Fugitive Pigments in Oil Painting: What Van Gogh’s Palette Reconstruction Teaches Artists

Oil paint does not keep every color in the same way. Some pigments are fugitive pigments — they change, dim, or fade with light exposure — and few paintings show the cost of that as clearly as Vincent van Gogh’s.

Some paints stay close to their first look for a long time. Some fade. Some yellow. Some darken. Some look sound as films, yet lose the color plan that gave the work its force.

This is the main studio lesson in Muriel Geldof and colleagues’ 2018 paper, “Reconstructing Van Gogh’s Palette to Determine the Optical Characteristics of His Paints.” The study is about Vincent van Gogh’s Field with Irises near Arles, painted in 1888. Yet the Van Gogh palette in this paper is more than art history. It is a clear case study in how fugitive pigments, oil choice, paint-making, and light exposure can shape the future appearance of a painting.

The painting still looks strong. However, it no longer looks as Van Gogh described it. He wrote of very yellow buttercups and purple irises. Today many of those irises look more blue than purple, and the yellow field has lost some of its first force. The paper links much of this shift to fading red lakes, changes in chrome yellow, a later varnish, dirt, and other aging effects (Geldof et al., 2018, pp. 1–2).

For a painter, this is not a remote museum issue.

If a violet is made from blue plus a weak red lake, the red can fade and leave the violet too blue. If a yellow darkens, a bright field can become dull. If an oil yellows, a pale passage can warm. If a varnish is added to a surface that was meant to stay unvarnished, the whole light key can change.