approx. 4000 B.C.
Archaeological research has identified the use of cultivated cotton (Gossypium barbadense) in the ancient Andes dating back to at least 7800 years ago. Because of unusual circumstances of preservation, 6000-year-old cotton fabrics from the Preceramic site of Huaca Prieta on the north coast of Peru retained traces of a blue pigment that was analyzed and positively identified as an indigoid dye (indigotin), making it the earliest known use of indigo in the world, derived most likely from Indigofera spp. native to South America. This predates by ~1500 years the earliest reported use of indigo in the Old World, from Fifth Dynasty Egypt [ca. 4400 BP (before present)]. Indigo is one of the most valued and most globally widespread dyes of antiquity and of the present era (it being the blue of blue jeans).
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The color indigo is named after the indigo dye derived from the plant Indigofera tinctoria and related species.
The first known recorded use of indigo as a color name in English was in 1289.
Indigo was actually a plant that got its name because it came from the Indus Valley, discovered some 5,000 years ago, where it was called nila, meaning dark blue. And by the 7th Century BC, people starting using the plant as a dye — the Mesopotamians were even carving out recipes for making indigo dye onto clay tablets for record-keeping. By 1289, knowledge of the dye made its way to Europe, when the Venetian merchant traveler Marco Polo reported on it.
But it wasn’t until 1640 when demand started to pick up for indigo. Spanish explorers discovered an American species of Indigo and began to cultivate the product in Guatemala. The English and French subsequently began to encourage indigo cultivation in their colonies in the West Indies. Indigo dye could be made from two different types of plants — the indigo plant, which produced the best results, and from the woad plant. The British were producing indigo with woad, a plant that yielded a lesser quality dye, but a plant they could grow. They even tried to hold their monopoly on indigo dye by managing to ban the indigo plant for years, claiming that it was poisonous. But eventually the British began to focus on tea and other crops — and meanwhile, the French started to get their fair share of the market. But this was problematic. The French had gone to war with Britain, so the British could hardly rely on the French for this precious blue dye. Consequently, the British had to turn to their colonies in America. It was Eliza Lucas from South Carolina who figured out how to grow the indigo plant and use it to make indigo cakes that would support British demand.
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The colors of the rainbow (a.k.a. Roy G. Biv) have a clear outlier: indigo. Commonly considered a shade of blue, indigo is not a separate color in its own right, so why does it get its own band in the color spectrum?
Indigo was a desired import throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, driving trade wars between European nations and the Americas, fueling the African slave trade, and even partially funding the American Revolutionary War. A natural dye rather than a pigment for painting, indigo was used to color fabrics, clothing, yarns, and luxurious tapestries. Unlike lapis lazuli, whose rarity drove its high prices, the indigo crop could be grown in excess and produced across the world, from India to South Carolina.
Indigo dyeing was especially popular in England, home to physicist Sir Isaac Newton. Newton, who introduced the term “color spectrum,” believed that the rainbow should consist of seven distinct colors to match the seven days of the week, the seven notes in the musical scale, and the seven known planets. Confronting the fact that the rainbow only displayed five unique colors, Newton pushed indigo, along with orange, much to the dismay of some contemporary scientists.
Synthetic indigo, developed in 1880, largely replaced the natural crop by 1913; this is the pigment that dyes your blue jeans. Over the past decade, scientists have introduced a competitor to the market: Escherichia coli bacteria that is custom-engineered to produce the same chemical reaction that makes indigo in plants. This method, called “bio-indigo,” will likely play a big part in the environmentally friendly denim of the future.
— [1]
approx. 2,200 B.C., copper pigment, inorganic
Egyptian blue—the first color to be synthetically produced—was invented in Ancient Egypt around 2,200 B.C., around the same time the Great Pyramids were built. To create the hue, Egyptians combined limestone and sand with a copper-containing mineral (such as azurite or malachite) and heated the solution to between 1470 and 1650 degrees fahrenheit. The end result was an opaque blue glass, which could be crushed up, combined with egg whites, glues, or gums, and made into a long-lasting paint or ceramic glaze. The process was easy to get wrong, and any mistake would result in a “glassy, green mess,” explains Victoria Finlay in The Brilliant History of Color in Art (2014). While Egyptian blue remained popular throughout the Roman Empire, its complex method of production was forgotten as new blues came to market.
In 2006, nearly two millennia later, conservation scientist Giovanni Verri made an accidental find that brought Egyptian blue back to the fore. Viewing a 2,500-year-old Greek marble basin under fluorescent lights, Verri was surprised to find that the vessel’s blue pigments began to glow—a signal that Egyptian blue emits infrared radiation. This rare property enables scientists to find traces of the color in ancient artifacts, even after the pigment has been washed away or otherwise made invisible to the naked eye. Scientists outside of the field of conservation have also taken interest in Egyptian blue, adopting the pigment for biomedical analyses and laser development.
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approx. 1045–771 B.C., copper pigment, inorganic
Han purple and Han blue (also called Chinese purple and Chinese blue) are synthetic barium copper silicate pigments developed in China and used in ancient and imperial China from the Western Zhou period (1045–771 BC) until the end of the Han dynasty (circa 220 AD).
In 1993, it was discovered to occur naturally as the rare mineral effenbergerite.
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6th century, aluminum pigment, inorganic
The name derives from Middle Latin ultramarinus, literally "beyond the sea" because it was imported from Asia by sea. Current terminology for ultramarine includes natural ultramarine (English), outremer lapis (French), Ultramarin echt (German), oltremare genuino (Italian), and ultramarino verdadero (Spanish). The first recorded use of ultramarine as a color name in English was in 1598.
The first noted use of lapis lazuli as a pigment can be seen in the 6th and 7th-century AD cave paintings in Afghanistani Zoroastrian and Buddhist temples, near the most famous source of the mineral. Lapis lazuli has also been identified in Chinese paintings from the 10th and 11th centuries, in Indian mural paintings from the 11th, 12th, and 17th centuries, and on Anglo-Saxon and Norman illuminated manuscripts from c.1100.
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Sometimes called “true blue,” ultramarine is made from the semiprecious gemstone lapis lazuli, which for centuries could only be found in a single mountain range in Afghanistan. Egyptian traders began importing the stone as early as 6,000 years ago, using it to adorn jewelry and headdresses. Yet they never figured out how to make a vibrant pigment from it. Riddled with minerals such as calcite, pyrite, augite, and mica, lapis loses its potency when it is ground up, turning from a bright blue to a dull gray.
Lapis first appeared as a “true blue” pigment in the 6th century, gracing Buddhist frescoes in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. Around 700 years later, the pigment traveled to Venice and soon became the most sought-after color in medieval Europe. For centuries, the cost of lapis rivaled the price of gold. Given its hefty price tag, the color was reserved for only the most important figures (namely, the Virgin Mary) and the most lucrative commissions (namely, the church).
Legend has it that Michelangelo left his painting The Entombment (1500–01) unfinished because he could not generate the funds to buy ultramarine blue. Raphael used the pigment scarcely, applying it above base layers of azurite when depicting the Virgin Mary’s blue robe. The Baroque master Johannes Vermeer, on the other hand, bought the color in spades, so much so that his indulgence pushed his family into debt.
Given the high demand, in 1824, France’s Societé d’Encouragement offered a reward of 6,000 francs to anyone who could invent a synthetic version of ultramarine. A French chemist and a German professor both found the solution within weeks of one another, leaving the competition with contested results. Unsurprisingly, the French committee gave the award to the Frenchman and named the new pigment “French Ultramarine.”
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- Blessed Virgin Mary, by Sassoferrato, c. 1654
- Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Johannes Vermeer, c. 1665
Aluminum pigment, inorganic
The color Persian blue is named from the blue color of some Persian pottery and the color of tiles used in and on mosques and palaces in Iran and in other places in the Middle East. Persian blue is a representation of the color of the mineral lapis lazuli which comes from Persia (i.e. modern Iran) and Afghanistan. (The color azure is also named after the mineral lapis lazuli.)
The first recorded use of Persian blue as a color name in English was in 1669.
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15th century
In Europe the use of smalt as an artist's pigment lasted between the 15th and the 18th century. Although several writers have suggested that smalt could be a European invention discovered around 1540 by Christian Schiirrer, a Bohemian glassmaker, evidence shows that cobalt was used in Egypt since the 27th century BC, and later on in Persia. Furthermore, it seems that before Schtirrer's discovery Venetian glassmakers were already familiar with the properties of cobalt, because some fifteenth-century Venetian glasses have been found coloured with cobalt. Smalt was also used in the Delft ceramic industry as the blue color in Delft tiles.
It's a ground blue potassium glass containing cobalt used among the 15th and the 18th centuries. In Europe the use of smalt as an artist's pigment was widespread certainly as early as the late sixteenth century. Smalt was popular because of its low cost and its manufacture became a specialty of the Dutch and Flemish in the 17th century. Smalt is a very good dryer and was used for this purpose and also to give bulk to thick glazes containing lake pigments which are poor dryers.
Renaissance artists used ground cobalt containing glass, smalt, to add vibrancy to their paintings. A portrait of Sir William Butts by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), is among the earliest paintings in which smalt has been found as a pigment.
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- Sir William Butts, by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1540-1543
1724, iron pigment, inorganic
One year before Newton published his first report on the seven colors of the rainbow in Opticks (1704), a new blue was invented in Berlin, Germany. The dye-maker Johann Jacob Diesbach was working on a cochineal red pigment when he disregarded the fact that one of his materials, potash, had come in contact with animal blood. He figured that red mixed with red would simply create more red. Surprisingly, this was not the case, and his red dye emerged as a potent blue. The animal blood had spurred an unlikely chemical reaction, which created the compound iron ferrocyanide, now known in German as the color Berliner Blau or, in English, as Prussian blue.
French Rococo painter Jean-Antoine Watteau, Japanese woodblock printmaker Katsushika Hokusai, and the Spanish master Pablo Picasso in his Blue Period all used the color extensively. However, the success of Prussian blue goes beyond its role as a pigment. In 1842, the English astronomer Sir John Herschel discovered that Prussian blue had a unique sensitivity to light, which could be manipulated to create copies of a single drawing. Herschel’s method of image reproduction proved invaluable to architects, who for the first time could easily create multiple versions of their building plans, aptly named “blueprints” after their Prussian blue coloring. In contemporary medicine, Prussian blue has a very different purpose: It’s delivered in pill form as an antidote to heavy-metal poisoning.
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In medicine, Prussian blue is used as an antidote for certain kinds of heavy metal poisoning, e.g., by thallium and radioactive isotopes of caesium. In particular it was used to absorb 137Cs+ from those poisoned in the Goiânia accident. Prussian blue is orally administered. The therapy exploits Prussian blue's ion exchange properties and high affinity for certain "soft" metal cations.
It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines, the most important medications needed in a basic health system. Prussian blue lent its name to prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide), which was derived from it. In Germany, hydrogen cyanide is called Blausäure ("blue acid"), and Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac gave cyanide its name, from the Greek word κυανός (kyanos, "blue"), because of the color of Prussian blue.
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- Entombment of Christ, by Pieter van der Werff, 1709
- The Starry Night, by SaVincent van Goghssoferrato, 1889
- The Great Wave off Kanagawa, by Katsushika Hokusai, c. 1829–1833
1789
Cerulean (/səˈruːliən/), also spelled caerulean, is a colour term that may be applied to certain colours with the hue ranging roughly between blue and cyan, overlapping with both. It also largely overlaps with azure and sky blue, although cerulean is dimmer.
Cerulean blue was discovered in 1789 by Albrecht Höpfner. Subsequently there was a limited German production under the name of Cölinblau. It was in 1860 first marketed in the United Kingdom by colourman George Rowney, as "coeruleum". Other nineteenth century English pigment names included "ceruleum blue" and "corruleum blue". The primary chemical constituent of the pigment is cobalt(II) stannate. The precise hue of the pigment is dependent on a variable silicate component. The pigment is very expensive.
In classical times, cerulean was used to describe blue pigments, particularly mixtures of copper and cobaltous oxides, like azurite and smalt. These early attempts to create sky blue colours were often less than satisfactory due to a limited saturation and the tendency to discolour in reaction with other pigments. When the pigment cerulean blue was discovered, it became a useful addition to Prussian blue, cobalt blue and synthetic ultramarine which already had superseded the prior pigments. See also Tekhelet.
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1802, cobalt pigment, inorganic
Cobalt blue in impure forms had long been used in Chinese porcelain, but it was independently discovered as a pure alumina-based pigment by Louis Jacques Thénard in 1802. Commercial production began in France in 1807. The first recorded use of cobalt blue as a color name in English was in 1777. The leading world manufacturer of cobalt blue in the 19th century was Benjamin Wegner's Norwegian company Blaafarveværket, ("blue colour works" in Dano-Norwegian). Germany was also famous for production, especially the blue colour works (Blaufarbenwerke) in the Ore Mountains of Saxony.
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1842
Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints. The process uses two chemicals: ammonium iron(III) citrate and potassium ferricyanide.
The English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel discovered the procedure in 1842. Though the process was developed by Herschel, he considered it as mainly a means of reproducing notes and diagrams, as in blueprints.
Anna Atkins created a series of cyanotype limited-edition books that documented ferns and other plant life from her extensive seaweed collection, placing specimens directly onto coated paper and allowing the action of light to create a silhouette effect. By using this photogram process, Anna Atkins is sometimes considered the first female photographer.
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mid. 1930s
Phthalocyanine Blue BN, also called Monastral blue, phthalo blue, thalo blue is a bright, crystalline, synthetic blue pigment from the group of phthalocyanine dyes.
It was first developed as a pigment in the mid-1930s. Its brilliant blue is frequently used in paints and dyes. It is highly valued for its superior properties such as light fastness, tinting strength, covering power and resistance to the effects of alkalies and acids. It has the appearance of a blue powder, insoluble in water and most solvents. The anecdotal history of the compound is that a chemist at the ICI phthalimide plant was troubled by blue contamination of the product. This was traced to a by-product formed when the phthalimide reacted with trace amounts of iron from the metal reactor. The chemist took samples of this blue and using sulfuric acid as a solvent, managed to produce a workable pigment. This was converted into the copper centered blue and sold under the trade name Monastral. Difficulty was experienced in forming stable dispersions with the first alpha forms, especially in mixtures with rutile Titanium, where the blue pigment tended to flocculate. The beta form was more stable, as was the improved stabilized alpha form. Today, there are even more isomeric forms available.
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1960
In the summer of 1947, French artist Yves Klein was just 19 years old, sitting on the beach with his friends Claude Pascal (who later became a poet) and Armand Fernandez (who later became an artist). As the story goes, the three of them began to brainstorm how they would divide up the world: Pascal would take the air, Fernandez would have the land, and Klein wanted the sky. Klein’s pursuit of the sky’s expansiveness would come to define his artistic career, and, in 1957, he began to work almost exclusively with the color blue. “Blue has no dimensions. It is beyond dimensions,” he once said. The artist began by spraypainting entire canvases, everyday objects, and casts of ancient sculptures with French Ultramarine, which had been invented about a century before. Working with a paint dealer in Paris, Klein created a matte version of ultramarine and patented his new method of pigment production under the name International Klein Blue, or IKB, in 1960.
While Klein is perhaps the most famous painter to riff on ultramarine, one of history’s most expensive pigments, he is far from the only one. Inspired by Klein, the filmmaker and author Derek Jarman created the moving picture Blue (1993), which projected the same shade of ultramarine blue for 75 minutes, punctuated by a haunting soundtrack of ticking clocks, choral singing, and poetry and storytelling recited by actors and Jarman himself. More recently, in his installation Seizure (2008/2013), the British artist Roger Hiorns covered an abandoned London apartment with bright blue crystals, while the German artist Katharina Fritsch presented Hahn/Cock (2013), a giant sculpture of a rooster painted bright ultramarine in Trafalgar Square.
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2009, manganese pigment, inorganic
Prussian blue is not the only blue pigment to be discovered by accident. In 2009, the chemist Mas Subramanian and his students at Oregon State University were investigating new materials that could be used for manufacturing electronics. A graduate student noticed that one of their samples turned a bright blue color when heated, to which Subramanian responded, “Luck favors the alert mind,” a quote from Louis Pasteur. They named the color YInMn blue, after its chemical makeup of yttrium, indium, and manganese, and they released the pigment for commercial use in June 2016. Durable, safe, and easy to produce, the color also has a cooling property, so it may be used in environmentally friendly roof construction in the future. Of course, Subramanian sent samples of the pigment to artists, too.
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- [1] The 6,000-Year History of Blue Pigments in Art by Sarah Gottesman
- [2] Wikipedia
- [3] Early pre-Hispanic use of indigo blue in Peru
- [4] List of inorganic pigments on Wikipedia
- [5] Egyptian blue: The colour of technology by Philip McCouat
- [6] History of Prussian blue
- [7] Pigments through the Ages
- Why Isn't the Sky Blue? // ~20 minute podcast on Radiolab
- Blue is the Strangest Colour
- The colors of 94,526 paintings since 1800, charted