More Pigments, Fewer Colors
Camille Pissarro
(French, 1830-1903)
The Artist's Palette with a Landscape,
c. 1878
Oil on panel (artist’s palette)
9 1/2 x 13 5/8 in.
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts
1955.827
While the number and variety of pigments available to the impressionists were greater than any previous time in the history of art, the impressionists actually used fewer pigments for any one painting than their academic predecessors. The traditional academic palette held about 15 pigments. Monet’s early pre-impressionist paintings of the 1860s contain as many as 15 pigments in one painting, half of them traditional pigments. A decade later, at the height of pure impressionism, the impressionists’ paintings generally contain no more than eight or 10 pigments. Of these all but one or two are new 19th-century pigments. Yet, with the reduction in the number of pigments, the paintings actually appear more colorful.
This is clearly illustrated by The Artist’s Palette with a Landscape, painted by Camille Pissarro in 1878. Here Pissarro shows us that he can paint a fully colored landscape—with only six pigments! Starting at bottom left and continuing along the top edge are: emerald green, French ultramarine blue, red lake (possibly the recently invented alizarin crimson), vermilion, chrome or zinc yellow, and lead white. Lead white, vermilion, and possibly the red lake are the only traditional pigments. Setting aside white, the five-colored pigments constitute a very balanced set of primary colors and secondary colors, a fair approximation of the rainbow. Used together with white, Pissarro could create almost any desired color simply by mixing.
