For most of the history of painting, blue was the hardest color to get. The finest came from a stone mined in one corner of today's Afghanistan, and it cost more than gold. Then, in Berlin, a paint maker trying for a red produced a blue by accident, and the color began to travel.
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Blue paint is a colored powder bound in oil, egg or water. For centuries the finest, natural ultramarine, was ground from lapis lazuli, a stone mined in one region of today's Afghanistan, and it cost more than gold. The cheaper blues looked greener or duller.
Chemistry changed the supply. Prussian blue appeared in Berlin around 1706, cobalt blue in France in 1802, then a factory ultramarine. Painters wanted blue for what it does to space: it seems to sink back from the eye, the color of sky, distance, night and shadow.
Each work here marks a turn in the story of blue, in its price, its supply, its chemistry or its meaning, or is one most people know on sight. The countdown runs by date, so it walks back from blue sold by the million to blue weighed against gold.
12. Maxfield Parrish, Daybreak (1922)
Behind the two girls of Daybreak, a pale blue sky fills the whole back of the picture, above a valley of rocky mountains framed by two tall columns. On the stone terrace in front, one girl in a thin gown lies stretched out with an arm behind her head, while the other, nude, bends over her.
Maxfield Parrish, then one of the highest paid illustrators in America, finished the picture in 1922 in his studio at Plainfield, New Hampshire. That sky is so closely tied to him that its blue carries his name, Parrish blue.
The name came from the way the picture was sold. In August 1920, the House of Art, a New York publisher of art prints, commissioned Daybreak, the first work Parrish made solely to be reproduced in color. Once the print went on sale, his sky hung in ordinary American homes. By 1925, counting all his prints together, there was one Parrish print for every four American households.
To make that blue glow on paper, Parrish first had to make it glow on the board. He started from a white ground and laid each color on its own as a thin transparent glaze, which had to dry and be sealed under varnish before the next went on. Light passes through the layers and bounces back off the white underneath, much like colored cellophane laid over white paper.
For the same reason, he refused to mix his colors on the palette. Mixing, he said, gives "a color you look on instead of into." For his skies he relied on cobalt blue, developed in 1802 by the French chemist Louis Jacques Thénard, which painters had taken up in place of the far costlier ultramarine. As early as 1818, the English watercolorist John Varley judged cobalt "superior when used in skies."
In Daybreak, those glazes also do the work of distance. The rocks nearest the terrace glow orange and pink, the mountains behind them turn mauve, and the farthest ridges fade to a blue barely darker than the sky itself. Painters call this aerial perspective: the more air lies between the eye and a mountain, the bluer and paler it looks.
At a Glance
Artist: Maxfield Parrish (1870 to 1966)
Painted: 1922
Medium: Oil on board
Size: 67.3 × 114 cm (26.5 × 45 in)
Where to see it: Private collection, not on public display
11. Franz Marc, The Large Blue Horses (1911)
Three horses with blue bodies stand pressed together, heads lowered, so close that it is hard to tell where one animal ends and the next begins. Behind them, red and violet hills roll toward a sky streaked with yellow.
Franz Marc was living in Sindelsdorf, a Bavarian village south of Munich, when he painted them in 1911, the year he and Wassily Kandinsky founded the Blue Rider, a circle of Munich artists. Horses are not blue, and Marc knew it. A few months earlier, in a letter to a friend, he had given each color a character of its own, and he chose the horses' color for what it stood for, not for what horses look like.