As posted yesterday: a lake pigment is a pigment manufactured by precipitating (creating a solid from a solution) a dye with an inert binder or mordant, usually a metallic salt. Unlike vermillion or ultramarine and other pigments made from ground minerals, lake pigments are organic. Manufacturers and suppliers to artists and industry frequently omit the lake designation in the name. Many lake pigments are fugitive because the dyes involved are unstable when exposed to light. Red lakes were particularly important in Renaissance and Baroque paintings; they were often used as translucent glazes to portray the colors of rich fabrics and draperies.
I decided to delve into Madder Lake and Lake Pigments.
The production of a lake pigment from madder seems to have been first invented by the ancient Egyptians. Several techniques and recipes developed over time. The ideal color was said to come from plants 18 to 28 months old that had been grown in calcareous soil , or soil that is full of lime and typically chalky. Most lake pigments were considered relatively weak and extremely fugitive until 1804, when the English dye maker George Field (1777?-1854) refined the technique of making a lake from madder by treating it with alum and an alkali! The resulting madder lake had a less fugitive color and could be used more efficaciously, for example by blending it into a paint. Over the following years, other metal salts, including those containing chromium, iron, and tin were found to be usable in place of alum to give madder-based pigments of various other colors.
In 1827, the French chemist Pierre Robiquet (1780-1840) began producing garancine, the concentrated version of natural madder. He then found that madder lake contained two colorants, the red alizarin and the more rapidly fading purpurin (mentioned in yesterday’s blog). Again, purpurin is only present in the natural form of madder and gives a distinctive orange/red generally warmer tone that pure synthetic alizarin does not. Purpurin fluoresces yellow to red under ultraviolet light, while synthetic alizarin slightly shows blue or violet under ultraviolet lights. Alizarin was discovered before purpurin too, by heating the ground madder with acid and potash. A yellow vapor crystallized into bright red needles: alizarin. This alizarin concentrate comprises only 1% of the madder root.
As noted in yesterday’s post, natural rose madder supplied half the world with red, until 1868, when its alizarin component became the first natural dye to be synthetically duplicated by Carl Gräbe (1841-1927) and Carl Liebermann (1842-1914). However, their recipe was not feasible for large-scale production; it required expensive and volatile substances, specifically bromine.
William Perkin (1838-1907), the inventor of mauve, filed a patent in June 1869 for a new way to produce alizarin without bromine. Gräbe, Liebermann, and Heinrich Caro (1834-1910) filed a patent for a similar process just one day before Perkin did – yet both patents were granted, as Perkin’s had been sealed first. They divided the market in half: Perkin sold to the English market, and the scientists from Berlin to the United States and mainland Europe.
Because this synthetic alizarin dye could be produced for a fraction of the cost of the natural madder dye, it quickly replaced all madder-based colorants then in use (in, for instance, British army red coats that had been a shade of madder from the late 17th century to 1870, and French military cloth, often called “Turkey Red.” In turn, alizarin itself has now been largely replaced by the more light-resistant quinacridone pigments originally developed at DuPont in 1958. Quinacridones are considered “high performance” pigments because they have exceptional color and weather fastness (major uses for quinacridones include automobile coatings as well as other industrial coatings).
There is a wonderful article on the artist Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) and his use Madder Lake. One of the topics discussed in this article is Vermeer’s technique of applying a madder lake glaze over vermillion, especially for drapery. Also, the mouth of “Girl with a Pearl Earring” (ca. 1665) was painted with madder lake! The author surmises that some of the rather monochrome flesh tones seen in Vermeer’s faces might be explained by the madder lake’s tendency to fade is used in minimum proportions. Vermeer may also have used a mixture of red madder and black to make preliminary drawing on the canvas and in shadowed areas of the flesh tones as other Dutch painters. Madder lake has been detected as an admixture with other pigments in Vermeer’s paintings. Check out this great article:
http://www.essentialvermeer.com/palette/palette_madder_lake.html#.WFU43KIrJ0s
Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” (ca. 1665)
Detail of mouth painted with Madder Lake paint
Madder Lake pigment suspended in linseed oil
Dye vats at leather factory in Fez, Morocco
