نطق سوم

Lecture 3 - Challenge to the use of blue

Listen to part of the lecture in an art history class.

Professor: Okay. So, when we were discussing Gainsborough’s painting, the Blue Boy, which he painted in 1770,I mentioned the story that the painting might have been an experiment. The result of a challenge. It was believed that blue couldn’t be an important color in a painting because…well…it tends to recede into the background. Not good for your main subject, right?

So to show otherwise, Gainsborough created the Blue Boy, with the boy featured large in his famous blue clothes…and…well…l guess he proved his point.

But there was another challenge to blue. It was very very expensive back then.

Now of course, because of modern chemistry, any color is available in tubes at any art supply store. But in the 18th century and before, it wasn’t so easy.

And blue…well…the color ultramarine, the most desired shade of blue, was made from the precious stone, Lapis Lazuli, which had to be imported all the way from Afghanistan.

And the second most favorite shade of blue, after ultramarine made from Lapis Lazuli, was a shade a blue that came from another precious stone, Azurite.

But Azurite was…well…harder to work with. There’s evidence that artists would try to get around these difficulties. For example, use pigment from lapis lazuli or azurite very sparingly, and also use something cheaper, like smalt, which was made of ground glass. Thing is, smalt became discolored over time. So many artists probably avoided blues altogether rather than use something cheap and impermanent.

So, blue, and especially ultramarine pigment, was a luxury, a status symbol, worth even more than gold at times. And you even have the wealthy ordering paintings with ultramarine to show others that they could afford something made from this precious pigment, much in the same way they would order gold leaf.

Actually, the ancient Egyptians did manage to make an artificial blue, the first synthetic pigment in fact, if you can believe that. They passed the formula on to the Greeks and Romans, but then it was lost.

Anyway, not only was lapis lazuli hard to get, it was also hard to process. The recipe was difficult. The stone had to be ground finely, not easy to do with a rock, then mixed with melted wax, resins and oils, wrapped in a cloth and knitted like bread dough. The fine particles of ultramarine were then separated from the rest.

The process was time-consuming, which also contributed to the high cost of producing ultramarine, and it didn’t even yield much usable pigment.

As a result, the French government sponsored a competition in 1824 to find a cheaper way to make ultramarine pigment. And soon after a process was demonstrated where a combination of coal, sulfur and other cheap, commonplace substances were heated, creating a suitable synthetic substitute for lapis lazuli. So there’s no doubt that 19th-century artists, after good synthetic versions were available, used more ultramarine. Think of the impressionists, for example,they had a lot more choices or at least, less expensive choices, than painters not that long before them.