Naples Yellow has nothing to do with Naples in Italy, but it has an interesting story

Naples Yellow can range from a buttery primrose yellow to an earthy brown-yellow.

It is very dense, opaque, fast drying (like all lead-based pigments) and has an average tinting strength, but the genuine pigment is rarely found in artist ranges today. This article explores how one painting by Édouard Manet represents a turning point in the journey of this historical colour.

What is Naples Yellow?

Naples Yellow is an ancient pigment composed of lead antimoniate. It is the earliest known synthetically produced yellow pigment, and it was thought to have been first manufactured by the ancient Egyptians. For centuries it was used only in yellow ceramic glazes, and it wasn’t until the mid-17th century that it is first recorded for use in painting. Until this point, Lead Tin Yellow was the primary yellow pigment used in European oil painting, but Naples Yellow had overtaken it in popularity by the beginning of the 18th century.

The name ‘Naples Yellow’ is much newer than the pigment itself. It was first recorded in latin (luteolum napolitanum) in 1693, probably due to the belief that the colour was made from Neopolitan volcanic stone. While the pigment has nothing to do with the Italian city, the name stuck. Naples Yellow was a staple in the artist palette for more than a century, most notably it was used by Goya, Canaletto, and Delacroix. However, by looking at one work by Impressionist painter Édouard Manet we can identify the point at which the popularity of this historical pigment began to wane.

How did Manet Use Naples Yellow?

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) was an important artist of the French Impressionist period. He is most significant in his portrayal of everyday urban life, rejecting the mythological and religious themes that dominated salon painting at the time. His style is loose and evocative and he worked wet-in-wet, often using paint straight from the tube, rather than the traditional method of building up the painting with successive layers of thin glazes.

Music in the Tuileries Gardens was one of Manet’s first major paintings. It depicts a fashionable crowd gathered in the Tuileries Gardens, Paris, and is something of a who’s-who of Parisian society. Present are portraits of many people that Manet knew, including poet Charles Baudelaire, composer Jacques Offenbach, and the writer Champfleury.

More interesting than Manet’s social circle are the pigments that he used in the painting, which include Viridan, Ultramarine Blue, Chrome Yellow, and Zinc White. The chairs in the foreground are painted with genuine Naples Yellow. It appears to be of the browner variety, with its characteristic golden hue which is perfect for evoking a brassy sheen.

But also present in this painting is something much newer– the bright lemon yellow bonnet of a woman sitting behind the two central female figures is painted using a pre-mixed colour, sold in tubes in the 1860s under the name Jaune de Naples. It is a mixture of Zinc White, Chrome Yellow, and Yellow Ochre which combine to recreate a genuine Naples Yellow (in this case, the more lemony variety).

Pre-mixed colours, sometimes referred to as ‘hues’, are a blend of pigments that approximate the shade of another colour. When Manet painted Music in the Tuileries Gardens, readymade hues were a very new concept. Until the 19th century artists or their apprentices would purchase dry pigment from apothecaries and grind their colours themselves, a process that is both labour-intensive and time-consuming. It was only in the 1820s that machines for grinding oil paint were successfully invented. In 1841 the collapsible tin paint tube was introduced which changed the artist market entirely– painting became accessible to amateur artists as well as academy-trained professionals, and paints could be easily taken out of the studio, leading to the practice of painting en plein air. The mass-manufacture of readymade paints also meant that several pigments could be combined in standardised ratios to make cheaper pre-mixed hues.

Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens represents a crossroads in the history of Naples Yellow. It includes both the traditional genuine Naples Yellow, a staple artists colour for hundreds of years, and a new ‘hue’ that would soon largely replace the original pigment. Just as Naples Yellow had superseded Lead Tin Yellow by the middle of the 17th century, it was itself superseded by modern pigment blends, facilitated by the invention of the paint tube.

Naples Yellow Today

With very few exceptions, Naples Yellow paints today are all hues– even if the paint name doesn’t explicitly describe it as such. The mixture of pigments used vary greatly from range to range, but most include a white pigment (either Titanium or Zinc White) and a combination of yellow, brown, or orange pigments.

So do you use Naples Yellow?

Categories: : All about paint