Fugitive colors on Vincent van Gogh’s paintings

Vincent van Gogh, Bouquet of Irises, 1890, the background was lemon yellow.

I can’t help but wonder what this painting of Vincent van Gogh’s irises would have looked like when it was new, the yellow-green cast would not have been there and the blues would’ve been more intense. Perhaps even purple. His Bouquet of Irises against a Yellow Background (above) probably depicted purple irises, not blue ones. The yellow-green background to has shifted color and was probably closer to Naples yellow, as Vincent described it as a lemon yellow.

Irises painted May, 1889, at the St. Paul-de-Mausole asylum, in Arles, were once purple.

How much color degradation by photo-oxidation, or chemical reaction to varnishes added later has happened since this canvas was painted? Did Vincent use cadmium yellow or lead-based chrome yellow? Or yellow ochre? Zinc yellow favored by one of his contemporaries, Georges Seurat, too, is unstable. In other words the colors we see in La Grande Jatte are no longer true. They have shifted. 

The invention of new synthetic colors for textile dyes during the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s coupled with the revolutionary invention of paint in a tube in the 1850s, directly led to the era of Modern Art. Not only had the painter’s palette, brightened considerably, painters were having a field day, literally, out painting in the fields, en plein aire. having forsaken the confines of the studio for the bucolic countryside. 

There was a major painting revolution going on. Artists were painting directly from life, not from smudged field notes and memory. Impressionism was in full swing, followed by Post-Impressionism. Color was king. No more drab chiaroscuro paintings. But artist also needed bold new colors that were more stable. There’s the rub.

What we are seeing now in many of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings—especially the yellows—is not what Vincent painted. Chrome-yellow turns brownish-green when exposed to sunlight. Ditto that with the reds and blue-purples. In his famous Bedroom at Arles painting and the many Irises paintings, Vincent used red lake with organic bug-based cochineal, and both were fugitive colors that either darkened, or faded to white. As it is, those white flowers in the field were once red poppies. And the brown buttercups were once yellow.

If we are to understand Vincent van Gogh’s palette choices, we need to know what pigments and binder mediums he used. And how they have changed colors with the passage of time. For example, linseed oil, the most-favored vehicle that binds pigments to the canvas, yellows and darkens with age. Too bad safflower (sunflower) oil wasn’t yet invented. For me, this is all sort of a hold my beer kind of epiphany. I need to recalibrate a long-standing notion of what I think of as Vincent‘s color palette.

It’s a good thing Vincent mixed cobalt blue pigment into his irises as well, otherwise we would be viewing a field of white irises. At least I think he used cobalt. He probably couldn’t have afforded lapis lazuli or ultramarine blue. There was a new synthetic ultramarine blue on the market, but it was terribly pricey. And surely he knew that azurite goes rogue and turns teal green or even black with age. 

Some of those medieval Madonna paintings with teal backgrounds were once deep blue. (See my blogpost rant on Blue), which leads me back to both the Iris painting and the Haystack painting—that greeny-sky was there because he used a cobalt-based cerulean blue mixed with a shifty-eyed cadmium yellow to achieve that sky blue as there was no such thing as cyan in a tube.

Wheat Fields with Cypress, one of three studies, painted in plein aire July of 1889.

This painting, one of three canvases of Wheat Fields with Cypress, painted outside, in the field in July of 1889, may have had major color shift from when it was first painted, as there’s no longer any violet in it. Vincent often used cochineal (an insect carapace) cobalt mixed with cobalt and synthetic ultramarine to achieve those deep purples. Brother Theo, “This is a painting of night using no black, nothing but mellow blues, violets and greens... I love coming here just to paint the place." 

Vincent also wrote to his brother Theo, "This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big.” He paimted The Starry Night from his barred window at the asylum in June of 1889. He considered the most identifiable and iconic of all his paintings, to be an epic failure. 

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The Starry Night, painted from the asylum window, June, 1889.

A little sleuthing was in order. Vincent did use the newly invented trending pigments cobalt, and Prussian blue as well as the pricy synthetic ultramarine in The Starry Night. Real ultramarine was more expensive than gold. And from his letters to his brother Theo, we know that Vincent was never flush. Theo supported him throughout his entire career. I cannot imagine Starry Night in shades of green. So van Gogh’s lavish use of blue meant he was on the cusp of exploring all that new blue technology. Talk about a revolution.

As to the fugitive colors that appears in many of Vincent’s other paintings, it came down to the red lead paint he used on the iconic Sunflowers series which oxidized to white. And the chrome yellow turned to ochre, dark ash, or in some cases, burnt sienna, or burnt umber. Talk about a shifting color palette.

These Sunflowers, 1889, were screaming yellow, not yellow ochre.

Van Gogh probably knew more than most painters about the science behind pigments and he was aware of the instability of some of the colors he used. His Roses painting within seven years faded from pink to white. And he switched from chrome yellow and chrome yellow lemon hue to cadmium yellow, thinking he could hold onto the vibrancy he sought on the canvas. 

But it turns out that cadmium yellow too was unstable. And both were extremely toxic along with vermillion, emerald and the viridian greens he favored. Not to mention lead red and lead white. Vincent preferred coarse-ground pigments for their intense colors that he got from paint dealer, Julien Tanguy. If the tubes of paints weren’t up to snuff, he sent them right back.

I try to keep in mind that in many paintings, what Vincent saw and painted, is not what we’re seeing now. Last April I attended the immersive van Gogh exhibit and then held a paint party afterwards and as I painted an homage to his sunflowers in a vase (below), I wondered about his color choices. Apparently what I was confronting was not his color choices, but the oxidation of those colors through the passage of time.  Makes more sense now.

My painting after one of the four versions of sunflowers, 1889

Many of van Gogh’s paintings have changed color or lost their luster. In some cases the destruction of the original color scheme was exacerbated by the use of varnish applied by museum curators. I found this information on his sunflowers paintings enlightening:

“Parts of Vincent van Gogh's "Flowers in a blue vase" painting have mysteriously changed color over time, and now scientists have figured out why: A chemical reaction between the paint and a protective varnish supposedly applied to the painting after the artist's death in 1890, turned his bright yellow flowers an orange-gray color…. The research team found in an earlier study that photo-oxidation led to a darkening of Van Gogh's bright yellows in two paintings of his, "Bank of the Seine," and "View of Arles with Irises."  NBCnews

Field with Irises near Arles 1888, the irises were purple, the sky, blue

and this:

“Many of the red lake hues on van Gogh’s artwork began to disappear “within van Gogh’s own lifetime or very soon afterwards,” says conservator Ella Hendriks at the Van Gogh Museum, in Amsterdam…. A place that I often visited when I was living in Amsterdam. The pink blossoms in “Roses” (below) lost their color by 1907, after being hung for 17 years in his mother’s house.

Still Life: Vase with Pink Roses, 1890, faded from hot pink to white by 1907

“Consider van Gogh’s 1888 landscape “Field with Irises near Arles”. In letters, he described the painting’s irises as purple instead of their current bluish hue. Researchers have since identified the red pigments, cochineal and eosin as the problem: Loss of the red hue used to color the flowers purple left blue pigments in the paint to prevail….

“Van Gogh knew the red lake pigments were prone to fading—yet he couldn’t resist their vibrancy, Hendriks says. To compensate, van Gogh painted with thick strokes, desperately hoping that the additional paint would keep the colors bright for longer. “Paintings fade like flowers,” van Gogh once wrote his brother Theo. “All the more reason to boldly use them too raw, time will only soften them too much.” c&en

Red pigments used by van Gogh in “The Bedroom” 1888, have faded with time turning the purple wall blue and the pink floor brown (left). By analyzing the painting’s pigment degradation, conservators at the Van Gogh Museum have produced a digital version of “The Bedroom” as it probably looked when first painted (right). c&en

Another version of the story, Cause of Puzzling Color Change in Van Gogh Painting Found and  Van Gogh Masterpiece Reveals True Colors And of course, I found a science paper long after I had written this piece. Reconstructing Van Gogh’s palette to determine the optical characteristics of his paints There’s even a name for it Revigo.

This is a stub from a Facebook fragment that exponentially expanded. Maybe I will come back to it and revise it, shrink the quotes, but for now, it’s a placeholder—stet.