Thanks to technology, we can now obtain any colour or hue imaginable. However, go back in time and we can see how difficult it was to research and find the right colour. In the nineteenth century, artists and painters gave their all to obtain the perfect pigment for their work, travelling to remote mines in Afghanistan, lush Brazilian forests or the pyramids in Egypt, where pigments were even extracted from the bandages of mummies. Bearing that in mind, one could feel rather guilty browsing through catalogues containing endless pages of different colours and hues available to us now.
Although the history of pigments dates back to prehistoric times, most of what we know now about their use in the arts is thanks to the work of Edward Forbes, historian and manager of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University between 1909 and 1944. Forbes could be described as the Indiana Jones of pigments. He travelled all over the world, recording and collecting original colour pigments to authenticate old Italian paintings.
Over the years, Forbes has collected more than 2,500 pigments, each of which has its own history, origin and production technique. They range from Mummy Brown, a brown resin extracted from the bandages of mummies that was very popular in the 18th century, to Brazilian Wood, made from Brasilin, a colorant contained in tree trunks that gives that distinctive reddish brown hue. Brasilin is what gives that unique colour to violins, strings and high-quality furniture.
Today, this priceless collection is mainly used for scientific analyses, providing standardised pigments for the analysis and comparison of new ones. Edward Forbes’ heir is Narayan Khandekar, manager of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at Harvard’s art museum. Taking the lead from Forbes, Khandekar has extended the collection, adding more modern pigments in order to analyse and authenticate works of art from the twentieth century.
