Gamblin Artists Colors
Oil Colors Throughout The Centuries
by Laurie S. Hurwitz, American Artist Magazine


Fascinated with historical oil colors, artist and paintmaker Robert Gamblin recently had the opportunity to manufacture these paints and compare them with those available today.

"I'm sure the Old Masters would love to be alive today," says Robert Gamblin, a painter, a paint manufacturer, and the owner of Gamblin Artists Colors in Portland, Oregon. "Having surveyed three hundred years of paintmaking history, it is my opinion that artist-grade oil paints have continually improved and have never been better." Last year, Gamblin and his wife and partner, Martha, were commissioned to do a research project for the conservation department of Washington, DC's Smithsonian Institution that gave him firsthand knowledge of the types of oil colors used in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

The conservators at the Smithsonian collected small samples - about three hundred milliliters each - of 150 historical pigments, including lapis lazuli, azurite, verdigris, realgar, and vermillion, which were sent to the Gamblins. After consulting and studying a number of historical resources, the Gamblins ground them in oil with the correct pigment-to-oil ratio on small, metal-roller mills. The resulting paints will be used in the conservation laboratory; they will be tested on various grounds to see their reactions to modern solvents.

Samples of each pigment were ground in a few different manners - in cold-pressed linseed oil, in cold-pressed linseed oil with lead drier (or litharge) added to it, and in boiled linseed oil. Robert Gamblin found that colors ground in the linseed oil with lead drier added dried most quickly. The ones ground in boiled linseed oil took the least amount of pigment and produced "the greatest amount of leveling, which created an enamel like surface," he says.

In the course of doing the research project, the Gamblins encountered many surprises. "Some of the materials that painters used are strange and are often difficult to work with," states Gamblin. "Bitumen is one example. Samples of bitumen took many months to dry and their surfaces looked like the surface of the moon - cratered and pockmarked. I found bitumen a really inferior material, although it has a gorgeous undertone.

"The color verdigris, which is basically a copper compound, intrigued me the most," he says of the bluish-green color. "I had never seen it before and I was rather curious because I had read that it was extremely difficult to use. Painters working with verdigris had to be careful about mixing it with certain colors because it would darken considerably. I couldn't understand why artists went to the trouble of isolating it from other colors when using it. But when I actually saw the color, I realized its clarity is unmatched by anything else I have ever seen, although phthalocyanine green has a good deal in common with it. I believe I would have gone to the trouble of using verdigris if I had been around then."

Another surprise was encountered in genuine vermilion, a compound of mercury and sulphur that he says has a "light and brilliance" to it. "It hates oil," Gamblin adds. "When the two are combined, the mixture immediately separates. To be usable, it would need a small amount of wax added to it to help the two stay together." Smalt, which was in use on and off for 3,000 to 4,000 years before the pigment cobalt blue became available in its current form, was also found to be unusual. Traditionally used in the sky in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century palettes, smalt was actually made up of tiny slivers of blue glass. "The more finely it was ground, the better it worked," he says. "It did not grind very well and once I had made the color, using it was like painting with ground glass. I could feel it in the texture of the paint."

According to Gamblin, gamboge, a transparent yellow pigment from Thailand, is a material that is "almost binder and pigment all in one. It is a colored secretion from a tree, and we had to heat it to get it soft before mixing it with the oil. At this point, it was in globules; when it went through the mill, the globules exploded. The more it was ground, the more it became paint, but those globules exploded like popping popcorn as it became finer and finer.

"In working with many pigments that are no longer available, I saw the reality of the fact that colors don't necessarily stay around forever," Gamblin continues. "Gamboge is typical of the worst case of painters having to make do. Gamboge was difficult to grind, it had a horrible sticky texture, and it faded badly, but it was the only material that was as beautifully transparent as the later Indian Yellow, with its warm, yellow-orange glow."

During the course of the project, the Gamblins wore gloves, aprons, and masks, and set up a dust collector over their heads. Ordinarily, they don't manufacture paints that incorporate lead, mercury, or arsenic, "but we had all three in the shop during the project," Gamblin explains. "The pigment that frightened me the most was the realgar because it's sulfide of arsenic, which is highly poisonous. Realgar, a reddish-orange color, was very difficult to work with - it was clearly poisonous and had a very acrid odor." He adds that painters "must have been happy to get realgar off their palettes."

Gamblin sent the samples he had made to the Smithsonian, but he kept small amounts in order to test colors available to artists - from what Gamblin calls Old World colors to modern inorganic and organic colors. "Evaluating the inorganic colors made in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries is especially important at this time as we begin to see the current legal assault one by one on these excellent colors - first lead, now manganese and cadmium. Next will be chromium and cobalt," he says. Gamblin is referring to certain colors that have recently been in danger of being banned because of toxicity.

Gamblin, who originally became interested in manufacturing oils as a painter, created four small oil sketches of an intensely colorful landscape, repeating the theme with the different palettes that were available at three periods in history. The first painting, representing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colors, used lead white, vermillion, red lake, red iron oxide, gamboge, and smalt. The second painting used the inorganic colors (made from mineral pigments) of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: cadmium reds, cadmium yellows, viridian, cobalt blue, cobalt green, and Prussian blue. The third painting was made with twentieth-century organic colors - napthol reds, hansa yellows, phthalocyanine greens, phthalocyanine blues, and dioxazine purple. (Organic colors are made from vegetable colors, animal colors, or synthetic substances. All the organic colors in the painting were synthesized from hydrogen and carbon.) In the fourth painting, he compared tints of all the colors used from the seventeenth century to the present.

Says Gamblin, "In the first painting, I was frustrated because I didn't have a wide range of color. The reds were rather muted, the yellows had a terrible texture, and the verdigris couldn't be mixed with anything else. I did find the iron oxides very interesting, however. I was painting under the circumstances a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century painter experienced. Characteristically, we think of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century paintings as being pretty muted and as dealing with natural light; this situation seems to result from the palette that was available then.

"In the next two paintings I did, I wanted intense red mountains, and intense yellow ground, and an intense purple road, and the colors were all right there - and they all had beautiful working characteristics. All colors have their charms and their value to painters. When cadmiums, cobalts, and leads came together with hydrated chromium oxide and other modern inorganic colors, painters for the first time had a set of colors that were uniformly brilliant and opaque, and had working properties that were all pretty equal. I didn't have to improvise; they were there on a silver platter for me to choose from.

"The landscape made with the modern organic palette," he continues, "allowed me the greatest range of options. I could actually choose the temperature of a color within a hue. It was very interesting to be able to do this. If I wanted a red, I could select any red from the bluest to the most orange, and I could change its temperature without going to another hue." Although in their pure form he found the last two color groups "colorwise very much the same," in making the fourth painting, which used tints of the colors, he found that the organic tints of the colors were uniformly more intense than inorganic tints. "This tinting strength is, I think, the real value of the organic colors," he states.

Gamblin concludes that nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial progress brought about colors in all major hues that had excellent brightness, excellent overall opacity, and excellent working characteristics, especially for impasto painting. With the coming of organic colors in the twentieth century, the shift of hues was extended, although Gamblin feels that the major contribution of the organic colors to the world of color was their capacity to produce tints of an intensity never before possible.

Gamblin also stresses that as the colors moved through time, they become less toxic - from lead to titanium, from arsenic to cadmium to arylide, and from mercury to cadmium to napthol. He concludes, "Having the chance to make paint with a number of old pigments has made me acutely aware of how fortunate we are as twentieth-century painters to have such a fabulous array of colors with which to paint."

(reprinted with permission)

  
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