The Palette/yellow/Made in a lab or a works
Naples yellow
The 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.
Also called lead antimonate yellow · giallolino · antimony yellow
- Hex
- #FADA5E
- RGB
- 250, 218, 94
- Pigment index
- PY41
- First used
- Babylonian glazes c.1500 BC; as a painters' pigment from the 17th century
- From
- Mesopotamia, then Naples and the Italian glass trade
What it is
Lead antimonate, Pb₂Sb₂O₇.
How it is made
Lead and antimony compounds fired together, usually with salt or another flux, at around 900–1000°C. The firing conditions set the hue from a greenish lemon through to a warm pinkish cream, so a single recipe covers a wide range and old sources describe several.
It was a glass and ceramic colourant for three thousand years before anybody used it as a paint. Babylonian and Egyptian glazes use it, then Islamic and Italian majolica, then finally seventeenth-century painters.
Naples yellow, Lead-antimonate inorganic pigment used in paintings. Wikipedia's description, not ours.
The history
The name is a piece of eighteenth-century marketing: the story was that it was made from volcanic deposits on Vesuvius, which sounds excellent and is not true. It was manufactured, as it had been for millennia.
What it gave painters was specific and hard to get otherwise: an opaque, pale, warm yellow. Every other pale yellow of the period was either a tint of something brighter with white (which goes chalky) or a fugitive plant yellow. Naples yellow is already pale and still has body, which makes it the natural choice for skin, for clouds and for the light end of anything.
It fell out of use for health reasons, being both lead and antimony, and almost every modern tube labelled Naples yellow is a mixture of cadmium or titanium with an earth colour. The mixture matches the hue and misses the quality, in the same way a mixed grey misses a true Payne's grey.
Where it is used
Glass, glaze and majolica for three millennia, then European painting from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century: flesh, sky, highlights on drapery.
The useful observation is about pale colours generally. Making a light colour by adding white to a strong one nearly always produces something chalky and slightly dead, because white does not just lighten, it dulls and cools. A pigment that is natively pale behaves differently. The same is true of a tint ramp built in software: an algorithmic 20% tint of your brand colour is not the same as a designed light shade, and on a real palette the difference shows immediately.
Go and look at it
Eighteenth-century portraiture
National Portrait Gallery and the Wallace Collection, London
The skin and the sky. Pale, warm, opaque, and not a tint of anything.
How it behaves
- Made of
- Lead antimonate, Pb₂Sb₂O₇.
- Opacity
- Opaque. It covers what is under it.
- Lightfastness
- Permanent. It will outlive the thing it is painted on.
Hazard
Contains lead and antimony. Toxic; largely replaced for this reason.
- Natively pale and still opaque, which is rare and is the whole reason to want it.
- Darkens if it meets iron tools, traditionally ground with bone or ivory knives.
- Almost every modern tube of this name is a substitute mixture.
The numbers
All derived from the hex, never typed beside it
- HEX
- #FADA5E
- What a browser and a design file want.
- RGB
- 250, 218, 94
- The same three numbers in base ten. Light, not ink.
- HSL
- 48°, 94%, 67%
- Hue, saturation, lightness, how a person describes a colour.
- CMYK
- 0, 13, 62, 2
- Arithmetic only. A real separation depends on the press, the paper and a profile.
- LAB
- 88, -3, 63
- Perceptual. L* of 88 is how light this actually looks, which HSL gets wrong.
This hex is an approximation, and a page about pigment has to say so. Naples 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 48°
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
1.38:1 · Fails
Handgloves
Black on it
15.25:1 · AAA
Handgloves
It on paper
1.31:1 · Fails
Handgloves
It on ink
13.29:1 · 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.
Read more, elsewhere
Colours next to this one
Next, in time
Bone black
Charred bone. Warmer and browner than soot black, and the only black most painters will use.
Back up
Foundations · Colour·yellow·Made in a lab or a works