With the Paris Commune crushed in 1871, and order being restored to France under the new Republic, the Pissarros returned to live a more settled life in Louveciennes again, after the shock of discovering that most of his 1500 or so paintings had been damaged or destroyed by occupying Prussian soldiers. There Pissarro lived close to Alfred Sisley, and the two often painted in company. Renoir’s mother also lived in the village, enabling the three painters to meet frequently.

Among Pissarro’s favourite motifs in this post-war period were numerous views of the Route de Saint-Germain and other roads around Louveciennes, and the River Seine at Bougival.

Less known are his watercolours, such as this view of Louveciennes, Route de Saint-Germain from 1871, and are reminiscent of the paintings of Johan Jongkind.

Pissarro painted this woodland view of an Avenue in the Parc de Marly in the autumn of 1871. It looks towards the village of Marly-le-Roi from the Port du Phare, inside the grounds of the Château de Marly. His skilful use of staffage draws the eye towards the far end of the avenue. The artist seems to have sold this painting quite quickly to an unknown buyer, from whom Durand-Ruel bought it in early 1873.

Alfred Sisley also painted here en plein air, as seen in The Seine at Bougival from 1872. The water surface is mirror-smooth, and Sisley has been careful to paint the reflection of the buildings with optical precision.

This is Pissarro’s wintry scene of The Post-House, the Route de Versailles, Louveciennes, Effect of Snow from 1872. This looks from the ‘Royal Gate’ of the Château de Marly towards the post-house, a landmark featured in several of his works from this period. This painting was bought that Spring by Durand-Ruel, who sold it a year later to Jean-Baptiste Faure, the opera singer, Pissarro’s first collector and Sisley’s enduring patron.

Pissarro must have taken delight in the weird forms of the trees in this Chestnut Grove at Louveciennes, painted in 1872. In the far distance is the massive warm cream stone of Marly Aqueduct.

Although the Pissarros were able to live on the money generated by Camille’s painting, they must have got by in relative poverty. However, in 1872, he sold four stretched canvas overdoor panels depicting the seasons to the banker Achille Arosa for 100 Francs each. Pissarro tried to buy them back when they came up for auction in 1891, but despite appealing to Vincent van Gogh’s brother Theo, they were sold for just over a thousand Francs to the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, and have remained in private collections since.

In April 1872, the Pissarros moved from Louveciennes to Pontoise, where they rented a house and Camille established his studio.

Sisley wasn’t as prolific as Pissarro in either ‘road’ or snow scenes. His Snow on the Road, Louveciennes (1874) clearly comes from the same school, but his trees and buildings remain distinctive.

Sisley’s Aqueduct at Marly (1874) shows the massive form of this aqueduct which appeared in the distance in Pissarro’s Chestnut Grove at Louveciennes above. This and the nearby Machine de Marly, which Sisley also painted, were part of a monumental hydraulic network built in the 1680s for Louis XIV, to supply water to the Château de Marly and the royal gardens of the Palace at Versailles. The stone tower at the right end of the aqueduct is the Tour de Levant, used by Prussian troops as a vantage point for observing the besieged city of Paris, a point that won’t have escaped Sisley’s attention.

Sisley’s Forge at Marly-le-Roi from 1875 shows the village blacksmiths at work.

In 1876, Félicien Rops must have visited one of the popular bathing resorts nearby, to paint his Sunday in Bougival. This shows a lecherous old man watching two young women preparing to bathe there, a mere 15 km (10 miles) from the heart of Paris.

By this time, the Impressionists had moved away from Louveciennes, and were painting elsewhere.

Although Sisley was now living near Sèvres, he must have returned in about 1879 for one last painting in front of the motif, on The Road from Versailles to Louveciennes. This is an example of his more sketchy plein air paintings from his time at Sèvres, and a more traditional perspective view of a road of the time. This section of the road is close to Louveciennes, on the main route between Versailles and Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

At that point, the Impressionists finally left Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun to rest in peace.

When the prolific portraitist in pastels Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun retired to live near Paris, she chose a small hamlet to the west of the city, between the palace at Versailles and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Louveciennes. She died there in 1842, and is buried in the graveyard not far from her house.

Twenty-seven years later it became the focus for a group of friends, who went on to become the core of the French Impressionists. For the next few years Louveciennes and the adjacent villages of Bougival and Marly-le-Roi were to appear in well over a hundred of their paintings, a few of which I show this weekend.

Just beyond Chatou, the River Seine sweeps to the right in a bend with a series of long islands with popular bathing houses, among them the famous La Grenouillère. In the summer of 1869, Auguste Renoir was living at his parents’ house in Louveciennes, just to the south of this bend, where Camille Pissarro and his family were renting a house. He visited Claude Monet and his family, who were living near Bougival, also on that bend, and they often painted together.

Some of the formative moments in Impressionism if not European art occurred when Monet and Renoir visited La Grenouillère.

Renoir painted at least three different views of La Grenouillère that summer: that above is now in Stockholm, and that below, which is most similar to Monet’s, is in the Oskar Reinhart Collection in Switzerland; the third (not shown here) is in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Originally conceived as plein air sketches preparatory to more finished paintings for submission to the Salon the following year, they came to define these brilliant shimmering images formed from high chroma brushstrokes as Impressionist style.

If Impressionism has to have a single moment of birth, it’s surely in the summer of 1869 at La Grenouillère.

Monet’s Bathers at la Grenouillère is his early statement of his Impressionist agenda. The pair realised that Impressionism was about these sketched instants. This also reveals Monet’s preference for modern pigments, as most of the brighter mid-blues here use cobalt blue, introduced earlier in the nineteenth century.

In addition to Renoir, Pissarro and Monet, Alfred Sisley maintained a studio nearer the river in Bougival, where the four artists painted, starved and fought off despair together.

Pissarro painted a succession of views of the roads around the village. His Road to Versailles at Louveciennes (Snow Effect) (1869) is typical of his earlier ‘road’ paintings, showing an avenue of tall, bare-branched trees, brushed in coarsely.

The following winter his paintings concentrated on road scenes around Louveciennes, a theme which continued for many years, spanning the seasons.

As many artists before him, Pissarro used trees to frame his motifs in repoussouir, but during the late 1860s they started to invade more central areas of the canvas. In about 1869, in his Winter Landscape at Louveciennes for the first time tree trunks and branches spread across his canvas, breaking up the motif behind into small sections.

Pissarro’s Houses at Bougival, Autumn is clearly dated 1870, although by that time he had moved from Louveciennes. It is also thought to have been exhibited at the Salon that year, suggesting it may have been started in late 1869.

Like Pissarro, Sisley started depicting the streets of suburbs, including Early Snow in Louveciennes. This has been dated to 1870, although it appears more likely that it was painted en plein air late the previous year.

Following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, in September 1870 the Pissarros’ house in Louveciennes was requisitioned by the invading Prussians. The family fled first to their friends in Montfoucault, then in December travelled on to England, where they settled in Norwood, at that time an outer suburb of London. When in England, Pissarro met Paul Durand-Ruel, who became his dealer, and Claude Monet, who had also fled to London.

Bougival was also overrun by Prussian soldiers, who commandeered Sisley’s studio; many of his early works were lost, as Pissarro’s were in Louveciennes, just over a mile away. The Sisleys were forced into the city of Paris, and despite Alfred’s British nationality, they remained trapped through the siege of the city into the following year. Worse still, the Sisley family business collapsed and his parents were in no position to support the artist.

By the early 1860s, the large and ancient Forest of Fontainebleau, to the south-east of Paris, had been attracting those of the Barbizon School, who painted realist landscapes in front of the motif. The next generation started visiting in 1865, and went on to form the French Impressionists.

In May 1865, the young Frédéric Bazille left the city of Paris for the Forest of Fontainebleau, where he painted Landscape at Chailly (1865) in company with Claude Monet, and possibly Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley. Although clearly influenced by the Barbizon School, his colours are much brighter, and escape the rather sombre browns and greens that dominated much of the work of that earlier art.

Sisley painted this Avenue of Chestnut Trees in La Celle-Saint-Cloud to the west of the forest in 1865, again in Barbizon style. He didn’t submit it to the Salon until 1867, when it was refused. It then remained unsold for ten years before being bought by Sisley’s patron Jean-Baptiste Faure, a celebrated opera singer.

The following year, Sisley walked through the forest with Renoir. He then stayed in the village of Marlotte, where Renoir, Monet, Bazille, Pissarro and Cézanne also visited to paint.

Sisley was more successful with Women Going to the Woods, completed in 1866. This was one of his two paintings exhibited at the Salon that year, and shows the main street in the village of Marlotte with a little rustic staffage.

Clearing in the Woods (1865) is Renoir’s first substantial (surviving) landscape painting, and shows strong influence from Corot. He adopts quite a detailed realist style in this view of a clearing in the midst of massive chestnut trees. These are believed to be near the small village of La Celle-St-Cloud, to the west of Paris not far from Bougival, rather than in the forest. It’s likely that he painted there in the company of Alfred Sisley, who made two views of the same site in very different style.

The following year Renoir painted his friend Jules Le Coeur and his Dogs in the Forest of Fontainebleau. This is unusual among his works, as it was preceded by two studies, and all three were made using the palette knife rather than brushes. This makes it most likely to have been painted before Renoir abandoned the knife and returned to the brush, by the middle of May 1866.

The following year Abbott Handerson Thayer, an American artist who trained in Paris, painted this wonderful oil sketch of Landscape at Fontainebleau Forest (c 1876). This is probably the loosest and most Impressionist painting of his career.

At some time in the late nineteenth century, the wealthy industrialist, amateur painter and patron of Impressionism, Henri Rouart painted In Fontainebleau Forest. This may have been inspired by Corot, but is a realist study in light, shade, and the texture of bark.

John Ferguson Weir was another American painter who had trained in Paris, and became the first director of the School of Fine Arts at Yale University. He visited in about 1902, when he painted Forest of Fontainebleau (c 1902), with its tiny solitary figure against the fallen trunk.

In 1867 Théodore Rousseau died in the village of Barbizon, and he was followed in 1875 by Jean-François Millet. By the twentieth century the forest had fallen out of favour with the new generation.

Almost all who paint in oils use conventional brushes, but there’s a significant minority who sometimes, or frequently, use different tools to apply and shape the paint layer. Of those, the most popular are palette knives, generally used to move and mix paint on the palette. Others have used the other end of the brush stick to incise, or their fingers.

Marie Bashkirtseff’s painting of a class in the Académie Julien in Paris in 1881 demonstrates how oil painting should be done by the textbook. The artist, shown in her self-portrait in the centre foreground, is using a long-bladed palette knife to prepare the paint on her palette. At her feet, on an old sheet of newspaper, are her brushes, all with handles of typical length, and the pupil behind her is using a maul stick to rest her right hand while painting with her brush.

Gustave Courbet applied his paint using a palette knife for some of his paintings. This has been identified from the facture in some of his paintings of caves that he made from about 1864, including The Grotto of Sarrazine near Nans-sous-Sainte-Anne above.

Another enthusiast for painting with a knife was Auguste Renoir.

In 1866, Renoir painted his friend Jules Le Coeur and his Dogs in the Forest of Fontainebleau. This is unusual among his works, as it was preceded by two studies, and all three were made using the palette knife rather than brushes. This makes it most likely to have been painted before Renoir abandoned the knife and returned to the brush, by the middle of May 1866.

Renoir returned to the technique in The Mosque, also known as Arab Festival, in 1881. Small strokes of bright colour and energetic work with the palette knife give it a strong feeling of movement, and it so impressed Claude Monet that he bought it from Durand-Ruel in 1900.

Anna Althea Hills’ Fall, Orange County Park (1916) is a classic and highly accomplished plein air painting that appears to have been made with extensive and deft use of the knife, particularly in the foreground.

Perhaps the most famous artist who is known to have painted with his fingers is Leonardo da Vinci.

This Annunciation, painted in oil and tempera on a poplar panel, is generally agreed to be one of the earliest of Leonardo’s own surviving paintings. When it was painted is in greater doubt, but a suggestion of around 1473-75 seems most appropriate. There are numerous pentimenti, particularly in the head of the Virgin. Its perspective projection is marked in scores in its ground and Leonardo used his spontaneous and characteristic technique of fingerpainting in some of its passages.

Finally, some painters are well-known for their use of brushes with exceptionally long handles. These enabled them to stand back, sometimes almost on the opposite side of their studio, get an overall view of their canvas, and paint from the same distance as a viewer.

Like all plein air painters, Paul César Helleu (1859–1927) shown in John Singer Sargent’s An Out-of-Doors Study from about 1889, is using brushes with handles of modest length. His canvas is fairly small, and he’s working close-in while clutching a brace of brushes in his left hand. Some designed for use when painting in front of the motif have even shorter handles, but when back in the studio Helleu would almost certainly have opted for longer.

Whistler was renowned for using brushes with handles over one metre (39 inches) long, and appears to have used them when painting Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl in 1862 on a canvas just over two metres (78 inches) tall. He reworked it between 1867-72 to make it more ‘spiritual’ and reduce its original realism.

Early in his career, Joaquín Sorolla established his reputation of painting ‘voraciously’, often using brushes with extremely long handles and large canvases. Although Sewing the Sail from 1896 may look a spontaneous study of the effects of dappled light, Sorolla composed this carefully with the aid of at least two drawings and a sketch, and given its 2.2 metre (87 inches) height, he was almost certainly using brushes of similar length.

In 1868, Frédéric Bazille completed two of his most successful figurative paintings, The Family Gathering, started the previous summer, and View of the Village.

Another painting of figures in a landscape he made that summer is Fisherman with a Net (1868), which the following year was refused by the Salon jury. This was painted on the banks of the River Lez, close to Bazille’s family’s estate at Méric. Unlike most of his other figures in a landscape, it was executed relatively quickly with a single preparatory drawing.

The stark contrast between the flesh figures and the rich greens of the surrounding vegetation makes the two men pop out almost incongruously.

Bazille remained productive through the following winter, in part because he and Renoir reorganised their shared studio. His portrait of Pierre Auguste Renoir (1868-69) was a quick oil sketch that probably filled in some free time when waiting for models to become available. It was painted over an abandoned still life, and is a wonderfully painterly snapshot in oils.

His growing success ensured that he had no difficulty finding models. Woman in Moorish Costume was painted during the winter of 1868-69, and is a nod towards the vogue of ‘orientalism’ at the time.

He also painted his second portrait of Edmond Maître in early 1869. He had met Maître (1840-1898) in 1865. Like Bazille, he had moved to Paris to study, in his case law in 1859, but had become a civil servant to allow him sufficient free time to enjoy his pursuits, including music and art. They were to remain close friends until Bazille’s death.

He was visited by Daubigny, and Alfred Stevens invited him to his evening meetings. With continuing hostility from some members of the Salon jury, notably Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bazille had only one painting, View of the Village, accepted for the Salon of 1869. However, he wasn’t discouraged, and seems to have relished the ongoing battle between the Impressionists and Gérôme.

Bazille started painting Summer Scene, also known as Bathers, during the summer of 1869 when he was on holiday in Montpellier. He had already made a series of compositional studies starting in February that year, but when he was working on the canvas, he found it hard going, and complained of headaches and other pains.

He eventually opted for a composition based on strong diagonals, in which the bathers in the foreground are in shade, while the two wrestlers in the distance are lit by sunshine. The landscape background was painted from the hot green mixture of grass with birch and pine trees, typical of the banks of the River Lez near Montpellier. He completed this in early 1870, and it was accepted for the Salon of that year, where it was well-received by the critics.

La Toilette (1870) was one of his three planned projects for the winter of 1869-70. However, with three models required, he had to ask his father for money to cover their cost. This was refused by the Salon jury of 1870, when Daubigny resigned from the jury in protest.

Bazille’s Studio, or The Studio on the Rue La Condamine, was another project he worked on during that winter.

Bazille clearly liked painting his studio, but the three canvases he completed showing his different studios aren’t as simple as they might appear. Inspired by Fantin-Latour’s A Studio in the Batignolles Quarter (1869-70), which includes Bazille, it is in some ways its antithesis.

Bazille was careful in the choice of paintings shown, which include View of the Village on the easel, Fisherman with a Net, Terrace at Méric, and La Toilette as yet unfinished. The largest painting hanging is Renoir’s Landscape with Two Figures, and there is also a small still life by Monet. Bazille used these as pictures within a picture to map his career, from the past to his aspirations for the Salon in 1870, not in his successes so much as in the paintings refused, and better appreciated by the colleagues shown.

Flowers (c 1870) is one of a small group of floral paintings made during the Spring of 1870, when he moved to his own studio in the rue des Beaux-Arts.

Bazille painted two related but different versions of La négresse aux pivoines (Young Woman with Peonies) in the Spring of 1870. His professional model is the same as that used for La Toilette. She is normally read as being a servant engaged in making the floral arrangement, although in the other version (at the National Gallery of Art in Washington) she appears to be a flower seller.

At the time, the dominant flower, the peony, was a relatively recent import to France, and would probably have been seen as bringing a touch of exoticism to the two paintings. The striking vase may have been borrowed from Fantin-Latour. Rishel has proposed that this painting in Montpellier was intended as homage to Gustave Courbet, and that in Washington to Eugène Delacroix.

In the summer of 1870, Bazille worked on three paintings when he was staying alone at Méric. Study for a Young Male Nude appears odd because it was painted over an unfinished painting of two women in a garden, and the lower third of the canvas shows the lower part of their dresses.

On 19 July 1870, France declared war on Prussia. Within a month, Bazille had enlisted in the Third Zouave Regiment. He spent September training in Algeria, then returned into combat in France. On 28 November 1870, Bazille was killed at the Battle of Beaune-la-Rolande. He would have celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday just over a week later.

In but eight years of painting, Bazille had shown great technical skill, originality, and high promise for his future in the Impressionist movement. Unlike his close friends Monet and Renoir, he was particularly interested in and adept at depicting figures in landscapes. That brilliant future, which would surely have changed Impressionism too, was abruptly ended in a futile attempt to relieve the Siege of Paris.

References

Wikipedia.

Hilaire, Michel, & Perrin, Paul (eds) (2016), Frédéric Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism, Flammarion. ISBN 978 2 080 20285 7.

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.

As we all should really be on holiday, I’m taking a long weekend to look at the stories of three green pigments, starting today with the oldest and most elusive of them, the mineral malachite.

Because green is a secondary colour, it might seem better mixed from blue and yellow, as it has been in various recipes such as Prussian green. But the painter always prefers using single pigments for the purity of their chroma, and the fact that the more pigments that get mixed, the closer the colour comes to muddy grey.

Given the shortage of lightfast bright greens, it’s surprising how little-used malachite green is in European painting, despite its rich colour. For a while it rejoiced quietly under traditional names including chrysocolla, green verditer, and even green bice, but it only ever became popular in Japan and China.

As a natural mineral, malachite is not uncommon, and a reliable source of pure pigment, which is chemically basic carbonate of copper. Malachite green was known to the ancient Egyptians, who appear to have used it as eye-paint. Found abundantly in Japanese and Chinese paintings from the seventh century onwards, it wasn’t used much in Europe until the Renaissance. After that, it almost died out in Europe until the nineteenth century, when it enjoyed a brief revival.

Two versions of the painting by Watanabe Kazan 渡辺崋山 of Sato Issai 佐藤一斎（五十歳）像 show malachite green at its finest.

This version from 1824, now in the Freer in Washington, is known to use malachite green with a slightly blue shade and deep in colour.

This smaller and earlier version from 1821, now in Tokyo, is a lighter, more yellow shade. I’m not aware of its pigment having been analysed, but I’d be surprised if it was straight malachite green.

The biggest problem with its adoption in Europe was the popularity there of oil paint. The pigment worked well where it could be ground quite coarsely and used in water-based media like fresco and egg tempera, but the finer you grind it, the paler it becomes. Oil painters like smooth buttery paints with fine pigment particles, which sadly didn’t work for malachite green.

The rich, almost emerald green robes of Spinello Aretino’s Virgin Enthroned with Angels from about 1380 contain malachite green, here in tempera medium.

Among its earliest appearances in oil paint is this spectacular centre panel of the van Eyck brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece, famous in its own right as the Adoration of the Lamb (c 1425-1432).

Continuing use of egg tempera in the Southern Renaissance helped it survive. Piero della Francesca’s famous The Baptism of Christ (after 1437), made in egg tempera on poplar wood, relies on the pigment for its greens. Microscopic examination of the paint layer here shows coarse mineral particles typical of natural malachite.

In Francesco del Cossa’s Saint Vincent Ferrer from about 1473-75, it has been identified in the dark green grass at the foot of the painting. This too was made using egg tempera.

However, microscopy of this paint layer shows that these pigment particles don’t seem to have been fractured as if they have been ground, but are globular, as occurs when the malachite green has been made by a process of precipitation. Such artificial malachite green didn’t appear in European paintings until after about 1430, just in time for Francesco del Cossa.

Although he painted in oils, Tintoretto was an enthusiastic user of malachite green. To obtain the range of greens seen in the rich and varied colours of vegetation in his Saint George and the Dragon from about 1555, he used this pigment with copper resinate glazes, a technique found in other paintings of the period.

Tintoretto’s vast oil painting of The Last Judgment (1560-62) in the Chiesa della Madonna dell’Orto, Venice, has been found to contain malachite green, I suspect in the band of green depicting the Flood just below the centre. The detail below makes this a bit clearer.

When painting the frescoes formerly in the Villa Aldobrandini between 1616-18, Domenichino and his assistants relied heavily on malachite green. It has been formally identified in this section, showing Apollo pursuing Daphne, where it’s the mainstay colour remaining, and is suspected in most of the others.

Although only classed as moderately permanent, these and other examples of very old frescoes show how well malachite green has retained its colour after four centuries or more. But with the rise of oil painting in European art, it fell from favour.

One of those who participated in its revival in the nineteenth century was Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose painting of Chrysanthemums from 1881-82 shows how it could still be used in oil paint. But by then there was a much wider choice of more modern green pigments; the revival was short-lived, and malachite green has hardly been used since.

Reference

Rutherford J Gettens and Elisabeth West Fitzhugh (1993) Artists’ Pigments, vol 2, edited by Ashok Roy, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 75 3.