A 100,000-year-old paint kit and the long road to the tin
In Blombos Cave in South Africa, archaeologists found an ochre mixture about 100,000 years old that could have served as paint, and later a whole kit for grinding pigments. For most of the time since, paint meant grinding coloured earth by hand. Ready-to-use paint straight from the tin is barely 160 years old.
Cave artists worked with red and yellow ochre, haematite, manganese oxide and charcoal, and some paintings may be 40,000 years old. At the Ness of Brodgar in Orkney, 5,000-year-old walls include stones painted yellow, red and orange with ochre mixed into animal fat, milk or eggs. The temple walls at Dendera in Egypt still glow after about 2,000 years in the open air. Egyptian painters bound their colours with a gum and kept six hues separate rather than blending them, first whitening a whole surface, then outlining in black.
Oil paint is older than Europe's masters. The earliest known oil paintings are Buddhist murals from around 650 AD in rooms carved into the cliffs of the Bamiyan Valley, made with walnut and poppy seed oils. In medieval Europe, painters mostly used egg-yolk tempera and at first only touched in details with oil, partly because its slow drying seemed a drawback. Antonello da Messina seems to have improved the recipe by adding lead oxide. House painting was hard work too: at Ham House in Surrey, seventeenth-century painters ground pigment into oil by hand, breathing in poisonous white-lead powder.
Machines slowly took over. Marshall Smith invented a colour-grinding engine in England in 1718, and one firm boasted that paint ground in a horse mill covered twelve yards against half that for any other method. Steam mills followed, zinc white offered an alternative to lead, and cheap linseed oil spread interior painting, which also protected walls from damp. In 1866 Sherwin-Williams opened in the United States and created paint usable straight from the can. When the Second World War caused a shortage of linseed oil, cheap and durable synthetic alkyd resins were developed to replace it.
The newest paints skip pigment altogether, using aluminium flakes dotted with nanoparticles whose size sets the colour.
Source: Paint
