#architecture rendering

We have a wide selection of paint colors across the color wheel today, but it is actually really difficult to develop all these pigments. Green was a particular thorny color to get right. From at least Roman times to the 1700s, the most common tone used was Verdigris Green. This was a bluish green tone made from copper acetate1 (you know how copper turns blue-green with enough seawater exposure? Yeah, that.). Artists could then get to forest green by mixing with lead tin (a yellow pigment). Verdigris starts showing up in American homes around 1790s/early 1800s on house shutters2 and is used all throughout George Washington's Monticello residence3.

Blue-green is lovely in its own right, and mixing to get a more "pure" green isn't the worst thing in the world. The problem is... verdigris green would age and darken over time to a brown or black. Definitely not what the artist is going for!1

Well, in 1775, the perfect green colorant was developed by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, by "heating sodium carbonate, adding arsenious oxide, stirring until the mixture was dissolved, and then adding a copper sulfate to the final solution."4 The result? A dazzlingly deep and glowing green perfect for representing foliage.

Scheele's green was the star of product and interior design during the Victorian Era, at least in Great Britain and Europe5 (so far I've only found that it "may have been used in house paints" in America6). The Arts and Crafts movement at this time spawned many organic wallpapers depicting nature scenes using Scheele's Green:

Unfortunately, the green was as deadly as it was lovely. Look back at that mixing process. "Arsenious Oxide". Yes, THAT arsenic. Materials that touched skin regularly would usually leave the wearer with skin lesions4. Materials with the pigment in damp conditions would produce a toxic gas that could produce extreme nausea, cramps, and light-headedness. If you were exposed to enough of the gas (say, a worker at the Morris company making the wallpapers above), or were a child (in either a room papered in this green or a child laboror producing artificial flowers in the stuff), this also meant death.

Deadly green

It is hard to tell how quickly the public realized the dangers of this pigment. A German chemist named Leopold Gmelin began warning the public against Scheele's green as early as 1839, but William Morris didn't stop producing his popular wallpapers with arsenic-based paints until around 1875 (5). In paintings though, we could see a differing connotation in the color.

I find Edvard Munch's paintings of illness fascinating - especially with this lurid green at Death in the Sick Room, made even more stark in contrast with the warm tones of the floor and furniture. This use of green has such a difference in tone from the soft, nostalgic wallpaper patterns above.

In an earlier work, The Sick Child, the green haunts every dark space about this girl, and her arm even seems to be glowing with a floating spectre of green. Did he associate green with illness and death? Did everyone by this time? Was Munch... painting with Scheele's green?

Most likely, his paints did not include Scheele's Green, but a newer pigment at the time, the aptly named Emerald Green or Paris Green. This Emerald Green was developed in 1814 as a less harmful yet still brilliant and easy to produce green, and came to replace Scheele's Green. Investigation of Materials used by Edvard Munch7 noted this about The Sick Child: "copper and arsenic were found both in the green-blue layer at the top ... and in the green particle in the lower layers, probably indicating the presence of emerald green".

Yes, that's right, this green still uses arsenic. So much for safer. Neither pigment is in use today, but perhaps symbolically it was for the best that my client did not choose the green tone for his hall.

Citations:

1 http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/intro/greens.html

2 Welsh, Frank S. "The Early American Palette." Paint in America, edited by Roger W. Moss, The Preservation Press, 1994, 68-85.

3 Mosca, Matthew J. "Paint Decoration at Mount Vernon: The Revival of Eighteenth-Century Techniques." Paint in America, edited by Roger W. Moss, The Preservation Press, 1994, 104-127.

4 Kelleher, Katy. "Scheele's Green, the Color of Fake Foliage and Death". The Paris Review. 2 May 2018, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/05/02/scheeles-green-the-color-of-fake-foliage-and-death/, Accessed 30 Aug 2021.

5 Cale, Jessica. "Death in the Walls: How Scheele's Green Poisoned Victorian Britain." Dirty Sexy History, 30 Oct. 2016, https://dirtysexyhistory.com/2016/10/30/death-in-the-walls-how-scheeles-green-poisoned-victorian-britain/, Accessed 30 Aug. 2021.

6 Newman, Richard & Eugene Farrell. "House Paint Pigments: Composition and Use." Paint in America, edited by Roger W. Moss, The Preservation Press, 1994, 276-290.