In the distant past, fresco painting was ideal for brightening up the walls or ceiling of a substantial building, but there was also demand for smaller, more portable works of art. Some would have been painted onto animal skins, and were ultimately developed into miniatures in beautiful manuscripts, using the precursors of watercolours. One alternative medium developed most successfully was wax, in encaustic painting.

Characteristically this uses binder that in most ambient temperatures is solid, but becomes liquid paint at higher temperatures, usually no higher than the boiling point of water. This enables the painter to heat mixtures of pigment and binder kept at around 50˚-90˚C (120˚-200˚F), apply them while still hot, and for them to bind the pigment to its ground once the paint cools.

People started to keep bees by around 7000 BCE, and one of their most important products has been the wax from which they build their hives. Beeswax has a typical melting point of about 63˚C (145˚F), a temperature readily achieved by heating water but well above daytime maximum air temperatures experienced where people live, which very seldom reach 50˚C (120˚F). Beeswax was therefore most probably the first binder used for encaustic painting.

Encaustic paint is thus unusual as it doesn’t rely on a chemical process to form the dry paint layer, but a physical change of state, which is fully reversible. Common supports include panels of wood, which originally didn’t have any ground applied. More recently grounds of gesso have been used successfully, but encaustic paints have also been applied to a wide range of supports including dried and fired clay tablets, pots, and sculpture.

One significant limitation with the process of painting using encaustic media is that heated paint tends to be thin and runny. Most artists therefore apply their paint with the support laid flat, and leave their work horizontal until the paint has solidified. Instead of painting stood up in front of an easel, they tend to work lying down.

Although encaustic paintings are susceptible to physical damage and decay, some from before the Christian era have survived, and it’s thought that the medium was used for several hundred or even thousands of years before the birth of Christ. The best-known early encaustic paintings are those made by colonists from Greece and Rome when living in Egypt between about 80-250 CE, particularly those found in the Fayum (or Faiyum) Basin. These were first discovered in about 1615, with most being removed during the nineteenth century and spread across collections in Europe and America. These funerary portraits are among the most haunting images in European art, and demonstrate how skilled encaustic painting can rival other media. It can achieve a remarkable lucency, although this depends on the processing of the beeswax and its ageing.

This Funerary Portrait of a Woman ‘Isidora’ is rendered in fine, close-packed strokes of encaustic wax to model the form, and the eyelashes have been formed by scraping away wax to reveal the underlying black ground. Originally painted on a rectangular cedar board, small squares of gold leaf were applied around her neck, and the board cut down to size to fit the facial area of the woman’s mummy for interment.

Modelling of the skin in this Funerary Portrait of the Boy Eutyches is well in advance of its time, and appears more characteristic of portraits from the Renaissance over a thousand years later.

A tradition of encaustic painting also grew up in early Christian communities, where it was used to create icons for places of worship and the homes of the wealthiest.

This encaustic painting of the Virgin Mary and Child with Saints Theodor of Amasea and George, and Angels was made in about 580 CE for Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, not far from where the Fayum portraits had been interred.

A few artists continued to paint in encaustic even after the Renaissance, although this has remained a minority pursuit. Giovanni Francesco Romanelli’s painting of Boys Fishing from about 1640 curiously uses cardboard as its support, suggesting it may have been more of an experiment.

The nineteenth century saw a resurgence in the use of more traditional media such as egg tempera. In addition to painting with that, some like Arnold Böcklin returned to try encaustics, here in one of his major works, the first version of Villa by the Sea from 1864.

More followed suit in the twentieth century, including James Ensor, Diego Rivera and Jasper Johns, and today encaustic methods have a small but enthusiastic following.

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.