Secret history of color: yellow

butter is on our collective mind🧈🧈🧈

Butter yellow was the color of the season - but when did the collective obsession with yellow begin? Today’s post is diving into the secret history of yellow - from coloring the happiest time of Van Gogh’s life to becoming a noun in Ellsworth Kelly’s work.

It’s no secret that yellow is having a moment. The clock struck 2025 and suddenly it’s everywhere - the Prada runway. Timothee’s suit. Jacquemus’ marketing. But did you know it’s one of the oldest colors in human history? Yellow has always been used to make a mark - literally - and we’re taking a deep dive into why that is.

The yellow moodboard. I’ve always loved yellow - my childhood bedroom was painted the sunniest shade. Andie Anderson’s dress was burned into my 8-year-old brain. Giorgio Morandi’s paintings will be my first purchase should I fall into sudden wealth. What’s your fave yellow memory?

P.S. after you've had your yellow fix, make sure you’re caught up on the secret history of blue👇

Secret history of color: blue

WHEN DID YELLOW START TO TAKE OVER?

Ok let’s go back in time. Way back! Before sunflowers or butter sculptures…before anything close to “art” as we know it, humans were already reaching for yellow.

Why? Because it was everywhere. Yellow is one of the most naturally occurring pigments on earth. 300,000 years ago, early humans were using yellow ochre to decorate their bodies (prelude to Chanel runway?). 17,000 years ago, our OG artists - prehistoric cave painters - made the first yellow pigments to paint galloping horses in France’s Lascaux caves.

Antoine Vollon's Mound of Butter (c. 1875–1885): the original butter yellow obsession. Yellow has always been a color of extremes. In Renaissance art, yellow meant divinity (cue Jesus’s halos). It also meant betrayal (Judas was often painted yellow and “yellow-bellied” became code for cowardice). Ancient Egyptians used yellow to paint the skin of gods…in Medieval Europe, it marked outcasts. By Oscar Wilde’s days, yellow meant scandal (“yellow books” were code for edgy smut). Yellow has been a lot of things - but never shy.

From the beginning, yellow wasn’t subtle. It marked bodies! It caught eyes! It poisoned people (more on that later). Throughout history, yellow has been a color that’s impossible to ignore.

So how did yellow swing the pendulum in art? We’ll break down the history of yellow into the four paint pigments (and famous works) that changed everything.

1. ORPIMENT YELLOW: the deadly star of the ancient world

Let’s start with some DRAMA. This pigment was beautiful enough to rival gold, unstable enough to ruin your masterpiece, and dangerous enough…to kill you. Meet orpiment: the femme fatale of the ancient pigment world.

Back it up: orpiment is one of the first naturally occurring pigments dating back to ancient Egypt. It’s made by grinding up a mineral THICK with arsenic sulfide (yes, poison!!!). Egyptians used it for tomb murals and eyeshadow (cute! deadly!). Romans treated it as “poor man’s gold,” a substitute for actual gilding. In the Islamic golden age, it was used in illuminated manuscripts.

The Book of Hours at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (1490–1500). If you want to get up close with illuminated manuscripts, start with Isabella in Boston or J.P. Morgan in New York. Both collectors were obsessed with the ancient and the ornate (famously allergic to Modern Art). Thanks to their ~stacked~ collections of early religious texts, we get to see pigments like orpiment - toxic, golden, and incredibly preserved - still glowing on the page.

It was brilliant - but it was also wildly toxic. By the Middle Ages, the public knew it was dangerous - but we used it anyway. Because nothing else matched its golden glow.

Poisonous paint for the sake of color? That’s true love. And Rembrandt was one of the guys that said yes please.

Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Jewish Bride (c. 1665)

Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Jewish Bride (c. 1665–1669) Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. See that intense contrast w/ light and shadow? That’s signature Rembrandt (an expert at painting “chiaroscuro” aka that high contrast use of directional light). He was chasing a specific glow - skin clothes hair that looked alive. In this case, note the golden shimmer in the sleeve - that’s thanks to Orpiment, the glowing yellow pigment made from arsenic. A man who liked to live on the edge.

Our dear Rembrandt is known as a master of light. And he’d use whatever materials necessary to get that ~dramatic effect~. Think: strange combos of paint ingredients, incompatible pigments. You see that in the Jewish Bride - he painted with orpiment to color the bride and groom’s sleeves. Yes, he knew it was toxic & chemically unstable. And yes! He used it anyway. Nothing else got him that almost ethereal glow. Visual pay off = worth it.

2. LEAD-TIN YELLOW: the yellow that disappeared

How does a color go from being the yellow of the Old Masters to totally forgotten? Let us get! on! the! case! of lead-tin yellow - the pigment that disappeared in the 1700s only to be rediscovered in 1941.

Back-it up: after its debut in the 13th century, lead-tin yellow was the hot yellow in town - slowly replacing orpiment as a glowy & (slightly less) toxic alternative.

The old masters LOVED it. It lit up the palettes of the Italian Renaissance (Titian alert) and Dutch Golden Age (cc: Vermeer, Rembrandt). But by the 1700s, it simply disappeared - replaced by some trendy newcomers like Naples and Chrome yellow.

A detail from Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast (1635-1638), which is *dripppping* with lead-tin yellow - see the highlights of the clock. How could such an obvious pigment disappear? One theory: naming chaos. Unlike more famous pigments (ultramarine), lead-tin yellow never had a single catchy name. In Italy, it was giallorino. In Franc, jaune d’étain. The linguistic tangle = hard to pass down through generations. It makes me wonder what other colors are right under our noses?!?!

For over 200 years, lead-tin yellow was pretty much hiding in plain sight until a German scientist (why is it ALWAYS a German scientist?) was studying historical paintings in 1941 and came across this mysterious yellow. He realized it wasn’t Naples or ochre but its own thing: lead-tin yellow. He REVERSE ENGINEERED it to bring it back to life. The yellow of the old masters has returned! What a comeback!

Vermeer was one Old Master who put it on the map:

Johannes Vermeer’s The Woman with a Pearl Necklace (1664)

Lead-tin yellow is often referred to as the yellow of the Old Masters - if you look at the 20 Vermeer paintings that use it, you can see why. The Woman With A Pearl Necklace is one of Vermeer’s lesser-known jewels - & it does not skimp on lead-tin yellow. It colors the girl’s striking yellow jacket, the curtain, the sunlit glow of the room. Vermeer didn’t just paint color, he painted light.

Vermeer was famously slow - just 34-35 paintings in his lifetime - so every pigment used was very intentional. Unlike Rembrandt, Vermeer only a handful of carefully selected colors, all made by hand. His go-to yellow? Lead-tin.

Lead-tin was warm. Stable! Could give him that ~fancy glow~ Vermeer is known for. Orpiment was too volatile & chrome yellow didn’t exist yet. Lead-tin yellow was the only choice.

Keep reading to my Guest Curators’ Yellow Picks below - Somsack blesses us with Vermeer commentary I can’t stop thinking about….

Vermeer’s yellows💛 Left to right: Woman with a Pearl Necklace (1664), A Lady Writing (1665), Lady with Her Maidservant Holding a Letter (1666). Each of these paintings uses lead-tin - if ultramarine was Vermeer’s king, lead-tin yellow was his QUEEN. P.S. More on the secret history of Vermeer’s blue here.

P.S. I was curious if lead-tin yellow ever made its way back into popular art - the short answer is no. By the time it was rediscovered in 1941, modernism was already in full swing. Now, it seems to be made by niche pigment companies, mostly for historical analysis or restoration.

3. CHROME-YELLOW: Van Gogh’s golden child

When you think of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, you’re thinking of Chrome Yellow - it’s the yellow of the Impressionist era.

Back it up: it’s 1809 and Chrome Yellow was born in a lab (19th century = peak time mad-scientist-pigment-boom). Our artist crowd LOVED it. It was rich! Saturated. Totally alive.