The closest an artist comes to painting with pure pigment is when applying soft pastel to the ground. From the earliest cave art, humans have applied powdered earths and chalks to surfaces. Some of the oldest surviving masterpieces made using coloured chalks include those of Leonardo da Vinci, and are sometimes incorrectly referred to as pastels.

An example is this drawing of Isabella d’Este from 1500, described here as using “black and red chalk, yellow pastel chalk on paper”. But there is no such thing as “pastel chalk”, any more than there is “oil watercolour”.

Pastels are much more than just a stick of pigmented chalk or coloured earth, as they’re made by mixing pigment and a bulking powder, with water containing a gum or glue, into a thick dough-like paste. That paste is dried slowly in sticks to become sufficiently firm as to be capable of being sharpened and applied to paper or another ground.

Painting in pastels requires many sticks of different colours; although those can be blended on the paper or ground, pastels don’t mix like oil paints to produce good intermediate colours. You can’t paint properly in pastels with just half a dozen different colours, but need dozens or hundreds to support a broad spectrum. This shows one of my sets of pastels, a Winsor & Newton boxed set of 200.

Careful assessment by Thea Burns has established that the earliest painter in pastels was probably Robert Nanteuil.

Nanteuil’s Portrait of Monseigneur Louis Doni d’Attichy, Bishop of Riez from 1663 is one of the first true pastel paintings, relatively small, but expertly worked. When these became popular in the eighteenth century they quickly became all the rage. Unlike oil paints applied in layers over a period of weeks, pastels adhere to the ground mechanically, and have no drying time. A good pastellist could produce a fine portrait in just a few sittings, making them far less demanding on both parties, much quicker, and of course considerably cheaper. The ‘look’ of pastel paintings also came into vogue, with flesh looking lifelike with a soft, matte finish.

Initially there were no fixatives to help the adhesion of pastel to ground, so they all had to be glazed, and even then didn’t prove as durable as a well-made oil painting. But at that price, only the very rich would care.

Next, mainstream artists started using pastels in preparatory work and sketches, here Charles Antoine Coypel’s dramatic portrait of Medea (c 1715).

One of the most brilliant of this first big wave of pastellists was Rosalba Carriera, whose work demonstrated that a good pastel painter could match the accomplishments of the best oil painters of the day. She had a painterly style at times, as shown in her rich marks in Africa, for which I don’t have a date.

In the fingers of a skilled pastellist, materials like hair and fur that had long challenged painters in oils became great strengths. Carriera’s superb Self-Portrait as ‘Winter’ from 1730-31 is a fine example, as seen in the detail below.

Look carefully and you can see individual grains of pastel that form each mark she made. She didn’t just apply her pastels dry and from the stick, but in places turned them back into a paste using water, and applied that to the paper with a brush.

The star pastellist of the middle of that century was undoubtedly Maurice Quentin de La Tour, whose works are readily seen in the Louvre and elsewhere.

De La Tour not only excelled at modelling softer surfaces and materials to which pastels are so suited, but tackled harder and glittery materials used in jewellery and the like. They’re particularly well shown in his Portrait of Marie-Josèphe of Saxony, Dauphine of France (1731–1767) (1756-60).

After de La Tour, the next brilliant pastellist was quite a contrast: Jean-Etienne Liotard, whose meticulous realism is just breathtaking. Applying his pastels to parchment rather than paper, he was able to paint painstakingly detailed works like The Chocolate Girl (c 1744-45). This shows how the medium was moving on from regular portraits.

Only when you see the patterned grain of the pastel on parchment does it become clear that this is not oil paint. I still marvel at the glass of water: surely a demonstration tour de force to make the viewer gasp in wonder.

Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s simple portrait of a baby from about 1790 takes up from where Carriera and de La Tour had made their marks. This infant’s face is softly rendered, but their clothes are sketched in a loose style far in advance of oil paintings of the day.

Pastel painting remained popular through the nineteenth century, but its next major advances came with those around the Impressionists, rather than the core Impressionists, who overwhelmingly preferred oils.

Édouard Manet’s Woman Fastening Her Garter (1878-79) shows a motif many would associate more with Degas, and a spontaneous and sketchy style, with an emphasis on form.

Paul César Helleu was radical and exciting in his pastels; his portrait of Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough (c 1900) combines perfect, smooth blending over her face with vigorous mark-making through the fabrics and the ornate frame of the chair, as shown in the detail below.

Edgar Degas was another innovative painter in pastels, whose work encouraged Odilon Redon to take the medium on into the twentieth century.

His recurrent theme of a small sailing boat, which kept appearing in Redon’s later paintings, was expressed most extensively in his pastels. Some, like Flower Clouds (c 1903), above, show the boat sketched in roughly, his paper being dominated by nebulous patches of colour from behind.

His best-known painting of the boat, The Yellow Sail (c 1905), below, was painted in pastel too. He exploits new and more intense pigments here, for the sparkling gems in the boat, and the clothing of the two women.

Although the period since has seen new media such as acrylics, there is still nothing else like painting in pure pigment.

Reference

Thea Burns (2007) The Invention of Pastel Painting, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 12 3.

The element chromium gains its name from the rich colours seen in many of its salts and compounds. One of them, chromium oxide, was discovered in about 1798 by Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin, who immediately recognised its future use as a pigment, because of its “fine emerald colour”. But painters were still enamoured with more toxic greens, and straight chromium oxide doesn’t look particularly brilliant, being a rather dull yellow-green. Its introduction into paintings probably didn’t start until around 1840, when landscape painting outdoors was becoming all the rage.

Some of the earliest paintings known to use chromium oxide are those of Moritz von Schwind, of which the first example that I can show is his Mermaids Watering a Stag from about 1846. He seems to have used the pigment quite extensively here in foliage, although probably in combination with other pigments.

Von Schwind’s King Krokus and the Wood Nymph from about 1855 is a clearer image, where he probably used chromium oxide in combination for most of his greens.

As these works were being painted, an improved version of chromium oxide was being developed: hydrated chromium oxide, which became known as viridian during the 1860s. This first became available at a reasonable price after Guignet started to make it in quantity in 1859, so has also been known as Guignet’s green. It’s sometimes termed émeraude or emerald, which only serves to confuse viridian with copper acetoarsenate, more widely known as emerald green.

Viridian came into use during the 1860s, and has proved far more popular than chromium oxide. Both pigments are reliably lightfast, opaque, and have good covering power, but viridian is the more intense, and doesn’t appear dull like plain chromium oxide.

Anselm Feuerbach’s painting of Paolo and Francesca from 1864 is one of the earlier works found to contain viridian among its many rich greens.

The best example showing off the colour of viridian is perhaps Édouard Manet’s The Balcony (1868-69), where he appears to have used the pigment throughout the blinds and railings, most probably mixed with lead white, and unmixed for the woman’s parasol.

Arnold Böcklin’s Triton and Nereid from 1874 is unusual in several respects. It’s reported as being painted in tempera rather than oils, but its deep lustrous greens were developed using a base of predominantly viridian, over which Böcklin applied a copper resinate glaze.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Yole (The Skiff) of 1875 uses viridian as the main colour for the reeds in the left foreground.

Analysis of Claude Monet’s series of paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare in 1877 has revealed extensive use of viridian in mixtures, including the green shadows in the roof. In Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877), the pigment is apparent (and confirmed) throughout the green foreground of the platform, an optical effect resulting from light passing through the glass roof of the station.

Renoir used viridian together with malachite green and other pigments for the greens in his Chrysanthemums (1881-82).

If you care to spend some time examining the myriads of tiny dots in Georges Seurat’s monumental Divisionist painting of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-86), I’m assured that you’ll find many of those forming its vegetation contain viridian.

Viridian remained popular among the post-Impressionists, from whom I have two well-known paintings as examples.

Vincent van Gogh included viridian in the pigments used in the range of greens in his A Wheatfield, with Cypresses (1889), which is more unusual for his use of ultramarine blue mixed to form green.

Paul Cézanne is known to have had a strong preference for viridian as one of the key colours in his palette. However, in his Hillside in Provence (1890-92), it is emerald green that is the more prominent, and the major part of the painting’s more brilliant greens, even into its pale turquoise sky. Some green passages, such as the patch of yellow-green grass at the edge of the path in the foreground, at the right edge of the canvas, have been built with a base of lead white and viridian, over which he has applied a yellow lake glaze.

Chromium oxide and viridian remain widely available today; although the former is not popular or widely used, viridian remains a mainstay green widely recommended for its colour and other properties. Being virtually insoluble, chromium oxide and viridian pose minimal risks of toxicity to the artist. However, there is growing concern over their environmental effects, and great care is needed when handling waste paint containing either pigment.

Reference

Richard Newman (1997) Artists’ Pigments, vol 3, ed Elisabeth West FitzHugh, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 76 0.

Rumours still abound as to the cause of Napoleon’s death over two centuries ago. One theory, not currently in favour, is that he was poisoned by arsenic in the wallpaper. At the time, that would have been unusual, but by the 1860s such deaths were significant enough to be reported in newspapers. Their ultimate cause was also one of the factors behind the success of Impressionist landscape painting: emerald green.

Getting a good range of green pigments was vital for landscape painting, and more generally for coloured commercial products such as wallpaper and clothing. The first of the ‘poison greens’ to be discovered was that named after Carl Wilhelm Scheele, the Swedish chemist who originally made it in 1775: copper arsenite, a highly toxic salt of arsenic. Soon after its introduction from about 1780, it became clear that it tended to darken with age, and the search began for a replacement.

Little attention has been paid to the use of Scheele’s green, and it isn’t clear how widely it was used, or even when it was first used in painting.

JMW Turner’s early oil sketch of Guildford from the Banks of the Wey, painted in about 1805, has been found to contain Scheele’s green. Given its range of greens, that could be quite extensive.

Wilhelm Sattler, a paint manufacturer in Schweinfurt, Germany, worked with Friedrich Russ to discover an even better arsenic compound for use as a colourant, and from 1814 Sattler’s company manufactured Schweinfurt or emerald green, the equally toxic copper acetoarsenite. Its alluringly brilliant green colour appears very stable, with only slight darkening resulting from reaction with hydrogen sulphide, a common atmospheric pollutant.

By about 1830-32, when Turner painted Going to School as an illustration for Rogers’s Poems, he had switched to using emerald green, obvious from its characteristic colour standing out from the small bag on the boy’s back.

Turner used emerald green again in this watercolour painting of Rouen, Looking Downstream from about 1832, here in combination with other pigments, so less brashly.

Concerns over the established toxicity of these two greens were raised by 1839, when warnings were first issued in Bavaria. Despite those, the use of emerald green became more widespread, and it was even ‘fixed’ to ball gowns using albumen or dextrin, which allowed its poisonous dust to brush free from the garment when dancing. It also became particularly popular, and insidiously toxic, in coloured wallpapers. When applied on damp walls, as were common at the time, fungal products could produce trimethyl arsine gas, which is thought to have been responsible for many of the symptoms and deaths that were reported.

Édouard Manet’s Music in the Tuileries (1862) is an unusual example of a painting containing both Scheele’s and emerald greens. Manet used them in combination in two different glazes applied to the areas of foliage. In one transparent glaze, they are mixed with yellow lake, small amounts of ivory black, and yellow ochre; the other more opaque glaze consists of the two greens, with yellow ochre and white.

The last recorded use of Scheele’s green was by Edwin Landseer in 1866.

The Impressionists relied heavily on emerald green for its brilliance and intensity of colour. Frédéric Bazille’s Self-Portrait with Palette (1865) shows some emerald green paint on his palette, squeezed out and ready to paint vegetation such as sunlit grass.

Claude Monet used emerald green among other green pigments and mixtures in his famous Bathers at la Grenouillère, painted in 1869. It has also been found widely in the landscapes of Cézanne, Gauguin, Pissarro and Vincent van Gogh.

By the late nineteenth century, concern over the consequences of using emerald green in household products had risen to the point where the pigment was banned in a succession of countries.

Paul Gauguin’s Arlésiennes (Mistral) (Old Women at Arles) (1888) uses emerald green for the band of bright green grass sweeping up across the painting from the right. It is also mixed for the skin and hair of some of the figures, and in the foliage more generally.

Odilon Redon’s pastel painting of Sîta from about 1893 uses emerald green, chrome yellow and chalk in the prominent yellow-green halo surrounding the woman’s head. Working with soft pastels containing this pigment was particularly hazardous, because of the likelihood of inhaling their dust. At least today we have effective respiratory protection available.

During the twentieth century, genuine emerald green was withdrawn from use as a pigment, although it wasn’t completely discontinued until the 1960s. Since then, paints sold as being emerald green have contained alternatives that are far less toxic.

Emerald green has been found in mixtures used by Paul Cézanne in the patches of vegetation in his huge The Large Bathers (1906). Alongside lead white, vermilion and ultramarine blue, this pigment appears to have been among his most frequently used.

Childe Hassam’s watercolour of White Mountains from Poland Springs from 1917 is one of the last major paintings that appears to have relied on emerald green. Its use in the meadow in the foreground is perhaps the pigment’s last brash farewell.

Reference

Inge Fiedler and Michael Bayard (1997) Artists’ Pigments, vol 3, ed Elisabeth West Fitzhugh, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 76 0.

Blue pigments used in painting include some of the oldest used by man, and others that led the change to modern synthetic pigments driven by the arrival of chemistry in the eighteenth century. This weekend I look at two examples, today the queen of pigments, ultramarine, and tomorrow the first synthetic chemical, Prussian blue.

Originally made by crushing and grinding the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli, the cost of ultramarine has exceeded that of gold. Seen in paintings, it produces a rich slightly reddish blue which stands the test of time, as distinctive and effective today as when it was first used. And its use has a history of unmasking fakes and forgeries.

The sole source of lapis lazuli in Europe and the West were quarries in Badakshan, described by Marco Polo and now in Afghanistan. It appears that wall paintings made around 507-554 CE adjacent to the great Buddahs of Bamiyan were the first to have used the mineral as a pigment. It was then used in early Persian miniatures, and in early Chinese and Indian paintings too. Tragically, these wall paintings in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, were damaged by the Taliban in 2001 when the two statues were destroyed, and their restoration has made little progress since.

The powdered pigment had made its way, first along the Silk Road, then by sea, to traders in Venice by about 1300. By the Renaissance, it was established as one of the most important and precious of all the pigments used in European art.

Because of its beauty and high cost, ultramarine blue was used for the robes of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. Duccio’s panels from the Maestà Predella, including this of The Healing of the Man born Blind, show this tradition in its earliest years, around 1307-11. As a pigment, it proved practical in egg tempera as here, and in oils, watercolour, and fresco.

Ultramarine blue has been found in the van Eyck brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece from about 1432 (above), and particularly in its most famous panel, The Mystic Lamb, below.

Sandro Botticelli’s early tempera on panel painting Adoration of the Kings from about 1470, apparently made with Filippino Lippi, shows two different blue colours and purple. He painted the purple with an opaque underpainting of lead white tinted with a red lake derived from madder, to create pink. That was then glazed with quite coarse particles of ultramarine blue, so the pigment was thinly dispersed.

Peter Paul Rubens used ultramarine blue widely in his magnificent triptych now in Antwerp Cathedral. In its centre panel, Descent from the Cross (1612-14), it has been found combined with indigo and other pigments.

In van Dyck’s Charity from 1627-8, its most obvious use is in the blue cape, where ultramarine blue was painted over indigo, applied as both a tint and as a glaze over the top.

Visit any of the larger galleries with substantial collections of paintings made before 1700, and you will see works with drapery that I can only describe as arresting in the brilliance of their ultramarine blue. One stunning example in the National Gallery in London is Sassoferrato’s The Virgin in Prayer from 1640-50. The Virgin’s cloak looks as if it was painted only yesterday, and that colour makes you stop in your tracks and draws you into the painting, like no other pigment can.

Given its importance, and limited supply, considerable effort was devoted to ensuring that natural ultramarine blue was of the highest quality, and alternative sources were sought. Deposits in the Chilean Andes, and near Lake Baikal in Siberia, weren’t developed until the nineteenth century, and attempts to make synthetic ultramarine proved unsuccessful until 1828, when Jean Baptiste Guimet was awarded a prize of six thousand francs for his discovery. Almost simultaneously, C G Gmelin of Tübingen discovered a slightly different method.

Commercial production had started by 1830, and it became known as French ultramarine, to distinguish it from the natural pigment. Although almost identical in colour and performance, there are significant differences between natural and synthetic ultramarine when tested in the laboratory. This has enabled the examination of paintings to determine the source of their pigment, and has brought some surprises. These most often relate to later overpainting during restoration. For example, two areas of much later painting have been discovered in the van Eycks’ Ghent Altarpiece.

Examination of Édouard Manet’s Corner of a Café-Concert, from 1878-80, has shown that he used synthetic ultramarine in its blue passages, for example.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Umbrellas, from about 1881-86, uses synthetic ultramarine in a methodical fashion. The first stage in its painting used only cobalt blue, but in its second stage synthetic ultramarine was applied extensively.

Vincent van Gogh’s A Wheatfield, with Cypresses (1889) contains synthetic ultramarine in its deepest blues, and in some areas of green, although it’s unusual to find ultramarine mixed to form green. Before synthetic pigment became available, this would have been far too expensive a way of making any significant amount of green, but once much cheaper pigment came onto the market, that became more feasible, if still unusual.

The ability to distinguish synthetic ultramarine, which didn’t exist before about 1828, and the natural pigment has proved important in detecting some forgeries. Only the most ignorant would attempt to pass off a painting made with synthetic ultramarine as being very old, but a few fakes fell at that hurdle.

Han van Meegeren was far too knowledgeable and cunning to be caught so easily. He used natural ultramarine, for example when he sold The Men at Emmaus (1937) to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen as a Vermeer. What no one knew at the time was that his ultramarine looked genuine, but had been contaminated with a small amount of cobalt blue, which wasn’t discovered until 1803-04, and was first used as a pigment in 1806.

In 1960, the modern artist Yves Klein worked with the paint supplier Edouard Adam to ‘invent’ a paint he termed International Klein Blue (IKB). Although its formulation is a secret, it’s almost entirely synthetic ultramarine blue pigment in a polyvinyl acetate binder.

Like all the best queens, ultramarine blue has an unnerving habit of revealing the truth.

Reference

Joyce Plesters (1993) Artists’ Pigments, vol 2, ed Ashok Roy, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 75 3.

Prior to the nineteenth century most beer, wines and other popular drinks were served to paying customers by staff in inns or taverns that didn’t have a bar or counter as such. From the middle of the century there was a transition to bars, also known as pubs (from public house) in Britain, and varieties of cafés in France and mainland Europe. This article shows some of the interiors of these successors to the inn or tavern.

These two sorry-looking drinkers in Edgar Degas’ famous painting In a Café or L’Absinthe from 1873 are sat on a long bench fitted to the wall behind them, at tables that appear to be fixed. Behind them is a large mirror.

The waitress in Édouard Manet’s Corner of a Café-Concert from 1878-80 has brought these beers from the bar, so customers can drink while they enjoy the musical and stage entertainment. Behind her is a small orchestra in its pit in front of a stage where an actress is performing.

Manet’s In a Café, from 1880, is thought to have been painted using a combination of oil paint and pastels, and may have been an early study leading to his famous painting below.

His Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) engages in enigmatic and optically impossible mirror-play. This forlorn young woman is serving at the bar in front of her, with a large mirror behind showing a reflection that doesn’t match its original. Arranged on the bar are assorted bottles of beers and spirits, that on the far left bearing the artist’s signature. According to the reflection, the audience at the Folies-Bergère are watching the show under the light of a huge chandelier.

Constantin Meunier’s Café del Buzero, Seville probably from around 1882 shows the interior of one of the city’s bars, with a dancer on its small stage.

During his travels in Belgium in 1884, Lesser Ury painted this view of the inside of a Flemish Tavern, as the barmaid drew beer for what seem to be two barefoot young girls.

Évariste Carpentier’s The Foreigners shows the interior of another inn in Belgium. At the right, sat at a table under the window, a mother and daughter dressed in the black of recent bereavement are the foreigners looking for hospitality. Instead, everyone in the room, and many of those in the crowded bar behind, stares at them as if they have just arrived from Mars. Even the dog has come up to see whether they smell right. The artist painted this in the small town of Kuurne in West-Flanders in 1887.

Jean Béraud’s more academic take on The Absinthe Drinkers from 1908 reworks Degas’ painting, with its two glasses of cloudy absinthe, soda syphon, and jug of water. As a bonus, at the top edge he lines up a parade of coloured glass bottles containing liqueurs and other spirits that became popular and functional decoration in bars.

Béraud’s Letter from 1908 gives another glimpse into the café culture of the years prior to the First World War. Polished metal coat-hooks adorn the walls, and there are more liqueur bottles reflected in the mirror.

Sava Šumanović’s Bar in Paris from 1929 shows a sailor chatting up two well-dressed women at a more modern bar, with a bottle of champagne poised for opening, in an ice bucket at the left. One of the women is sat on a high bar stool.

Malcolm Drummond depicts a traditional English public bar in The Princess of Wales Pub, Trafalgar Square: Mrs. Francis behind the Bar, from about 1931. This pub is still open, and is at 27 Villiers Street, just off Trafalgar Square, and not far from the National Gallery. It’s named after the first wife of George IV, who married in secret, thus never became his queen. A row of three pumps for drawing beer dominate the top of the bar, while underneath it is a small sink with taps where used glasses are washed. Above is an array of spirits, together with the red-coated figure promoting Johnnie Walker whisky. This remains the model for the great majority of modern English pubs.

Historically the most sustained purpose for umbrellas has been to shelter from sun rather than the rain, when they act as parasols. In contrast to the story of the umbrella in rain, its use in the fair weather of Europe has become a matter of fashion, as an accessory almost exclusively to shade women. That excludes specialist use by painters and anglers.

Girolamo dai Libri’s Umbrella Madonna, more prosaically titled Madonna Enthroned with Jesus between St. Joseph, St. Raphael the Archangel and Tobias from 1530, shows an intermediate step between the ecclesiastical umbraculum and an ornate parasol. The winged putto supporting the umbrella seems to be skewering it into the top of the Virgin’s throne, and Raphael the Archangel wears an ancient precursor of the modern printed T-shirt.

Umbrellas and parasols became used by women of the nobility, as shown in Anthony van Dyck’s Portrait of Marchesa Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo from about 1623. The Marchesa was a Genoese aristocrat, whose appearance and deportment reinforce her status, from her matching scarlet cuffs to the gold braid around the lower edge of her underskirt.

When people started gathering on the beaches of Europe, it was only natural that ladies should take their parasols with them. Eugène Boudin’s marvellous paintings of these incongruous soirées show participants seated on upright chairs, wearing heavy outdoor clothing, their parasols superfluous under the overcast sky at dusk, here in The Beach from 1864.

When Claude Monet’s family and friends took to The Beach at Trouville in 1870, they too brought their parasols. The woman on the left is thought to be Monet’s first wife Camille, and that at the right is probably Eugène Boudin’s wife. This was painted during the Monets’ honeymoon. This also marks an interesting period of transition: Madame Boudin wears black and holds a black parasol, similar to those seen in her husband’s earlier beach scenes. Camille Monet wears white and holds a white parasol, attributes of the younger generation.

The following year, Jules Breton and his family spent much of the summer and autumn in their customary haunts in Brittany. Breton painted his wife Élodie with a Sunshade, Baie de Douarnenez (1871), with its magnificent view over that bay to the low hill of Ménez-Hom in the far distance. Although Breton was closer to Boudin’s generation than that of Monet, his wife opted for a more modern look than that of Madame Boudin.

Camille Monet appears again in fashionable white, with a white parasol, in Monet’s La Promenade, or Woman with a Parasol, from 1875.

Édouard Manet’s portrait of Jeanne Demarsy in his Spring from 1881 shows this actress who lived from 1865-1937, and modelled for both Manet and Renoir. At the age of just sixteen, and here still aspiring to the stage, she wouldn’t have been seen dead with an old black parasol.

John Singer Sargent’s model for his painting of her Morning Walk (1888) also opted for fashionable white.

So far, these parasols and umbrellas have declared their roots in the umbraculum, complete with lacy trimmings and plain fabrics. In the 1880s, the new fashion for Japonisme took Paris and the rest of Europe by storm.

In 1888, Olga Boznańska painted her sister in this Portrait of a Young Woman with a Red Umbrella, holding a brightly decorated east Asian parasol complete with its bamboo ribs.

A few years later, in 1892, Olga Boznańska painted this ingenious Self-portrait with a Japanese umbrella.

Victor Gabriel Gilbert’s undated Loving Flower Care was most probably painted at around this time, and features another Japanese parasol with more subtle colours than those of Boznańska. His model is hardly dressed for the task of gardening, though.

Paul Helleu’s wife Alice was his favourite model, and features in his loose oil sketch in blue and white of Portrait of Mrs Helleu with an Umbrella (1899).

Several of the many sketches made by John Singer Sargent of his friends during their travels in the Alps and elsewhere include their white parasols, as in this Group with Parasols (A Siesta) from about 1905.

In Helleu’s panoramic view On the Beach from 1908, his model’s parasol reclines on its own, apparently deployed as a compositional device.

Joaquín Sorolla, another of the virtuoso painters alongside Sargent at the turn of the twentieth century, shows the white parasol as part of full dress for a formal promenade of the beach at Valencia, Spain, in his Strolling along the Seashore (1909).

William Orpen’s Midday on the Beach (1910) shows a British day out before the First World War, with lighter dress, parasols, and a large wicker hamper containing a packed lunch.

When crossing the Simplon Pass through the Alps, in The Tease (1911), Sargent’s friends still travelled in their voluminous dresses, hats, and a white parasol.

Meanwhile, down at the coast on Good Harbor Beach (1915) in Gloucester, MA, large brightly-coloured beach umbrellas had become a feature of a more modern beach scene, as painted by Louise Upton Brumback in her bold and crisp style.

Japonisme wasn’t dead yet, though. Painted after 1915, Anna Ancher’s Young Woman in the Garden with an Orange Parasol shows an umbrella at least inspired by east Asian style, and once again bright in its colours.

My final example was painted in 1918, at the end of the First World War, far from the mud and blood of Europe’s battlefields. Colin Campbell Cooper’s Summer (1918) is inspired by Japonisme, fortified here by the east Asian influence of California, and by Monet’s paintings of his garden at Giverny.