The Palette/white/Made in a lab or a works

Lead white

The 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.

Also called flake white · Cremnitz white · white lead · ceruse

Hex: #F3F1E7
RGB: 243, 241, 231
Pigment index: PW1
First used: At least the 4th century BC, described by Theophrastus
From: Greece, then Venice, then the Netherlands

What it is

Basic lead carbonate, 2PbCO₃·Pb(OH)₂.

How it is made

The stack process, and it is worth knowing in detail because it ran essentially unchanged from antiquity to the twentieth century. Coils of lead sheet are set in earthenware pots with vinegar in the bottom, the pots are stacked in a shed between layers of horse dung or spent tanbark, and the shed is sealed. The dung ferments and provides heat and carbon dioxide; the vinegar provides acetic acid vapour. Over ten or twelve weeks the lead corrodes into a white crust.

Then somebody has to open the stack and scrape the crust off the coils by hand, in a shed full of lead dust. This job was done overwhelmingly by women in the Dutch and English industries, and the occupational disease was notorious and well documented: colic, palsy, blindness, miscarriage, death. It was called painter's colic and lead palsy, and everybody knew the cause.

The crust is washed, ground and dried. Dutch process white was the best and Venetian ceruse the most famous, and the difference was mostly in the care taken.

Lead white, Chemical compound. Wikipedia's description, not ours.

The history

Every European painting before about 1920 is built on this. Not decorated with it: built on it: the ground, the underpainting, every highlight, every flesh tone, every cloud. It is the only white with the particular combination of qualities oil painting needs: it is warm, it is not fully opaque so it has a luminous quality, it makes a tough flexible film that resists cracking, and it dries fast. Zinc white is brittle. Titanium white is chalky and inert and too opaque.

It was also a cosmetic for four hundred years. Venetian ceruse, worn on the face, was the standard European aristocratic makeup (Elizabethan portraits show the result) and it destroyed the skin it was applied to, which produced a cycle of applying more. The theory that it contributed to Elizabeth I's decline is often repeated and is not established, but the general toxicity of the practice is not in doubt. Maria Gunning, Countess of Coventry, died at twenty-seven in 1760 and lead cosmetics are the accepted cause.

It was progressively banned through the twentieth century, the 1921 White Lead Convention of the ILO restricted its use in interior painting, and domestic paint bans followed. Artists' lead white survives as a restricted product, and conservators and some painters argue hard for it, because there is genuinely no substitute that behaves the same way.

Where it is used

Painting, grounds, cosmetics, glazes, and every interior wall in the Western world until the middle of the twentieth century. Now restricted nearly everywhere except artists' materials.

Its lesson for a palette is about white not being neutral. Lead white is warm, zinc is cool and slightly transparent, titanium is cold and absolutely opaque, and the choice changes every mixture on the palette. The same is true of a page: a warm off-white and a cool off-white make the same photograph look like two different photographs. Choosing the white is a real decision and it is usually made by accident.

Go and look at it

Any Rembrandt highlight
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Thick, dragged, holding its own shape. A modern white will not do that and stay flexible for three hundred years.
Elizabethan court portraits
National Portrait Gallery, London
The white face is a cosmetic made of this pigment, painted with the same pigment. The material is in the picture twice.

How it behaves

Made of: Basic lead carbonate, 2PbCO₃·Pb(OH)₂.
Opacity: Semi-opaque. It covers, but something of the layer beneath still comes through.
Lightfastness: Permanent. It will outlive the thing it is painted on.

Hazard

Lead carbonate. Seriously toxic by inhalation and ingestion; caused mass occupational poisoning for two millennia. Restricted almost everywhere.

Makes the toughest, most flexible paint film of any white. This is why conservators defend it.
Blackens on contact with sulfide pigments: orpiment, realgar, some cadmiums.
Warm in tone, and slightly translucent, which is what gives old flesh painting its glow.

The numbers

All derived from the hex, never typed beside it

HEX: #F3F1E7; What a browser and a design file want.
RGB: 243, 241, 231; The same three numbers in base ten. Light, not ink.
HSL: 50°, 33%, 93%; Hue, saturation, lightness, how a person describes a colour.
CMYK: 0, 1, 5, 5; Arithmetic only. A real separation depends on the press, the paper and a profile.
LAB: 95, -1, 5; Perceptual. L* of 95 is how light this actually looks, which HSL gets wrong.

This hex is an approximation, and a page about pigment has to say so. Lead white 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 50°

Its opposite, by the diagram

#F3F1E7

#E7E9F3

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

#F3F1E7

#F5F3EB

#F7F5EE

#F9F8F3

#FBFBF8

#FDFDFB

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

#F3F1E7

#CFCDC4

#AAA9A2

#7A7974

#494845

#242423

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
1.13:1 · Fails

Handgloves

Black on it
18.55:1 · AAA

Handgloves

It on paper
1.07:1 · Fails

Handgloves

It on ink
16.15:1 · 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.