This week, our alphabet of landscape painting reaches the letter G, which has to stand for greens. Not the kind we should include in our healthy, balanced diet, but the central colour in most landscape paintings.

There’s a well-known principle in the use of pigments that you should mix the fewest pigments to achieve a given colour; the more pigments that you use, the muddier the colour will be, until its hue is eventually lost in a muddy mid-grey. So, although you can always make greens from a mixture of blue and yellow, if you’re painting a landscape, you’ll welcome a good green pigment.

Green earths

As with other ‘earth’ colours, green earths are taken from the earth as a clay mineral, celadonite and glauconite to be specific. This occurs in abundance near Verona in Italy, and on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, so was used extensively by Roman artists in classical times. Although a useful colour, green earths lack the intensity of most other greens, but were in general use during the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

They were popular among early landscape painters, including Saloman van Ruysdael, and his lesser-known contemporary Jan Willemsz Lapp, who painted this Italianate Landscape with Shepherds in around 1640. They will probably have been used most extensively in his underpainting, with other colours being used to tint and glaze over them to give them variation and breathe life into their colour.

Malachite

As a natural mineral, malachite isn’t uncommon, and is a reliable source of pure pigment, basic carbonate of copper. Although another copper green like verdigris, it’s quite different in properties and distinct in its use. Malachite green was known to the ancient Egyptians, who appear to have used it as eye-paint. Found abundantly in Japanese and Chinese paintings from the seventh century onwards, it wasn’t used much in Europe until the Renaissance. After that, it almost died out in Europe until it enjoyed a brief revival in the nineteenth century.

When painting the frescoes formerly in the Villa Aldobrandini between 1616-18, Domenichino and his assistants relied heavily on malachite green. It has been formally identified in this section, showing Apollo pursuing Daphne, where it’s the mainstay colour remaining, and is suspected in most of the others.

Verdigris and copper resinate

Verdigris was easy and cheap to produce from copper. In Europe, its manufacture centred around Montpellier, in the south of France, where there was a plentiful supply of waste products from winemaking to provide vinegar. By the seventeenth century, consumption of copper there had to be satisfied by imports from as far away as Sweden. Typically, verdigris is more blue when first applied, and develops its full green hue over the first month or so following application.

From the fifteenth century onwards, verdigris pigment was mixed with natural resins for use in glazes. This produces a different pigment from normal verdigris, as the copper combines with the resin acids to form what is known as copper resinate. A popular technique among many masters to produce an intense green was to paint an underlayer using verdigris, over which several glazing layers of copper resinate were then applied.

Tintoretto used copper resinate glazes in several of his paintings, most notably the rich, varied, and often lush vegetation in his Saint George and the Dragon from about 1555. He also applied those glazes over malachite green in some passages.

One of the last major uses of copper resinate is in Arnold Böcklin’s Triton and Nereid from 1874. This is reported as being painted in tempera, but copper resinate glaze appears to have been used to develop the intense green patterns on the sea monster in the foreground. This is consistent with Böcklin’s adherence to traditional techniques despite working in the late nineteenth century.

True verdigris gradually vanished from the palette during the early twentieth century. However, there’s still nothing quite like the intense green achieved by glazing copper resinate over a base of verdigris.

Prussian green

No one knows who first made Prussian blue, nor exactly when it was first synthesised. It seems to have appeared initially around 1704, and its origins have been attributed variously to Diesbach in Berlin, or Mak in Leipzig. For once its name is appropriate, as it was a product of the Prussian Empire. Its potential as a colourant was recognised by 1710 when it went on sale in Berlin, and by about 1724 it was being manufactured in several countries across Europe.

Prussian blue also became popular in water-based media. William Blake’s Lucia Carrying Dante in his Sleep, from his series depicting Dante’s Divine Comedy in watercolour between 1824-27, is a good example. In this and several other of his paintings, Blake used the pigment on its own and mixed with gamboge (yellow) as what was known as Prussian green.

Viridian

The element chromium is so named because of the rich colours seen in many of its salts and compounds. One of them, chromium oxide, was discovered in about 1798 by Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin, who immediately recognised its future use as a pigment, because of its “fine emerald colour”, although it’s really a rather dull yellow-green. Its introduction into paintings probably didn’t start until around 1840, when landscape painting outdoors was becoming all the rage.

Von Schwind probably used chromium oxide in combination for his greens generally in his King Krokus and the Wood Nymph from about 1855.

As these works were being painted, an improved version of chromium oxide was being developed: hydrated chromium oxide, which became known as viridian during the 1860s. This first became available at a reasonable price after Guignet started to make it in quantity in 1859, and has also been known as Guignet’s green. It’s sometimes termed émeraude or emerald, which only serves to confuse viridian with copper acetoarsenate, more widely known as emerald green.

Viridian came into use during the 1860s, and has proved far more popular than chromium oxide. Both pigments are reliably lightfast, opaque, and have good covering power, but viridian is the more intense hue, and doesn’t appear dull, as does plain chromium oxide.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Yole (The Skiff) of 1875 uses viridian as the main colour for the reeds in the left foreground.

Vincent van Gogh included viridian in the pigments used in the range of greens in his Wheatfield, with Cypresses (1889), which is also more unusual for his use of ultramarine blue mixed to form green.

Paul Cézanne is known to have had a strong preference for viridian as one of the key colours in his palette. However, in his Hillside in Provence (1890-92), it’s emerald green which is the more prominent, and the major part of the painting’s more brilliant greens, even to its pale turquoise sky.

Some green passages, such as the patch of yellow-green grass at the edge of the path in the foreground, at the right edge of the canvas, have been built with a base of lead white and viridian, over which he has applied a yellow lake glaze. What might appear to be quite simple and direct turns out to be much more sophisticated.

Chromium oxide and viridian remain widely available today; although the former isn’t popular or widely used, viridian is still a mainstay green widely recommended for its colour and other properties. Being virtually insoluble, chromium oxide and viridian pose minimal risks of toxicity to the artist. However, there’s growing concern over their environmental effects, and great care is needed when handling waste paint containing either pigment.

Emerald green

Wilhelm Sattler, a paint manufacturer in Schweinfurt, Germany, worked with Friedrich Russ to discover a better arsenic compound for use as a colourant, and from 1814 Sattler’s company manufactured Schweinfurt or emerald green, toxic copper acetoarsenite. Its alluringly brilliant green colour appears very stable, with only slight darkening resulting from reaction with hydrogen sulphide, a common atmospheric pollutant.

Paul Gauguin’s Arlésiennes (Mistral) (Old Women at Arles) (1888) uses emerald green for the band of bright green grass sweeping up across the painting from the right. It’s also mixed for the skin and hair of some of the figures, and in the foliage more generally.

Modern synthetic greens

Industrial chemistry in the twentieth century has brought a succession of new greens to tempt the palette of the modern landscape painter. These include cobalt, phthalo, and cadmium greens.