Color: Indian Yellow | Country: Bihar, India
Yellow is the cruelest color, yet this captivating color provides a translucent warmth that is essential to artists’ palettes.
There is a story of two kings who lived in the sixth century BC. Every year they would exchange gifts, trying to outdo each other. One year, one of the kings decided to give his rival the ultimate present, a painting of Buddha, who was living in Bihar. No painting had ever been done before, but the king assigned the job to a man he thought had potential. When the man arrived to the place where Budda was in meditation, he was so overwhelmed by the enlighten golden-yellow glow he could not look at him. Buddha made a suggestion to the man, they would go down to the bank of a clear liquid pool, and the artist would look at the reflection of Buddha in the water. There the man happily painted the reflection he saw.
When the other king received his gift, he had an intuitive mental leap. In terms of Buddhist teaching, he realized that what we see in the world with our eyes is a reflection of the reality that we cannot quite grasp.
The intriguing story of Indian Yellow begins in 15th century India. The colour was known as piuri, purree, or gogilī – the latter being an Indian form of the Persian term for ‘cow-earth’. As the story goes, the first production was developed in India in the 15th century in the northeastern region, just south of Nepal. To achieve this unique hue, cows were fed on a restricted diet of mango leaves and water. The resulting bovine urine was collected and formed into lumps which were sent to Messrs Winsor & Newton and used to create the pigment.
One of Indian Yellow’s most famous users was Van Gogh, who famously painted a luminous Indian yellow moon in his 1889 masterpiece, The Starry Night. This was to be one of the last famous uses of the colour. In the early 20th century Indian Yellow was outlawed in Bengal due to the cruel nature of its harvest, and the pigment disappeared from the market until it was replaced with synthetic pigment.
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