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Language: en-GB

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I work with computers
and digital video a lot,

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which means that I think of colour
in terms of light,

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in terms of amounts
of red, green and blue.

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Someone who works with print
might think of colour

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in terms of combining inks,
cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

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A physicist might think in
terms of the frequencies

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and wavelengths of the light,

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but there is a very
different way to look at it,

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through the chemistry and compounds
that make up colours.

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Inside those buildings,
the Harvard Art Museums,

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is the Forbes Pigment Collection.

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- The pigment collection was put together

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by Edward Forbes, who was
the second director of the museum.

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He had been buying works of art

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and in doing so he discovered
that the dealers in Italy

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were seeing American collectors
as something of a mark.

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What he decided is that if you understand
what a work of art is made of,

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what the original materials were
that an artist used,

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then you can tell original from restoration,
original from fake.

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And so what he did was
start buying pigments

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to use as standards for the
analysis of works of art.

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Knowing that it was visible to the public
meant that I needed to make some sense

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of what we have as a collection.

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So what I did was take a colour wheel,
open it out, have yellow in the centre

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and we go along one way to blue,
along the other way to red,

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and purple at each end.

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So we have unique colours
along the top,

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we have duplicates of those colours,

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which are chemical duplicates,
but not actual colour duplicates

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and then underneath on the
bottom shelf we have

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the raw material that
makes up the colours above.

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In effect, what we have are the materials
that make up paint next to each other

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and then if people look
at the galleries below,

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they can actually see what artists can do
with these raw materials.

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If you think about iron oxide for example,
hematite, but as it forms in the earth,

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those slight additions that the earth adds
into the hematite deposits

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allow it to look slightly different,

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so we have 60 different
samples of hematite.

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Each of those is a slightly different
shade from the other.

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These pigments are not
used for restoration.

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We use them only as standards
for analysing samples from works of art.

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By analyzing the materials,
we can understand

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the thinking process and if the artist
is no longer alive,

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it's really the closest way to having an
interview with the artist.

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It's also great for teaching.

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We can show the students
how pigments change.

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They not just fade, but
some pigments darken.

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It's like Vaseline, but 80 years old.

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It doesn't last forever.

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Vermillion, red lead will turn black
on exposure to light.

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You can see how it started.

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And then other pigments like eosin,
which Van Gogh used a lot,

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will fade and give an
entirely different impression

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of what the painting was to what
it looks like now.

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And so for security, we don't
have the public in here.

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Some of the pigments are toxic,
so we don't want people touching them,

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playing with them.

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So pigments are made of mercury,

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they're made of cadmium,
arsenic and so on.

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The oldest white pigment is lead white.

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It's made by taking lead metal,
putting it into a container with vinegar.

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That container is buried in cow dung,

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so out of manure you get the most
pure beautiful white pigment.

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That's been around for
hundreds and hundreds of years.

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People used it as makeup.

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Lead white is toxic in the
way that lead is toxic.

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We have mummy brown.

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It has been used probably
since the 17th century

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and it's made up of Egyptian mummies
that have been ground up into pigment.

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Indian yellow is an interesting pigment.

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It's made by feeding
cows mango leaves only

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and collecting the urine
and drying the urine.

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What you see on the screen
depends on the limitations

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of what the computer screen can depict.

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So videoing them,
putting them into the digital format,

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doesn't replicate the colour.

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There is innovation and people are
developing new ways to depict colours.

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So for example, Mas Subramanian developed
a blue pigment called YInMn Blue.

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He discovered it by accident.

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It's very stable and it's the first inorganic
blue pigment that's been invented

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for a couple of hundred years.

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There's been a new black
that's come onto the market,

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which is Vantablack, which stands for
Vertically Arranged Nano-Tube Arrays.

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What you have is a forest of very tiny tubes
and light will go into that.

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It will bounce around inside the tubes
and then get issued as heat.

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It's a beautiful velvety looking surface
that doesn't bounce any light back.

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Chemists produce more and
more pigments every year

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and I think that we're going to see
pigments depicting colours

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that we never thought were possible.

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Every day somebody is coming in here,

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taking a pigment out and using it
as a reference.

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This was beautifully
arranged when I installed it.

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It took me like four months
of lining everything up

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and it's all a little
higgledy-piggledy now,

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so you can tell that
we use it all the time.

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It's not an historic artifact,

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it's something that we rely
on to do our work properly.

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- My thanks to everyone at
the Harvard Art Museums.

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Pull down the description
for more about them

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and more about the pigment collection.