By the nineteenth century a great deal was known about how oil paint worked, but the process of polymerisation to produce a robust paint layer wasn’t really understood until well into the twentieth century. As a result, practices that caused structural failure of the paint layer weren’t uncommon, among them the use of pigments like asphalt, and removing drying oil binder in peinture à l’essence. This article looks at the latter, a technique used by Edgar Degas and others.

Tubed oil paints, certain colours in particular, can be oily, and Degas and others experimented with reducing the amount of oil in their paints. Squeezing paint out of the tube onto blotting paper or rag and removing excess oil shouldn’t cause problems, but peinture à l’essence took that to the extreme, in blotting out as much as possible, then restoring viscosity and flow by adding turpentine, a diluent that’s only going to weaken paint binding.

One of Degas’ earliest paintings of a girl and a woman, once he had started to paint ‘modern life’, is his Beach Scene from about 1869-70. It’s also probably one of his first experiments with peinture à l’essence, as demonstrated in its thin and uneven paint layer in the left foreground, by the white hat.

Seven years later, in his paintings of the Ballet at the Paris Opéra here from 1877, Degas experimented with another method of reducing the binder in his paint layer, by applying pastel over a monotype. He first created this painting on a non-absorbent surface, and while that was still wet used that to make a print on paper, which he completed by applying soft pastel on top.

Degas’ Danseuse dans sa loge (Dancer in her Dressing Room) (c 1879) is one of his experimental paintings combining pastel with peinture à l’essence applied to canvas. The detail view below shows how thinly he applied his paint to the ground, although it’s impossible to judge from that how well it’s adhering.

Oil paint has been so successful and its paint layers so robust because the pigment is sealed in a protective layer of polymerised oil. Pastels adhere far more tenuously, with precious little to bind them to the ground. Removing the drying oil and adding essentially unbound pigment will inevitably result in a fragile if not ephemeral result.

Degas’ Women Combing Their Hair (c 1875-6) is also painted in oils, probably using peinture à l’essence, on paper. The detail below show how its light brown ground shows through the thin and fragile layer of paint.

His remarkable composite work, made using peinture à l’essence, of a Dancer Fastening Her Shoe (c 1893-98), brings together four different views of the same dancer fastening her left shoe. This may have been inspired by Muybridge and Marey’s composite photos of human motion, and may well have reflected his own experiments in photography.

Among the other painters who seem to have used peinture à l’essence are Paul Gauguin, in his Vue de la Plage de Bellangenay (View Of The Beach At Bellangenay) (1889) above, and Toulouse-Lautrec, in his Danseuse assise aux Bas de roses (Dancer sat at the foot of Roses) (1890) shown below, which follows Degas in combining the technique with pastels.

This detail shows again a thin paint layer with the ground clearly visible between the painter’s gestural marks.

Even Édouard Vuillard gave way to temptation to paint The First Class Compartment in about 1898-1900 using peinture à l’essence, here on a cardboard ground that has been mounted on a panel support.

Fortunately this fad seems to have passed by the early twentieth century.

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.