Inspiring editorial from MIX Magazine
Made from a mineral mined in Afghanistan as early as the 7th millennium BC, then employed as an indicator of wealth and status in Renaissance art, Ultramarine was once valued higher than gold.
Johannes Vermeer | Girl with a Pearl Earring | Mauritshuis, 1665
Around 1665, Dutch painter Vermeer set about mixing up pigment for a painting that would become one of the most famous in the world. Along with lead white and ochre, he chose natural ultramarine; the result was Girl with a Pearl Earring. The distinctive blue of the girl’s turban didn’t come cheap, many artists of the time used the far less costly and more unstable azurite. But Vermeer recognised the powerful luminosity of this colour and its importance in an otherwise muted palette.
The ultramarine much loved by Vermeer was made by grinding a deep blue metamorphic rock, lapis lazuli, into a powder, then mixing the mineral with melted beeswax, oils and pine resin. The lapis itself had been mined in the Sar-e-Sang mine in Afghanistan for more than 6,000 years.
The word Ultramarine is derived from Latin and means, rather poetically, beyond the seas. But this blue is actually the colour of a bright summer day, with a vivid purity and no traces of other hues.
While other blues, cobalt and Prussian, were developed in the 18th century, bringing a measure of affordability, the cost of ultramarine remained prohibitive. So perhaps inevitably, 19th century pigment entrepreneurs set about discovering a convincing synthetic alternative.
In 1824, the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale offered a prize of 6,000 French francs to anyone who could produce a synthetic ultramarine at a production cost of less than 300 francs per kilo. For comparison, at the start of the century, a kilo of lapis lazuli cost between 6,000 and 10,000 francs.
The prize was eventually awarded to French industrial chemist Jean-Baptiste Guimet in 1826. He heated kaolinite, sodium carbonate and sulphur in a kiln; the result was an even more vivid version of the colour, named French Ultramarine.
British artist JWM Turner, famously frugal, was one of the first artists to experiment with the much cheaper synthetic ultramarine in 1834 but others followed, including Vincent van Gogh. The artist’s The Starry Night would have been impossible without French Ultramarine. Beyond art, artificial ultramarine’s more affordable price enabled the colour to be extensively used in 19th century wallpapers, textiles and paint.
Experimentation into this colour’s potential didn’t stop with the 19th century. Artist Yves Klein’s love affair with ultramarine led to the development of an even more intense version of the colour in 1960, dubbed IKB (International Klein Blue).
Architects and designers continue to reach for ultramarine as a swift and effective way to make a statement. LOT Office for Architecture’s aptly named Blue Building in Brooklyn has an almost IKB intensity, while for SS 2023, Off-White presented a collection punctuated with ultramarine on a catwalk in the same colour.
MIX Magazine is a quarterly print and digital publication by our creative agency, Colour Hive and is available as part of Colour Hive membership.
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