WHYEVER?
Hues in Tubes… and how they made a name for themselves
Some paints are named after… someone who could be…

You might think dozens of artists have had such a strong connection with a colour that their names would be all over the tubes but, strangely enough, there are probably more paintmakers’ names on these than painters’. Some, such as Jacques Blockx (the First) indeed offered and still offers the three primaries under his name, Sennelier a few colours too but Mr Winsor alone has given himself twelve! (And how are we to even guess what a Winsor Green looks like? or what pigment it is?) On the other hand, I could find on their colour charts only a Van Dyke Brown, a Payne’s and a Davy’s Grey on the painters’ side. The last one, (sometimes misspelled Davey), was originally a slate pigment developed by them, W&N, for the 18th century English drawing master, Henry Davy, rightly but sadly best remembered for his use of the colour. (Perhaps as a result of its greenish-grey hue which might not be to many’s liking or because it can quite easily be mixed, it’s a colour not found on many charts.)

To be fair to the paintmakers, though, for I believed for a while it was something of a vanity on their part, I have now come to realise it was probably an early and most astute commercial ploy. You obviously don’t sell paint to confirmed artists only, and the 19th century did see the first rush of these amateur watercolourists and oil painters who must have been just as lost as today’s beginners trying to pick a few indispensable colours, you know, a red, a yellow, a blue… “Well Madam, why don’t you try these most exquisite and selected Winsor colours, they should offer your palette a most exquisite rainbow?”

Clever, hey? And not all of it commercial… Because, to end on a sweet spot, I must tell of a paint named after the love of a father, a paintmaker, for his daughter. Dominique Sennelier’s choice to honour a new yellow in his watercolour range, PY93, sits discreetly between Naples Yellow and Naples Yellow dark and is called Jaune Sophie (a Sophie you might meet if you ventured into their eponymous Parisian store on Quai Voltaire as she’s the manager there!)

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1. Amusingly, the one on the left is Winsor, and he’s the chemist, while Newton, the artist, is on the right… prejudice, no doubt, would have me think the opposite! ↩︎