Lead white
For two thousand years the painter's white was poison, made by burying lead in vinegar and dung.
- Made from
- Lead corroded by vinegar fumes
- Seen in
- X-rays of paintings
- Replaced by
- Zinc white, then titanium white
Lead white, basic lead carbonate, was the main white of painting from antiquity into the 1800s. The recipe barely changed: put strips of lead over vinegar in clay pots and let the acid fumes corrode them into a white crust. Theophrastus described making it around 300 BCE. In 17th-century Holland, in Vermeer's day, the 'stack' or 'Dutch' process added stacks of pots buried in horse manure or tanbark, whose heat and carbon dioxide sped the reaction.
Painters loved it. It's dense, opaque, flexible and quick-drying in oil, perfect for flesh, highlights and thick impasto, and for mixing tints, as in the sky blues of countless landscapes, mixed from lead white and ultramarine or Prussian blue. Because lead blocks X-rays, lead white shows up bright in X-ray images of paintings, revealing hidden first ideas and the 'skeleton' under the picture.
It was also a cosmetic. In Greece, China, Japan and 18th-century Europe, people whitened their faces with lead, despite well-known poisoning. Painters and lead workers suffered 'painter's colic', a form of lead poisoning.
Zinc white arrived in the 19th century and titanium white in the 20th, and today lead white is restricted and sold with warnings. The white in the app is a screen white; the warm, slightly creamy white of old paintings is closer to ivory. Vermeer built the light of The Milkmaid's wall from lead white, umber and charcoal black.
Swatches
- Lead white · in oil (approx.)
- Ivory · aged lead white (approx.)
Colors
Sources
- Gettens, R. J., Kühn, H. & Chase, W. T. (1993). Lead white. In Artists' Pigments, vol. 2. National Gallery of Art, Washington.
- Theophrastus, On Stones (De lapidibus).
- Wikipedia, 'Lead white'.
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.