A painter's black is nearly always burnt matter: charred bone for bone black, soot from burning oil for lamp black, charred twigs for vine black. All three go back to prehistoric times.
Black is what the eye sees when a surface sends back almost no light. Used pure, it can look harsh, so many painters tint it or mix their darks from other colors. In the famous black paintings below, I follow what each painter makes black do.
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How These Were Chosen
A painting made the list if it passes at least one test. Black is in its title or its series' name. Lab analysis or a firsthand account tells us how its black was made or laid down. Its black drew a recorded reaction. It shows black worn as a costly fashion.
Kazimir Malevich's Black Square (1915) has its entry on our contrast in art page.
12. Frans Hals, Regentesses of the Old Men's Almshouse (about 1664)
Five women dressed in black fill the canvas, four of them seated at a table draped in a cloth almost as dark as their gowns. Only their collars, cuffs and caps break the black, in broad flat bands of white linen.
The painter is Frans Hals, and the date is about 1664. He was working in Haarlem, where the four seated women sat on the board of the almshouse for old men.
The woman standing behind them was the house mother, in charge of the daily running of the home.
In the Dutch Republic, black was the most expensive color to dye. A deep, even black was slow work.
It often needed indigo shipped from India and cochineal, a red dye crushed from insects. Every year the dyers' guild of each town collected samples and fixed a standard black that all dyers had to match.
A single black gown could cost 50 to 100 guilders. Wealthy families bought expensive lace and huge pearls, then dressed in black to set them off.
Rank showed in the weave and the sheen of the cloth, while the cut stayed plain.
More than two centuries later, the blacks of Hals became an argument between two brothers. Theo van Gogh, an art dealer in Paris, had passed on the advice that a modern painter should not use black at all.
Vincent wrote back from the Dutch village of Nuenen around October 20, 1885. He asked whether black and white were forbidden fruit and decided they were not.
"Frans Hals must have had twenty-seven blacks," he wrote.
The first regentess on the left wears a cool black streaked with gray along her sleeve, while the cloth under her hands is a warmer, browner black. Seeing those two blacks touch is how I understand Vincent's count.
Hals painted the group at about eighty, in the late manner that sets deep blacks against pure, silvery whites with very few colors in between. Paul Claudel, the French poet and diplomat, found nothing in Goya or El Greco as masterly or as frightening as these last Haarlem portraits.
At a Glance
Artist: Frans Hals (1582 or 1583 to 1666)
Painted: About 1664
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 170.5 × 249.5 cm (67.1 × 98.2 in)
Where to see it: Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem
About This Painting
What does Regentesses of the Old Men's Almshouse mean?
The Dutch title is Regentessen van het Oudemannenhuis. The home opened in 1609 for men over the age of sixty. The four regentesses in office were Adriaentje Schouten, Marijtje Willems, Anna van Damme and Adriana Bredenhoff, though no one can match the names to the faces.
Did Hals also paint the Regents of the Old Men's Almshouse?
Yes. Hals painted the men who governed the same home at about the same time, in a companion canvas that is also in Haarlem. By 2015, when the museum began preparing it for conservation, it had darkened considerably.
Where in Haarlem is the Regentesses of the Old Men's Almshouse?
Since 1913 the Frans Hals Museum has occupied the former almshouse itself. The portrait of its women governors hangs in the building it was painted for.
11. John Singer Sargent, Madame X (1883 to 1884)
A young woman in black evening dress rests one hand on a small mahogany table, her powdered skin almost white against the dark cloth. Her other hand holds a closed black fan while her train spreads across the floor to the right.
The portrait is by John Singer Sargent, an American then building his career as a portraitist in Paris. He worked on it from 1883 to 1884.
His sitter was Virginie Gautreau, a Paris society beauty married to a banker.