A world of colour

Associated media

The National Gallery has long been engaged in research into the pigments in painting. Its curators have used this to create ‘an aesthetically serene exhibition’ that explores how artists have found, mixed and used colour

From the moment you enter the lower gallery at the Sainsbury Wing you are made aware of colour. Initially it’s the darkness of the foyer shop, painted black – or a shade thereof – as is the rest of the gallery, to highlight what is to follow.  This black not only provides the backdrop for the development of colour that is revealed on your journey through the rooms, but also lends serenity to the exhibition. This serenity is maintained by the beautiful collection of paintings that are displayed from the Gallery’s own collection.

This exhibition highlights the role that science and technology have played in the development of artists’ paints. Visitors are guided through the technical process of extracting the pigments for making colour from raw materials, alongside an enjoyable and easy-to-grasp theory of colour. For those wanting more in-depth information an excellent individual multimedia guide is available, as well as video information within the gallery.

The exhibition begins with an explanation of how the artists’ desire for the perfect representation of colour, as viewed in life and nature, led to the gradual development of pigments and shades of paint for the painters’ palette.  Having set the scene, the exhibition then takes the viewer on a room-by-room tour of the important colours used by artists, to illustrate how they were developed.

The first room, ‘The Quest for Blue’, shows the development of blue shades from ultramarine (literally ‘from across the sea’, as it came from Afghanistan), made from  lapis lazuli, to cobalt blue. It is in this first room that the visitor is reminded that painting does not happen independently of the world in which it is created but is a process enabled after a long timeline of events involving mining, transportation, commerce and science. In addition to a carefully chosen display of paintings to illustrate the use of blue, such as Pierre Mignard, The Marquise de Seignelay and Two of her Sons (1691), the room contains a sample of lapis lazuli and an explanation via visual media of how, and from where, the mineral derives.

In the next room, ‘Painting Green’, the viewer discovers how difficult it was for artists who wanted to accurately represent nature, to find greens using minerals in the way they had for blues. A stable green pigment was not discovered until the 19th century and a display of Paul Cézanne’s Hillside in Provencec.1890–2 adjacent to Phillipe Rousseau’s A Valley c.1860 demonstrates the improvement of green pigments over the 30-year gap between these two paintings of similar subject and composition.

The successive rooms take the viewer on a journey from yellow to cadmium to purple and finally to gold and silver – which, although metals, not colours were of fundamental importance in the artists’ use of colour effects over the centuries. The use of mixed media in each room, including a stunning painted terracotta Kneeling Angel holding a Candlestick from the Della Robbia family c. 1500–50 in the ‘Fashionably Yellow’ room, and a fragment of crimson velvet brocade with gold c.1460–99 in the ‘Seeing Red’ room, highlight how the techniques and colours used in these types of medium influenced artists and fuelled their desire to replicate those colours in their work.

This is an aesthetically serene exhibition in which just the right amount of material is displayed. It demonstrates how material history meets science, explains the difference between artificially made colours and those from minerals, highlights the physical act of painting – not just applying paint but mixing colour – illustrates the crossover of technology between mediums, and the artists’ quest for colour and stability of medium. Finally, understanding the history of making colour allows us to appreciate the continuum that exists in painting across countries and periods.

At the end of the exhibition visitors can enter a side room in the Sainsbury Wing and take part in a computer-controlled experiment in lighting and perception that has been developed by the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Newcastle. This experiment aims to demonstrate how we perceive and respond to different colours.

If you would like to know a little more before you commit to a visit, take a look at the National Gallery’s website page for the exhibition where you can enjoy a room by room tour and look at some clips of film about the making of colour.

This is an exhibition that really can be enjoyed by all the family and in my opinion the most pleasurable the National Gallery have held for some time.