A History of Paint

For over thirty millennia, human culture has embracedused names. Most colors are named not specifically,
paint and pigmentation so ubiquitously that it may bebut taken from objects in nature that they are most
instinctual. Cave paintings made from yellow and redstrongly associated with.
ochre, charcoal, and other materials taken from naturePaint is made using a pigment for color, a binding agent
have been dated to thirty-two thousand years of age,to keep it together, and thinner to make it spread
and the Ancient Chinese have been manufacturing iteasier. Before the nineteenth century, the term paint
for tens of thousands of years.was used only for oil based substances, with glue
The Ancient Egyptians believed that colors had healingbased paint being referred to as "distemper" instead.
and magical powers. They learned how to produceAbout a thousand years ago the paints made using
pigments from the soil such as yellow, red, and orange."gum arabic" from the acacia tree had become
By fifteen hundred BC the Egyptians had shared theirpopular.
recipes with Greek culture, and the systematicPrior to the sixteenth century, pigments were based
manufacture of paint became widespread. Thealmost entirely on what could be grown in Europe and
Romans discovered purple, produced by grinding shells.made from natural ingredients, although imports from
About five hundred years before the birth of Christ,Central America and India began to change that. In the
the Greeks and Romans were producing varnishes.seventeenth century the Dutch made several
Across the Atlantic, the Aztecs considered redbreakthroughs in the paint industry, streamlining the
pigment to be more valuable even than gold, as aprocess. By 1856 the first synthetic dye was
pound of it was made from roughly a million beetles.discovered, leading the the invention of many new
The Spanish introduced it to the rest of the world inpigments that could be produced more cost effectively
the fifteen hundreds. Indian yellow was made usingthan by harvesting them from nature. Linseed Oil paints
cow urine, green from berries, and brown from squidwent into mass production shortly thereafter.
ink.In the 1870s the industrial sector began to make the
Despite all this variety, most cultures have hadfirst washable paint, called "Charlton White." It took
surprisingly few names for colors. Two anthropologistsSherwin-Williams a decade to perfect the recipe for
in the '60s conducted a study of names for colorssuspending fine-grained pigments in Linseed Oil, and
across the world and found that many of them hadthey succeeded in 1880 with a quality of paint that
only two words describing coloration, one for dark andexceeded what came before. Finally, around that time,
one for light. Out of nearly a hundred languagespaints became readily available and were sold
studied, English had the most, with eleven commonlythroughout the world.