A painter's palette is one of the most intimate objects in art history. It is the record of a working practice: the specific pigments chosen, the order they are laid out in, the mixes accumulating as the work goes on. It reveals something the finished painting does not.

But palette has a second meaning that is more interesting still: the characteristic range of colours an artist uses across a body of work, the colour world they inhabit. Rembrandt's warm earths, the deep browns and golden ochres, the light emerging from darkness. Matisse's saturated primaries, acid pinks and brilliant blues at maximum intensity in dialogue with each other. The palette is part of the signature.

Pigment and its history

The history of colour in painting is inseparable from the history of pigments: the specific materials available in a given time and place.

Many of the most beautiful colours in Western painting came from materials no longer in use. Lapis lazuli, ground from stone mined almost exclusively in Afghanistan, produced the ultramarine of Renaissance Madonnas. Smalt, ground cobalt glass, gave the blue-grey used widely in the seventeenth century. Malachite, ground copper carbonate, gave the greens of medieval manuscripts.

These were expensive, some extraordinarily so. Ultramarine cost more by weight than gold, which is why it was reserved for the most important figures in a painting and why contracts specified its use. The colour was not merely an aesthetic decision but an index of expenditure and devotion.

The Industrial Revolution transformed the painter's palette. Synthetic ultramarine in 1826, then chrome yellow and orange, cobalt blue, viridian, cadmium red and yellow. The nineteenth century added more new colours to painting than any previous century, and the Impressionists were among the first to use them at full intensity and in combinations that had not been possible before.

The Scottish absence

I want to flag something rather than pretend it is not there. A discussion of the painter's palette on a Scottish site that reaches for Rembrandt and Matisse and stops there is missing its own doorstep.

The Scottish Colourists, Peploe, Fergusson, Cadell and Hunter, brought Fauvist colour back from France in the early twentieth century and turned it on Iona, Kirkcudbright and the Hebrides. Cadell and Peploe painted Iona repeatedly across two decades: white shell sand, turquoise water, black rock, under a northern light that does something to saturation that Mediterranean light does not.

They are the most significant thing Scotland has done with colour and they have their own article on this site.

Colour in film

The history of colour in cinema is a compressed version of the history of colour in painting: an initial monochrome period, the arrival of colour technology, then a long development of its aesthetic potential.

Technicolor, the three-strip process dominating Hollywood from the mid-1930s to the 1950s, produced a characteristic palette: highly saturated, somewhat cool, with a density that is immediately recognisable. The colour of The Wizard of Oz and The Red Shoes is Technicolor colour, as specific and as historically located as any pigment formulation.

The move to Eastmancolor in the 1950s and 1960s produced something warmer, more natural and less saturated. Digital colour grading in the twenty-first century has given filmmakers unprecedented control, and the teal and orange grading ubiquitous in blockbusters through the 2010s, complementary contrast of warm skin against cooled shadow, is a palette choice as deliberate as any painter's.

Seasonal palettes

Colour is one of the primary ways we experience the passage of time: the golds of autumn, the grey-white of winter, the tentative greens of early spring, the full complexity of high summer.

The Japanese concept of ma, the quality of a pause or interval, of empty space that is presence rather than absence, has a colour expression in the wabi-sabi palette: the muted low-saturation tones of weathered wood, aged metal and bare branch. A winter palette that is quietness rather than bleakness.

Western traditions codified their own seasonal palettes, most systematically in the fashion industry's seasonal colour analysis, which assigns people to Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter groupings. The system is a simplification and a commercial one. The underlying observation is real: colour communicates season, and season carries a whole complex of sensory and emotional association.

And a Scottish note. The seasonal palette here is unusual and worth attending to. Very long summer light at high latitude, very short winter days, and a landscape whose dominant colours are the muted range that lichen and heather and peat produce. The natural dye palette of Scottish cloth, covered in the tartan and dye plant articles, is not a stylistic choice. It is what the ground gives you.

Sources

  • Finlay, V. (2002). Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox. Sceptre. The most readable history of pigment.
  • Ball, P. (2001). Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Colour. Viking. The best account of the chemistry.
  • Gage, J. (1993). Colour and Culture. Thames & Hudson.
  • Harley, R. D. (1982). Artists' Pigments c.1600–1835. Butterworth.
  • The Forbes Pigment Collection at the Harvard Art Museums, and The Colour Library for pigment identification.
  • Higgins, P. (2013). The Scottish Colourists, and the collections of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
  • Higgins, S. (2007). Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s. University of Texas Press.
  • Koike, S. and the wabi-sabi literature; Koren, L. (1994). Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers.

Related: [The Scottish Colourists]; [Crotal, Woad and Madder]; [Tartan: Scotland's Colour Code]; [The Science and Soul of Colour]