Naples Yellow in the Palette of Édouard Manet

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.

Genuine and imitation Naples Yellow oil paints

What is Naples Yellow?

Naples Yellow is an ancient pigment composed of lead antimonate. 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. The pigment 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.

Madame Manet at Bellevue, 1880
Édouard Manet
Oil on canvas, 80.6 x 60.3 cm | 31.8 x 23.8 in
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Music in the Tuileries Gardens, now housed at the National Gallery, London, 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.

The pigments that he used in the painting 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 the shade of the genuine pigment (in this case, the more lemony variety).
 

Why Mix the Colour Instead of Using the Historical Pigment?

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. Here are some hues from various oil paint ranges:
 

Naples Yellow hues

The pigments used in the above swatches are as follows, from top to bottom:

• Old Holland Naples Yellow Extra oil paint – PW 4 (Zinc White), PW 6 (Titanium White), PY 42 (Synthetic Yellow Iron Oxide)
• Daler Rowney Naples Yellow 2 Artist oil paint – PW 4 (Zinc White), PY 1 (Arylamide Yellow), PR 9 (Naphthol Red), PY42 (Synthetic Yellow Iron Oxide), PW 6 (Titanium White)
• Charvin Naples Yellow Artist oil paint – PY35 (Cadmium Yellow), PY42 (Synthetic Yellow Iron Oxide) + an unspecified white pigment
• Michael Harding Naples Yellow oil paint – Pbr 24 (Chrome Antimony Orange)
• Sennelier Naples Yellow oil paint – PW 6 (Titanium White), PW 4 (Zinc White), PY 3 (Hansa Yellow), PY 74 (Monoazo Yellow)

It’s interesting to see the different combinations that paint manufacturers use to recreate the colour. For artists who prefer to use single-pigment colours, Chrome Antimony Orange (PBr 24- shown above in the second row from the bottom) makes a pretty good replacement for the browner varieties of genuine Naples Yellow. You may find it better for mixing than the pre-mixed colours which contain white. For a single-pigment alternative to the light, lemony variety, I’d recommend trying a Nickel Titanate Yellow (pigment index number PY 53) which, while less earthy than the genuine colour, is a beautifully buttery shade that is very Manet-esque!

Artists who are interested in the properties of the historical colour can find genuine Naples Yellow in the Michael Harding oil paint range. There are two varieties- light and dark– which represent the lemon and brown shades of the colour respectively.
 

Michael Harding’s genuine Naples Yellow Light and Naples Yellow Dark

Even if the genuine pigment is no longer in common use, Naples Yellow lives on in the palettes of many artists. Let us know how you use the colour, whether genuine or a hue, in your palette by leaving a comment below.

Further Reading

Pigment Stories: Lemon Yellow

Colour Mixing: Five Yellows in Five Limited Palettes

Recreating Rembrandt’s Colour Palette With Modern Pigments

Venetian Red: the Red Earth Pigment That Evokes the Italian Renaissance

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