Squeeze! How the Paint Tube Took Art Outdoors

Squeeze! How the Paint Tube Took Art Outdoors

1For hundreds of years, painters in Europe made their own oil paints. They or their helpers ground colored powders, called pigments, and mixed them into oil by hand. The work was slow and messy. Worse, the paint did not keep for long, because oil paint starts to dry and harden once air reaches it.

2Storing paint was a problem, too. Many artists kept their paint in small bags made from pig bladders and tied them shut with string. To use the paint, a painter poked a hole in the bag with a tack. The bags often burst, and once a bag was opened, it was hard to seal again. Some painters tried glass syringes instead, but glass could break.

3Because their supplies were so hard to carry, most painters finished their pictures indoors, in a studio. If they wanted to paint a field or a river, they usually made quick sketches outside and then painted the real picture back inside.

4In 1841, an American portrait painter named John Goffe Rand, who was living in London, found a better way. He invented a small, soft metal tube with a screw cap. A painter could squeeze out just the amount of paint needed and then close the cap. Because the cap kept air out, the rest of the paint stayed fresh.

5Paint makers soon began selling ready-made colors in tubes. Painters no longer had to grind pigments before they could start working. Around the same time, chemists were creating bright new pigments, and many of these new colors were sold in tubes as well.

6The tube changed where artists could paint. With a box of tubes and a light, folding easel, a painter could carry a whole set of colors into a meadow, onto a beach, or along a busy city street. Later in the 1800s, a group of French painters who became known as the Impressionists took full advantage of this. They wanted to show how light and weather change from moment to moment, so they painted outdoors and worked quickly with short dabs of color. Claude Monet, one of the best-known Impressionists, often painted the same scene at different times of day to show how the light changed.

7Many art historians believe that without paint tubes, Impressionism might never have happened. A small invention made for convenience ended up changing both how artists painted and what they chose to paint.