari work, long before it reached Europe, and the golden yellow of those paintings is one of the most recognisable colours in art. In Europe from the late eighteenth century it was prized for a transparent gold-yellow that nothing else provided.
Production is generally said to have ended around 1908, and the usual reason given is legislation on animal cruelty. That explanation has been questioned: there is no clear surviving record of a specific ban, and it may simply have been undercut by cheap synthetic yellows in the same years that killed madder and indigo. The cruelty story is repeated far more confidently than the evidence supports, and it is worth holding it as the traditional account rather than as established fact.
Every tube sold as 'Indian yellow' today is a synthetic substitute, usually a nickel azo or a diarylide, matched to the colour and not remotely the same material. The genuine article exists only in old paintings and a few museum samples.
Where it is used
Rajput and Pahari miniature painting, European watercolour and oil from the 1780s, and glazes wherever a warm transparent golden yellow was wanted.
The Indian painting use is the one worth studying. A transparent yellow glazed over an opaque one, or over white, gives a glow that no single opaque yellow achieves, and that layered-warmth technique is what makes those pictures feel lit from inside. It is directly applicable to anything with layers: print, screen, or a photograph's grade.
Go and look at it
Pahari and Rajput miniatures
V&A, London; National Museum, New Delhi; Met, New York
The golden ground and the glow in the skies. Often glazed over an opaque base.
Winsor & Newton's archive samples
London
Original balls of the pigment survive in the company archive. The film below opens the box.
How it behaves
- Made of
- Magnesium and calcium salts of euxanthic acid, a compound the animal produces from mango-leaf metabolites.
- Opacity
- Transparent. It stains rather than covers, so it can be glazed over another colour.
- Lightfastness
- Moderate. It will move, noticeably, within decades, faster in thin films and tints.
- Fluoresces strongly under UV, which is how it is identified in old paintings.
- Smelled powerfully of its origin, by every account that mentions it.
- All modern tubes under this name are synthetic imitations.
The numbers
All derived from the hex, never typed beside it
- HEX
- #E3A857
- What a browser and a design file want.
- RGB
- 227, 168, 87
- The same three numbers in base ten. Light, not ink.
- HSL
- 35°, 71%, 62%
- Hue, saturation, lightness, how a person describes a colour.
- CMYK
- 0, 26, 62, 11
- Arithmetic only. A real separation depends on the press, the paper and a profile.
- LAB
- 73, 13, 50
- Perceptual. L* of 73 is how light this actually looks, which HSL gets wrong.
This hex is an approximation, and a page about pigment has to say so. Indian yellow is a substance. A ground mineral scatters light from thousands of separate grains at slightly different angles, and no single sRGB value is that event. It is a flat average of a photograph of it, and the real thing is outside what a screen can emit. Use the number to specify a screen colour. Do not use it to judge the pigment.
Where it sits on the wheel
Hue 35°
Its opposite, by the diagram
The arithmetic opposite, 180° round in HSL. Useful, and not the same as the opposite a painter mixing pigment would name, that wheel was built for paint.
Lighter and darker
Towards white
Mixing with white does not only lighten, it dulls and cools. This is why a pale tint of a brand colour so often looks chalky, and why a designed light shade beats a generated one.
Towards black
Mixing with black kills the hue as it darkens. A better dark is usually the colour plus its neighbour round the wheel, which is what every painter does instead.
Can you set type on it
Handgloves
White on it
2.10:1 · Fails
Handgloves
Black on it
10.00:1 · AAA
Handgloves
It on paper
1.99:1 · Fails
Handgloves
It on ink
8.71:1 · AAA
4.5:1 is the floor for body text and 3:1 for large text, by WCAG. Treat it as a minimum you may not go under rather than as a target: plenty of pairs pass at 4.6:1 and are still unpleasant to read for a page, and the checker will not tell you that.
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Titles and channels as YouTube reports them
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