The lost yellow of the masters

The lost yellow of the masters

As one of the primary colours, yellow is a vital paint for artists. For many centuries there weren’t any particularly good greens that were also enduring, so many oil and watercolour paintings have relied on the mixture of blue and yellow to generate most of their greens. This weekend I show and tell the stories of three of the yellow pigments that have featured in well-known paintings. Today’s is about one pigment that went missing from the pal…