Colour outside the lines

Looking back at the past few months, an antique nest of drawers made to house artists’ pigments and a group exhibition of drawings spanning 500 years stand out as some of the most intriguing offerings of the summer

- By Huon Mallalieu

THE art market's summer break offers me the chance to include some favourite things that I could not feature earlier and to take further looks at items and subjects that deserved greater prominence.Years ago, when writing a book, I did a little research on pigments, in order to produce a timeline for the commercial introduction of colours. That can be useful for dating oil paintings and watercolours, as well as to people restoring period rooms and decorative schemes. There is a great deal of social history there, too. Naturally, then, at the Treasure House fair, I was immediately drawn to an item shown by Robert Young Antiques of Battersea, SW11, a business that specialises in provincial and folk art and furniture. It was a nest of 24 drawers on a stand (Fig 3), made for an artists' colourman at the turn of the 19th century. The drawers were red, perhaps ox or pig's blood, with black and gold sign-painted labels, making it both handsome and practical. One was labelled 'pencils', which at that time might have had the modern sense, but could also have meant small artists' brushes. There were also 'colcotha', an iron oxide powder, and 'rotten stone', powdered sandy limestone, both used for polishing, but the others were all pigments. 'Chrome' may have provided a date, as chromium was discovered in 1797, but the first printed reference I found to chromes in paint names came only in 1809.