In the first article of this pair looking at paintings of windmills, I covered traditional views up to the first of the pre-Impressionists. This article takes this account from around 1850 up to the period between the two World Wars. Although the development of steam power during the nineteenth century brought great changes to many industries, windmills continued to flourish until the middle of the century, and even then they only declined gradually until the Second World War.

Samuel Palmer’s Summer Storm near Pulborough, Sussex from about 1851 refers to Dutch landscape painting, in a very Kentish context. A storm is seen approaching the rolling countryside near Pulborough, now in West Sussex. On the left, in the middle distance, a small bridge leads across to a hamlet set around a prominent windmill, whose blades are blurred as they are being driven by the rising wind.

Windmill styles differ outside northern Europe. When Jean-Léon Gérôme travelled down the River Danube in about 1855, he claimed to have witnessed this moving scene of Recreation in a Russian Camp, Remembering Moldavia (1855). A group of Russian soldiers in low spirits is being uplifted by making music, under the direction of their superior. Gérôme has captured an atmosphere which few of his other paintings achieved: the marvellous light of the sky, the skein of geese on the wing, and the parade of windmills in the distance, all draw together with the soldiers in their sombre greatcoats.

The following year, JC Dahl’s Burning Windmill at Stege is an unusual fire-painting following a traditional sub-genre of the Dutch Golden Age. Although painted well before Impressionism, Dahl echoes the red of the flames in the field and trees to the left of the windmill, and even in his signature.

During the winter of 1864, Johan Jongkind returned to the Netherlands, where he painted this Winter View with Skaters, which is more overtly pre-Impressionist.

Jongkind’s watercolour sketch of a Windmill at Antwerp of 1866 is even more painterly.

Claude Monet’s second visit to the Netherlands in 1874 ensured that The Windmill on the Onbekende Gracht, Amsterdam (1874) became a part of the history of Impressionism. This shows a windmill known as Het Land van Beloften, De Eendracht or De Binnen Tuchthuismolen, which was built in the late seventeenth century, and was moved from there to Utrecht just a couple of years after Monet painted it on the banks of the River Amstel.

Frits Thaulow’s painstakingly detailed View of Amerikavej in Copenhagen (1881) shows a windmill in the background, where it’s being used to provide power to the adjacent industrial site.

Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Ukrainian Landscape from 1882 shows one of the distinctive windmills on the elevated bank alongside a major river and its more populated floodplain to the right.

It may not have been Monet who first made the visual association between Dutch windmills and fields of tulips in flower, but his 1886 painting of Tulip Field in Holland must be its best-known depiction.

When Vincent van Gogh moved to Paris in 1886, he stayed with his brother Theo in Montmartre. He painted a series of marvellous views of the remaining windmills there, including the most famous of them all, Le Moulin de la Galette (1887), in whose gardens Renoir had painted his Bal du moulin de la Galette a decade earlier.

Paul Signac’s Rotterdam. The Windmill. The Canal. Morning (1906) is a Divisionist view of a windmill in the centre of this major port.

It was a Dutch painter who took windmills from Impressionism to the modernist styles of the twentieth century: Piet Mondrian.

Piet Mondrian’s gentle nocturne of Oostzijdse Mill on the River Gein by Moonlight from about 1903 is one of several views of windmills that he painted in Impressionist and post-Impressionist style.

When he started experimenting with vibrant colour and patterned brushstrokes in about 1908, this painting of a Mill in Sunlight marks his point of departure.

The Red Mill (1911) continues Mondrian’s move towards areas of flat colour. That year he left the windmills of Amsterdam and moved to Paris. To mark his move into the avant garde of that city, he dropped the second ‘a’ from his surname, going from Mondriaan to Mondrian. He became increasingly influenced by Georges Bracque and the Cubist works of Pablo Picasso, and the purely abstract paintings for which he remains well-known today.

Serhii Svitoslavskyi’s Ukrainian Landscape with Windmills, probably from about 1911, shows a small cluster of windmills with grazing livestock.

By the end of the First World War, milling grain had become more centralised, and the hundreds of thousands of small windmills across northern Europe lost their business. A few have been preserved, and some are still used for specialist products such as stoneground flour. But the unmistakable sight of a windmill on the skyline had been lost from much of the land.

During the 1930s, the Raviliouses started spending time in Sussex, where they became close friends with Peggy Angus, whose house The Furlongs at Beddingham, East Sussex, became a second home. Eric Ravilious became particularly fond of painting the chalk downs there, as in his Windmill (1934). This isn’t a windmill in the traditional sense, but a smaller wind-driven pump to extract water from the chalk, mainly for irrigation.

Unlike watercolour, oil paint ‘dries’ by an irreversible process of chemical polymerisation. Once ‘dried’ it resists solvents and can be painted over without any risk of its pigments mixing between layers. Unlike modern acrylic paints, oil paint usually takes at least a week or two before its surface is dry, so allows the painter to control mixing of an existing layer with fresh paint. Skilful control of paint viscosity and drying rate thus gives fine control over the softness of edges and their blurring or sharpness.

This is illustrated well in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s portrait of Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist from about 1530. Crisp edges appear where you expect, for example between skin and clothing. In some places, he also outlined edges with thin lines of dark shadow for emphasis. Where skin tone changes more subtly, and in Salome’s eyebrows, there are soft transitions achieved by painting wet on wet and blurring the edge, a technique often known as sfumato, as seen in the detail below.

Cranach and the staff of his workshop would have worked on that painting over a period of many weeks to achieve those effects. In contrast, sketching with oil paints in front of the motif is far simpler, and on a more modest scale. Because of constantly changing light and shadow, most proficient landscape artists aim to complete their oil sketches in under two hours, and an hour is ideal.

Robert Henri’s Landscape Sketch at Escorial (1906) was painted on a wooden pochade panel, almost certainly in a single short session outside the city of Madrid, in the hills near the Escorial. Although he used the viscosity of different paints to make its skyline sharp, you can see where his coarse brushstrokes have been applied and colours mixed and laid in streaks.

The young Canadian artist Tom Thomson excelled in rapid sketching in oils, with several witnessed accounts of him dashing off a painting in little more than fifteen minutes. As a result he was able to capture many transient effects, such as the passing thunderstorm in Thunderhead from 1912-13. He has found it harder to keep a crisp skyline, and clearest separation of paint is in the white masts of the boats at the edge of the water. Those were painted last, in single strokes with as little diluent as possible.

Before the nineteenth century, quick oil sketches were almost never shown to the public, but used by masters including Valenciennes and Constable purely as preparative studies. When fashions changed, it became acceptable if not desirable for paintings to look sketchy and rushed, although appearances can sometimes be deceptive.

Some masters of fast painting used these skills in multiple sessions, to increase the amount of detail they could incorporate into a landscape. When Pissarro suffered from eye problems late in his career, he painted from rooms with views over the streets of Paris, and produced some of his finest cityscapes.

Boulevard Montmartre, Spring Morning (1897) is composed primarily of buildings and streets, a plethora of figures, and countless carriages to move those people around, the ingredients for so many of his late paintings.

In the foreground, Pissarro may have formed each quite roughly, but he has painted in sufficient detail. Three white horses range in tone and colour, with highlights on the front of each head. You can see which people are wearing hats, and spot ladies in their fashionable clothing.

Deeper into the distance, detail is lost, and the carriages and crowds merge into one another. Still they have a rhythm, highlights and shadows, and form. He must have spent day after day at his hotel window populating these busy streets.

Other Impressionist paintings appear at first sight to have been painted quickly in front of the motif, but were more likely worked on over a period of months in the studio. Once the public had come to expect an Impressionist painting to look as if it had been painted quickly, they expected the same look even though some paintings may have required several months painting.

Monet’s Flowering Plum Trees (1879), for example, has a complex structure in its paint layer, as seen from the surface in the detail below. Some marks have been added wet-in-wet, but many wet-on-dry, demonstrating it must have been worked on over a period of weeks or months.

The myth about Monet’s Grainstacks series is that they depict transient effects of season, weather, and light, as they were painted en plein air over the course of the winter. Looking at all twenty-five, I have long had my doubts, and suspect that Monet spent a lot of the time prior to their exhibition making further changes to them. This in no way lessens Monet’s sublime achievement, nor their art in any way. It’s just that they aren’t quite the paintings described by the myth that has grown around them.

Looking at Grainstacks, End of Summer, considered to be one of the earliest in the series and numbered 1266, the trees behind the two grainstacks are still in full summer leaf, with no indication of the advent of autumn. Yet Monet’s signature gives the year as 1891. Looking at its paint surface in detail (below), some has been applied wet-in-wet and blended with underlying and adjacent paint, but many other brushstrokes have clearly been applied over dry underlayers.

The blue-grey shadow of this grainstack was applied with relatively dilute paint wet-on-dry over thicker off-white paint with marked surface texture. However, that off-white paint has itself been applied wet-on-dry over a pale green layer. This couldn’t have been achieved in the same day, even when the ambient temperatures were warmer during the early autumn, but probably reflects at least three sessions with drying time in between them.

Grainstack, Sun in the Mist, numbered 1286, is thought to be one of the later paintings in the series, apparently showing the sole remaining grainstack in the Spring of 1891. It too has multiple layers applied wet-on-dry, with many hatched brushstrokes in shades of orange and pink apparently applied over a well-dried surface. These are again shown well in the detail (below) of the grainstack itself.

At the right side of the foot of the grainstack, the lowest layer of paint consists of dull blue and green that appear to have been applied at about the same time and have blended in places. When that layer had dried, infrequent and relatively thick streaks of white were added wet-on-dry. When that had dried, brown-orange was applied to form the uppermost layer. That uppermost layer has also been used to remodel the form of the grainstack using thickly-applied flesh, pale yellow and orange paint.

The evidence points to Monet starting each of this series with a sketch using more dilute paint in front of the motif in the circumstances described in the title. He then brought each canvas into his studio, where he continued to work on it, making further adjustments, adding partial layers of paint, and tweaking each work in comparison to the others in the series. This would have taken place over a period of several weeks: in the case of the canvases that he had started at the end of the summer of 1890, such as W1266 above, that period could have amounted to six months.

That may well have been longer than the time taken by Cranach to paint Salome.

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.

Until the advent of chemistry in the eighteenth century, early in the Age of Enlightenment, the vast majority of pigments occurred in nature, even if the minerals or plant matter from which they were derived had to be specially processed. The first truly synthetic pigment was so ancient that it had been forgotten completely by the Middle Ages: Egyptian blue was originally made before about 3000 BCE by heating together powdered rocks and sand, but that was an exception. It wasn’t until the early years of the eighteenth century that a hydrated iron hexacyanoferrate complex soon known as Prussian blue was synthesized.

No one knows who first made Prussian blue, nor exactly when it was first synthesized. It seems to have appeared initially around 1704, and its origins have been attributed variously to Diesbach in Berlin, or Mak in Leipzig. For once its name is appropriate, as it was a product of the Prussian Empire. Its potential as a colourant was recognised by 1710 when it went on sale in Berlin, and by about 1724 it was being manufactured across Europe.

Among the earliest surviving oil paintings to use Prussian Blue is that by Adriaen van der Werff and Henrik van Limborch, of Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph. This was started by van der Werff before he died in 1722, and the paint containing Prussian blue pigment is thought to have been applied by him to the curtain at the upper left. After van der Werff’s death, his pupil Henrik van Limborch finished the painting between 1727-28.

Another early example of the proven use of Prussian blue is Antoine Watteau’s The Italian Comedians from about 1720.

Canaletto is one of the first Masters to have used the new pigment extensively. Grand Canal from Palazzo Balbi toward the Rialto from 1720-23 has been attributed to him as one of his earliest surviving works, and its blues have been found to contain Prussian blue.

Canaletto was quick to adopt the pigment for use in almost all his paintings, including this view of the Rio dei Mendicanti from 1723-24, above, and his famous The Stonemason’s Yard (c 1725), below.

As experience was gained in using this pigment, it became controversial. Some artists were confident that its colour was stable and didn’t change or fade, but others experienced problems as bad as or even worse than those of the notoriously fugitive indigo blue, which it had generally replaced. It has gradually become understood that adverse results of lightfastness testing (and experience in paintings) have depended on the mixture of Prussian blue with other colours, particularly with white paint, and the presence of impurities in the pigment.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, Prussian blue was widely used with a range of binding media, with the notable exception of fresco and other alkaline media with which it proved incompatible.

William Hogarth’s paintings in his Marriage A-la-Mode series have been found to contain both smalt and Prussian blues. In The Tête à Tête (c 1743), smalt has been found in the ornate carpet, and I suspect that the ornamental pillars behind the woman rely on Prussian blue, at least in part. Hogarth trained as Prussian blue came to the ascendant, and wouldn’t have painted much before it had become widely available.

Jean-Baptiste Perronneau’s A Girl with a Kitten from about 1743 is a fine example of the use of Prussian blue in pastels: the girl’s blue dress and the background have both been found to contain the pigment.

Prussian blue also became popular in water-based media. William Blake’s Lucia Carrying Dante in his Sleep, from his series depicting Dante’s Divine Comedy painted in watercolour between 1824-27, is a good example. In this and several other of his paintings, Blake used the pigment on its own and mixed with gamboge yellow in what was known as Prussian green.

Prussian blue pigment has been found in the blue passages in Whistler’s The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863-65), from his Peacock Room, shown above and in the detail below.

The use of different blue pigments varied markedly among the French Impressionists and their successors. Paul Cézanne and Georges Seurat appear to have used Prussian blue seldom if at all, but it’s well known in the work of Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh.

Although Monet’s Bathers at la Grenouillère (1869) contains cobalt blue in the brighter mid-blues of the water surface and details in the boats, darker blues towards the left, and in the clothing of some of the figures and their reflections, are almost certainly Prussian blue.

Vincent van Gogh’s portrait of La Mousmé from 1888 illustrates some of the difficulties of identifying pigment use. Its unusual title is derived from the Japanese word musume, meaning girl; at the time the French word was understood to mean an ‘easy’ girl.

Infra-red images demonstrate van Gogh’s use of at least two different blues, one of which has been identified as Prussian blue. The two (or more) blue pigments aren’t distributed evenly: on the girl’s jacket, the three blue stripes to the left of the row of buttons contain the most Prussian blue, while the three under her right armpit, which look darker, contain little or no Prussian blue. Van Gogh also mixed yellow with Prussian blue to form the green of the flowers she holds in her hand.

Prussian blue remained a popular pigment in oil and watercolour paints well into the twentieth century, and is still offered in commercial ranges. For many artists, though, it has been replaced by much more recent synthetic blue pigments, such as phthalocyanine (‘phthalo’) blue, introduced around 1970, and is seldom used in Prussian green.

Reference

Barbara H Berrie (1997) Artists’ Pigments, vol 3, ed Elisabeth West Fitzhugh, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 76 0.

As a primary colour, red is essential to most palettes, but it has also proved technically challenging to find pigments that are both intense and lasting. This weekend I look at the history of two contenders, in vermilion and crimson, names also steeped in history.

There’s one red that looks as brilliant today as when it was first brushed out five hundred or even two thousand years ago. It’s a pigment known to, and used by, the Romans, and in ancient China was not only used extensively in art, but was scattered in graves. Vermilion is one of the most toxic pigments, and over the last century has been displaced by cadmium red and more novel organic pigments. Look at many paintings made before 1870, and their reds are likely to be dominated by vermilion.

For a long time, vermilion paint was made using powdered cinnabar, naturally-occurring mercuric sulphide, and is then technically known as cinnabar rather than vermilion. Its manufacture from liquid mercury was probably brought from China to Europe, since when much of the vermilion pigment used in Europe has been synthetic.

The main source of cinnabar, and of the metal mercury, in Europe were the mines at Almadén in Spain. These were used by the Romans, and until their closure in 2000 had produced more cinnabar and mercury than any other location. In 1563, deposits were discovered in Huancavelica in Peru, and they were the second largest source over the following three hundred years. Other important sources have been located in China, Slovenia, Italy, Mexico, and the USA.

The mining of cinnabar has long been recognised as hazardous due to its great toxicity, something known as far back as the Romans. Locked in pigment particles in oil paint it’s less hazardous than in water-based paints such as egg tempera; it’s wisest not to use cinnabar or vermilion in dry form, as in pastels, even with good respiratory and skin protection. Even with careful handling, pigment residues pose a serious threat to the environment.

The brightest of the reds in Duccio’s Transfiguration, from the Maestà Predella Panels painted in 1307-11, have the distinctive colour of vermilion. It is often associated with holy people, and holy objects, and contrasts with the other brilliant pigment of ultramarine, which is conventionally used in the clothing of the Virgin Mary.

Its one unfortunate habit is a tendency to blacken, by forming the black version of cinnabar known as metacinnabar. This tends to happen more often in the thinner, less protective paint films of aqueous media, particularly egg tempera, as shown in Nardo di Cione’s Saint John the Baptist, Saint John the Evangelist and Saint James from 1363-65. The lining of the clothing of the saint at the right uses vermilion, and has darkened in patches as a result.

Masaccio’s panel of Saints Jerome and John the Baptist from the Santa Maria Maggiore Altarpiece, from 1428-29, is another fine example of the use of a lot of vermilion (as cinnabar). The robes of Saint Jerome, on the left, may also show a little darkening in patches, but contrast well with the paler and pinker red of Saint John the Baptist at the right.

Cinnabar saw extensive and highly effective use by the van Eycks in The Ghent Altarpiece (c 1432). Because this was painted in oils, the chances of discolouration are much lower.

Botticelli used cinnabar in several passages in his Mystic Nativity (1500), where its persistent colour contrasts with his use of other red pigments, which haven’t retained their colour as well.

All the Masters and most other significant artists of the past used cinnabar, or vermilion when it was being manufactured in Europe by the early seventeenth century. Tintoretto was no exception, as shown in these two examples: Jupiter and Semele (1545) above, and The Origin of the Milky Way (c 1575), below.

Peter Paul Rubens’ centre panel of the Descent from the Cross (1612-14) in the huge triptych in Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal, in Antwerp, is one of the most spectacular demonstrations of the use of vermilion, and its lasting chromatic brilliance.

Rembrandt is another Master who used vermilion to great effect, here in the dress of the woman at the right, in his Belshazzar’s Feast (c 1635-38). The colour draws attention to her as she is so shocked as to empty the goblet she is holding in her right hand. A duller colour might have allowed this dramatic action to pass unnoticed by the viewer.

Aelbert Cuyp’s Hilly River Landscape with a Horseman talking to a Shepherdess from about 1655-60 is one of the few oil paintings in which darkening of cinnabar has become obvious. The pigment serves well in the huntsman’s coat, but has darkened in patches.

William Hogarth played on another common association of the colour red in the third painting, The Inspection, from his series Marriage A-la-Mode (c 1743). Although in English we usually refer to a scarlet woman, rather than a vermilion one, his use of vermilion here is effective in portraying the woman as a prostitute.

Vermilion remained popular well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, long enough for it to grace the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the French Impressionists.

Although Claude Monet used just a few dabs and strokes of vermilion in his landmark painting Bathers at la Grenouillère (1869), he continued to use it well into the latter years of his career. By that time, though, the new cadmium reds were replacing vermilion, a process that is almost complete today, with cadmiums now being superceded by modern organic pigments.

Reference

RJ Gettens, RL Feller & WT Chase (1993) Artists’ Pigments, vol 2, ed Ashok Roy, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 75 3.

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.

周六我和何去伦敦一日游。我们去了摄政公园（Regent’s Park）看玫瑰花和睡莲，国家美术馆（The Na […]