Ultramarine blue & Ultramarine violet

The two pigments are closely related, as ultramarine violet can be produced by modifying the preparation process used to manufacture synthetic ultramarine blue¹.

But how did synthetic ultramarine blue — and subsequently violet — find its way onto artists’ palettes?

Natural ultramarine blue is none other than lapis lazuli, the well-known semi-precious stone, which had been used as an artistic pigment as early as the 13th century B.C., as demonstrated by a Mycenaean wall-painting fragment from ancient Glas, a major Mycenaean acropolis in Boeotia, Greece².

“Ultramarine” derives from the Latin ultramarinus, meaning “beyond the sea”: the pigment came from lands beyond the sea, across the Caspian Sea and beyond the High Pamirs, in what is now Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush³.

Its value as a pigment was recognised throughout the centuries, but it always came with one significant drawback: its price.

In 1806, the French chemists Charles Bernard Désormes (1777-1862) and Nicolas Clément (1779-1841) first analysed the composition of ultramarine and published their findings in Annales de Chimie⁴,⁵.

According to Fabbrizzi⁶, in 1814 the French chemist Benjamin Tassaert, director of the soda factory of Saint-Gobain at Chauny, asked his former professor at the École Polytechnique and Academician Louis Nicolas Vauquelin (1763-1829) to analyse samples of blue deposits that had remained in a stoneware kiln used for the production of sodium carbonate (soda ash). Tassaert had noticed that, when the kiln was rebuilt in brick, the blue deposits no longer formed.

Vauquelin found that the composition of the sample was similar to that described by Désormes and Clément. Thus, the path towards the invention and synthesis of ultramarine blue was opened.

In 1817, the Royal College of Arts in England offered a prize for the development of a cheap and reliable artificial ultramarine blue. In 1824, the French government’s Société d'Encouragement pour l'Industrie Nationale offered a similar prize, with an exceptionally high monetary reward⁷.

The French industrial chemist Jean-Baptiste Guimet (1795-1871) succeeded in synthesising ultramarine blue in 1826, but did not publish his work.

“In July 1827, in contact with the painting world through his wife, the painter Rosalie Bidauld (1798-1876), he [Guimet] gave some of the pigment to Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), who tested it on the oil painting “The Apotheosis of Homer”, which was to decorate the Charles X Museum in the Louvre. When the great Neoclassical painter saw the result, he declared he preferred it to any other commercial blue”⁸.

Vauquelin did not qualify for the French prize, but Guimet ultimately did, although he kept his manufacturing process secret. This led to a major dispute with the German chemist Christian Gottlob Gmelin (1792-1860) of Tübingen. Unaware of Guimet’s unpublished work, but knowing that Guimet had successfully created the pigment, Gmelin independently succeeded in synthesising ultramarine in 1828 and subsequently published the process⁹.