Le Blon's Coloritto

Jacob Christopher Le Blon (1667-1741) was an engraver who developed what is perhaps the first system of color printing using three primary colors: red, yellow and blue. In his treatise, Coloritto, Or the Harmony of Colouring in Painting, he propounds a theory of painting that is of interest to students and professionals alike.

Le Blon describes white as a compound of the primitive impalpable colors, and black as a like compound of the palpable. True painting, he says, represents light by white, and shade by black, reflections by yellow, and turnings-off or roundings of objects by blue. Such is the outline of the brief and perspicuous theory of Le Blon, which, however deficient or defective, verges upon the truth and simplicity of nature.

Of Preliminaries.

Coloritto--or the Harmony of Colouring, is the Art of Mixing COLOURS, in order to represent naturally, in all Degrees of painted Light and Shade, the same FLESH, or the Colours of any other Object, that is represented in the true or pure Light.

Painting can represent all visible Objects, with three Colours, Yellow, Red, and Blue; sort all other Colours can be compos'd of these Three, which I call Primitive; for Example.

Yellow and Red make an Orange Colour.

Red and Blue make a Purple and Violet Colour.

Blue and Yellow make a Green Colour.

And a Mixture of these Three Original Colours makes a Black, and all other Colours whatsover; as I have demonstrated by my Invention of Printing Pictures and Figures with their natural Colours.

I am only speaking of Material Colours, or those used by Painters; for a Mixture of all the primitive impalpable Colours, that cannot be felt, will not produce Black, but the very Contrary, White; as the Great Sir Isaac NEWTON has demonstrated in his Opticks.

White, is a Concentrating, or an Excess of Lights.
Black, is a deep Hiding, or Privation of Lights.

But both are the Produce of all the Primitive Colours compounded or mixed together; the one by Impalpable Colours and the other by Material Colours.

True PAINTING represents
1. Light by White.
2. Shades by Black.
3. Reflexions by Yellow
4. Turnings by Blue.

N.B. In Nature, the general Reflex Colour is Yellow; but all the accidental Reflexions, caused by an opposite Body or Object, partake of the Colour of the opposite Body that caused them.

When a Painter says, that such Artists make a good Coloritto, he means, that they represent truly and naturally the Nude or the naked human Flesh; supposing they can paint all other visible Objects well, and without Difficulty.

In order to learn to paint a good Nude, or any other color'd Object, we must first learn to represent a white Object. For Example, To paint or represent a Head of Plaster, &c.

In which the White will serve to represent the Lights; and the Black the Shades; But White and Black are not alone sufficient like Nature is self, a white Object, which indeed represents a Print or a Design, but not a white Object.

To represent such a white Object, we must add to the Shades, or join with them the Reflex, or the Colour of the Reflex, viz. the Yellow; and with the Turnings off, or Roundings, we must join the Colour of the Turnings, viz. the Blue.

Only remember, that in natural Objects the Turnings off, or Roundings, are almost imperceptible.

To represent a colour'd Object, we may take an Head of Plaster stain'd with the Colour of Flesh, and set it in a good Light; and then we shall see that the same Colour of Flesh discovers it self throughout, or over all the Head, and distinctly enough, even in the Shades, in the Demishades or Mezzotints, in the Reflexions, in the Turnings off or Roundings, &c.

So begins Le Blon's theoretical discussion of color mixing in painting. In subsequent pages, he outlines a practical scheme of setting up the palette and individual color mixes for painting the various flesh tones in its shades and tints.

The basic palette of Le Blon consists of these pigments: 1. lead white, 2. vermilion, 3. red ocher, 4. brown ocher burnt, 5. lack (Indian or lac lake from lac dye), 6. umber, 7. burnt umber, and 8. black. Additional colors may be used are: Brown pink (or stil de grain), asphaltum, yellow ocher, massicot (lead-tin yellow), and "blew" (azurite, lazurite or indigo). This palette is almost identical to that prescribed by Roger de Piles some 40 years earlier.

The Palette of Michael Sweerts

It is no coincidence that the palette in the self-portrait by Michael Sweerts is practically identical to the palette described in detail by Roger de Piles in his 1684 book, Les Premiers Elémens de Peinture Pratique. Sweerts was a contemporary of de Piles, and it appears that his palette was laid out in the manner practiced throughout western Europe in the 17th century.

The pigments on the palette held by Sweerts in his self-portrait were analysed in detail in 1954 by Richard Buck and R. J. Gettens, and can be identified as: 1) vermilion, 2) red lake (possibly madder lake), 3) white lead, 4) yellow ochre, 5) red ochre or Venetian red, 6) terra verte, 7) a warm brown lake (stil de grain or brown pink?), 8) a cool brown pigment (unidentified, but likely a brown iron oxide earth pigment), 9) raw sienna, 10) Vandyke brown (or carbon black), and 11) an unidentified pigment that was lost.

Although we do not see the same arrangement of columns of shadow and half-tints prescribed by de Piles in his book, we do see mixes of vermilion and lead white like those written by de Piles.


Sweerts was baptized in Brussels on 29 September 1618. By the mid 1640s, he was living in Rome, where he remained until at least 1652. Back in Brussels, Sweerts opened an academy for life drawing in 1656, and became a member of the St. Luke's Guild in 1659. During a brief stay in Amsterdam in about 1660-61, he became a lay brother in the Lazarist Société des Missions Étrangères, and joined their mission to the Orient in late 1661. He was dismissed from the mission in 1662 because of his mental instability and ungoverned zeal, and died at the Portugese Jesuit colony at Goa in 1664.

In addition to portraits, Sweerts painted genre scenes and history paintings that combine stark chiaroscuro and blunt realism with a serene, almost classical simplicity.

Detail about the self-portrait: Michiel Sweerts (Flemish, Brussels 1618 - 1664 Goa [India]), Self-Portrait, ca. 1656, Oil on canvas, 37 1/4 x 28 7/8 in. (94.5 x 73.4 cm), Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio.

Rubens' Palette, a view by Denman Ross

Denman Ross sets forth a 'set palette' in his book, On Drawing and Painting, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912 that he says is based on the palette used by Rubens:

There is another palette, Palette 10, which should be mentioned which is not very far from being the palette which was used by Rubens and some other masters of the Renaissance. The form of this palette is shown on page 53. This palette, more than any other that I have proposed, reproduces the relation of colors and values which we see in the Spectrum. It was not, however, worked out with any particular reference to the Spectrum. It is based upon a color and value analysis of certain paintings by Rubens. In using this palette I am constantly reminded of Rubens in the way the tones come. I am reminded also of Correggio and of Turner. The descents from Yellow follow, as I have said, the value and color relations of the Spectrum, with an omission, however, of all violet tones. Violet rarely occurs in Renaissance painting. The lower tones of the palette are found in Burnt Sienna more or less mixed with a cool Green like Vert Emeraude. Below these orange and green tones comes a very dark brown, Van Dyck Brown or Cassel Earth, perhaps, which disappears in Black. The registers in Palette 10 are not repetitions of one another, but variations of the movement from Blue down to Red; variations which are so devised as to get the colors, as many as possible, to occur in the value of their highest intensities and in those intensities. Palette 10 is a palette for the lover of color.

On Drawing and Painting by Denman Waldo Ross:

This is not a palette based on historic equivalency to the pigments used by Rubens, but rather Rubens' palette using modern pigments in a modern viewpoint. Ross assigns RO to burnt Sienna, GB to chrome oxide (Verte Emeraude or chrome oxide dihydrate, Colour Index Pigment Green 18, 77289) and the other color notations with high intensity pigments as follows:

By Red I mean the only positive color which shows no element of Yellow or of Blue. It is the color which we often describe by the word Crimson. It is produced by the mixture of Rose Madder and Vermilion. By Yellow I mean the only positive color which shows no element either of Red or Blue. It is the color of the primrose, which may be produced by the pigment Aureolin with a very little Vert Emeraude. By Blue I mean the only positive color which shows no element either of Yellow or of Red. Blue is seen in a clear sky after rain and in the pigment Cobalt. By Orange I mean a positive color showing equal elements of Red and Yellow. By Green I mean a positive color showing equal elements of Yellow and of Blue. By Violet I mean a positive color showing equal elements of Blue and Red. (emphasis mine)

It would be interesting to attempt to reproduce Rubens' painting using this palette, as opposed to the actual pigments he used. However, it would be easier using a palette with his pigments and tints set in the manner described in de Piles' book.