Is there anything new in artists’ oil paint?
Can there really be anything new in artists’ oil paint? With so many different brands, how does one distinguish between them?
Most manufacturers use the same industrially produced pigments, the same refined oils, and the same undisclosed additives. The result is a market where one brand’s cadmium yellow handles almost identically to another’s. The composition of oil color is simple — pigment and oil — but what actually goes into the tube is more complicated than the label suggests.
Since the introduction of the collapsible tube over 170 years ago, manufactured oil paint has changed how artists work. Artists no longer grind pigment in oil to make paint. With this change came greater uniformity — and a third ingredient that most artists never asked for: stabilizers, stearates, and waxes, added to prevent oil and pigment from separating during storage. As more pigments manufactured by large industrial companies found their way into artists’ oil colors, the last meaningful differences between brands disappeared.
But not entirely.
Rublev Colours Artist Oils are made with pigment and oil. No stearates. No waxes. No driers. No fillers. Every ingredient is published per product — not because the labeling standard requires it, but because it does not require it.
What the Label Is Not Required to Tell You
ASTM D 4302 — the Standard Specification for Artists’ Oil, Resin-Oil, and Alkyd Paints — governs pigment identification, lightfastness ratings, and labeling for artists’ oil paints. It requires manufacturers to list the pigments used in each color by Colour Index name and to disclose the vegetable origin of the oil.
The standard is silent on stearates, beeswax, castor wax, and other rheology-modifying additives. It permits driers “in minimal amounts” and “minimal amounts of inert pigments,” but does not require these to be disclosed on the label. A tube labeled “PW6, linseed oil” is fully compliant with ASTM D 4302, regardless of whether the formulation also contains aluminum stearate, beeswax, or a cobalt-manganese drier.
This is not a loophole, nor is it dishonesty. The standard’s scope is pigments. It was not designed to address everything in the tube. But it means that for most commercial oil paints, the label tells you about the pigment. It does not tell you about the rest.
Rublev Colours publishes additive information voluntarily, beyond what the standard requires — because we believe artists should know what is in their paint.
A Brief History of Modern Oil Paint
Let’s see how developments over the past two centuries have changed artists’ use of oil paint to better understand why these differences are essential. Many of these changes have brought about greater efficiency for manufacturers, but at what cost to artists?
Collapsible Tubes
While in London, the artist John Rand invented a collapsible paint tube made of tin for storing artists’ oil paints. Prior to this advancement, painters generally mixed pigments with oil in small amounts and stored the paint in animal bladders or glass syringes. The tin tube allowed unused paint to be stored and used later without drying out. The collapsible tube was initially marketed by Thomas Brown, a London-based colormen firm (Harley 1971). Rand was issued two patents, one by the British Patent Office and another by the U.S. Patent Office. The first (March 6, 1841, #8,863) was for “Improvements in preserving paints and other fluids,” the second (September 11, 1841, #2,252) was for “Improvement in the construction of vessels or apparatus for preserving paint,” (Rand 1841) and the third (September 29, 1842, #9,480) was for “Improvements in making and closing metallic collapsible vessels” (Harley 1971).
By 1842, the tube was being sold exclusively by the firm of Winsor & Newton as “Rand’s Patent Collapsible Tube” (Fairbairn 1982). By the 1850s, the Winsor & Newton Collapsible Paint Tube (note that “Rand” has been dropped) was being advertised in the trade catalogs of New York firms such as Goupil & Co. and Masury & Whiton (New York City Directory 1858) and also in Paris in the earliest of the Sennelier catalogs of 1887. (Katlan 1999)
Although some claim paint in tubes has changed how some artists approach painting, this is an overly simplistic view. They often provide the quote of the father of Pierre-Auguste Renoir as proof of this claim, “Without paint in tubes there would have been no ...Impressionism.” (Callen 2000)
However, it is agreed that collapsible tubes revolutionized how artists’ paints are made and sold commercially. Whether they changed how artists paint is a separate and more contested claim.
Pigments
Before the nineteenth century, artists bought pigments from merchants, such as apothecaries, and sometimes ground their pigments from stones or earth. During the nineteenth century, pigment manufacturing began in earnest throughout Europe due to innovations from the Industrial Revolution and advances in chemistry. American manufacturing of artists’ pigments appears to have begun in the early nineteenth century, when Cholwell & Mercein operated a “manufactory” of watercolors at 178 Front Street, New York.
Many new pigments were introduced in the two centuries following the Industrial Revolution. Some failed to live up to expectations. Two of the most consequential — titanium white and zinc white — deserve particular attention, because they reveal how pigment choices carry long-term mechanical consequences that were not understood when the pigments were adopted.
Titanium White
Titanium dioxide white pigments have become one of the most essential pigment groups today and are products of twentieth-century technology. Although the incorporation of titanium white into commercial paint began in 1919, the industry remained skeptical of the claims made for these pigments into the 1920s. Some pigment supply occurred in France from the mid-1920s, but it was not until the 1930s that artists’ manuals indicated a degree of acceptance. (Laver 1997)
Out of concerns for lead poisoning, titanium dioxide has almost entirely replaced basic lead carbonate (lead white) on the artists’ palette. But lead white served roles beyond providing a white color. In a forum post, Jaap Boon described the role of lead white in oil paint as “multiple” — a thorough drier that links the acid groups of drying oil, stabilizing the paint in the early drying stages and further stabilizing it to form a strong, flexible film. Without lead white, something else must assume these roles. Boon concluded that no such replacement has been found, “simply because we have only very recently begun to understand the molecular structure of paints. I believe that the period 1950–2000 will bring us many defects in the oil paints that are now maturing.” (Boon 2007) Smithsonian researchers have since confirmed that titanium white forms a flexible film but is not as strong as lead white paint.
Rublev Colours offers both Lead White No. 1 (in linseed oil) and Lead White No. 2 (in walnut oil), as well as Plumbonacrite White No. 1 and No. 2 — the first commercially available artists’ oil colors made with plumbonacrite, the lead carbonate hydroxide recently identified as a key component in the ground layers of paintings by Rembrandt and other Dutch masters.
Zinc White
Although first produced in 1781, it was about 50 years before artists adopted zinc white. As early as 1834, a dense form of zinc white was introduced by Winsor & Newton under the name “Chinese white” (Church 1901). The major obstacle to its use was its poor drying in linseed oil. By 1850, after Leclaire in France showed that faster-drying oils could overcome this difficulty, it was regularly made as oil paint.
The long-term consequences took longer to appear. Mecklenburg and Tumosa, two scientists at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute, conducted a 28-year study on the stability and strength of oil paint films. Their findings have important implications for any artwork made with oil paints containing zinc white. What is of interest about paints made with zinc white and drying oils is that they become extremely brittle — in as little as three years. A 14.5-year-old zinc white paint snaps like glass when bent. A 14-year-old lead white paint made with linseed oil can elongate by 4.5% before breaking, whereas zinc white paint of the same age can elongate only 0.3% (Mecklenburg 2007).
The mechanism has since been traced: zinc oxide forms a packed crystalline structure that traps unsaturated fatty acid chains, preventing them from crosslinking with the polymer network that gives oil paint its flexibility and strength (Rogala et al. 2010). The failure occurs not only when zinc white is used as the sole pigment, but at additive levels — the small amounts routinely added to other colors to modify handling and reduce cost.
Today, zinc oxide is routinely added to manufactured artists’ paints labeled titanium white, flake white, and many pale colors called hues. Mecklenburg warned that these paints “often become very brittle in as little as three years if excessive zinc is used.” (Mecklenburg 2005) Natural Pigments published an early warning on zinc white in oil paint in 2007 — a warning later cited in Williamsburg’s own technical publication when the broader industry began to address the problem (Sands 2018).
Modern Additives
As commercial oil paints replaced those hand-ground by artists, manufacturers sought ways to prevent oil and pigment from separating in tubes during storage. Aluminum stearate, a metallic soap, was particularly effective. When aluminum stearate was first introduced to artists’ paints is not known, but it is directly mentioned in a 1942 painting materials review (Gettens and Stout 1942) and in a
Rublev Colours Artist Oils contain only pigment and oil. We use linseed oil, sometimes with a small amount of heat-bodied linseed oil. No stearates. No waxes. No driers. No fillers.
This costs more to manufacture. Without stearates to gel the mixture at a lower pigment concentration, each tube requires more pigment — the most expensive component in oil paint. Without wax or stearate to impose a uniform consistency, each color must be formulated individually around the pigment’s own behavior in oil. There is no additive package to flatten these differences into a standardized texture.
The result is paint that handles differently from color to color — because each pigment is different. Some colors brush out long. Others are short and buttery. Others are thixotropic — stiff under the knife but fluid under the brush. This is not inconsistency. It is the character of the pigment itself, unmasked.
Overall, Rublev Colours Artist Oils have a longer brushing consistency than most tube colors today, making them well suited for both bristle and soft hair brushes, in fine rendering on smooth panels and broader work on fine-weave canvas.
1949 paper by Levison, who wrote that “the use of aluminum stearate, customary for several decades, was openly declared” (Levison 1949).
In addition to aluminum stearate, several other stearates — magnesium, zinc — as well as beeswax, castor wax, and driers were introduced into many commercial oil paint brands later in the century. Stearates alter the consistency of the oil, changing the way the paint handles. With increasing amounts of stearate, the oil-pigment mixture becomes viscous, and by using an appropriate amount of stearate, the paint can gel at a lower pigment concentration (Mayer 1965). This creates a less expensive paint, since a smaller amount of costly pigment is needed (Tumosa 2001).
The result is uniformity. When every manufacturer adds the same stabilizers and rheology modifiers, each brand’s cadmium yellow handles much like another’s. The individual character of the pigment — the texture, body, and brushing quality that differ from one pigment to another — is overridden by the additive package. The paint handles the way the stearate dictates, not the way the pigment naturally behaves in oil.
Conservation science is now measuring the long-term consequences. Peer-reviewed research has documented five specific failure modes associated with common paint additives: zinc embrittlement and delamination from zinc soaps; water sensitivity linked to residual surfactants and stearate degradation products; long-term softness from wax additives that do not participate in the polymer crosslinking network; reduced crosslinking density from aluminum ions that destabilize ester bonds via Lewis-acid catalysis; and efflorescence from magnesium carbonate fillers under atmospheric sulfur dioxide exposure.
Rublev Colours Makes It Simple Again
Rublev Colours Artist Oils contain only pigment and oil. We use linseed oil, sometimes with a small amount of heat-bodied linseed oil. No stearates. No waxes. No driers. No fillers.
This costs more to manufacture. Without stearates to gel the mixture at a lower pigment concentration, each tube requires more pigment — the most expensive component in oil paint. Without wax or stearate to impose a uniform consistency, each color must be formulated individually around the pigment’s own behavior in oil. There is no additive package to flatten these differences into a standardized texture.
The result is paint that handles differently from color to color — because each pigment is different. Some colors brush out long. Others are short and buttery. Others are thixotropic — stiff under the knife but fluid under the brush. This is not inconsistency. It is the character of the pigment itself, unmasked.
Overall, Rublev Colours Artist Oils have a longer brushing consistency than most tube colors today, making them well suited for both bristle and soft hair brushes, in fine rendering on smooth panels and broader work on fine-weave canvas.
Why Natural Pigments Look Different
The particles of natural pigments are larger and more varied in size and shape than those in modern artists’ oil colors. This heterogeneity is not a defect — it is the source of the optical richness that distinguishes historical painting surfaces from modern ones.
When light enters a paint film made with uniform, finely ground synthetic pigment, it encounters particles of consistent size and composition. It reflects predictably. The result is even, flat color. When light enters a paint film made with heterogeneous natural pigment — particles of varying size, shape, crystal orientation, and refractive index — it scatters, refracts, and interferes across a far more complex internal geometry. The result is a surface with depth, luminosity, and what the historical literature calls “broken light.”
Crystalline pigments make this most visible. Azurite particles under the microscope reveal a mass of blue and blue-green crystals reflecting light in many directions, producing a visual complexity that no uniform synthetic blue can reproduce. The same is true of malachite, natural ultramarine, and the earths — each mineral particle contributes its own angle of refraction and its own color temperature to the aggregate surface.
Anita Albus, in The Art of Arts, describes the displacement of natural pigments by synthetic substitutes as a “loss of body” — a phrase that refers not to opacity or tinting strength, but to the physical structure of the pigment mass itself: the heterogeneity, the varied crystal facets, the interference colors that arise from particles of different sizes interacting with light at different scales. When that structure is replaced by uniform synthetic particles, the body is lost even when the hue is matched. (Albus 2000)
Single Pigment Colors
When you see a color name on our label, you get one pure pigment — and we tell you which one. Rublev Colours Vermilion is not a hue but the genuine pigment: pure red mercuric sulfide. Rublev Colours Green Earth is green earth — not a mixture of synthetic pigments formulated to approximate its appearance. Rublev Colours Naples Yellow is pure lead antimonate.
Every color’s full ingredient list — pigment, oil type, and whether heat-bodied oil is included — is published on its product page. The labeling standard does not require this. We do it because we believe the information belongs to the artist.
Is there anything new in artists’ oil paint?
Collapsible Tubes
Zinc White