At Home - Bill Bryson [170]
By the late nineteenth century, 80 percent of English wallpapers contained arsenic, often in very significant quantities. A particular enthusiast was the designer William Morris, who not only loved rich arsenic greens but was on the board of directors of (and heavily invested in) a company in Devon that made arsenic-based pigments. Especially when damp was present—and in English homes it seldom was not—the wallpaper gave off a peculiar musty smell that reminded many people of garlic. Homeowners noticed that bedrooms with green wallpapers usually had no bedbugs. It has also been suggested that poisonous wallpaper could well account for why a change of air was so often beneficial for the chronically ill. In many cases they were doubtless simply escaping a slow poisoning. One such victim was Frederick Law Olmsted, a man we seem to be encountering more often than might be expected. He suffered apparent arsenic poisoning from bedroom wallpaper in 1893, at just the time people were finally figuring out what was making them unwell in bed, and needed an entire summer of convalescence—in another room.
Paints were surprisingly dangerous, too. The making of paints involved the mixing of many toxic products—in particular lead, arsenic, and cinnabar (a cousin of mercury). Painters commonly suffered from a vague but embracing malady called painters’ colic, which was essentially lead poisoning with a flourish. Painters purchased white lead as a block, then ground it to a powder, usually by rolling an iron ball over it. This got a lot of dust onto their fingers and into the air, and the dust so created was highly toxic. Among the many symptoms painters tended to come down with were palsies, racking cough, lassitude, melancholy, loss of appetite, hallucinations, and blindness. One of the quirks of lead poisoning is that it causes an enlargement of the retina that makes some victims see halos around objects—an effect Vincent van Gogh famously exploited in his paintings. It is probable that he was suffering lead poisoning himself. Artists often did. One of those made seriously ill by white lead was James McNeill Whistler, who used a lot of it in creating the life-sized painting The White Girl.
Today lead paint is banned almost everywhere except for certain very specific applications,* but it is much missed by conservators because it gave a depth of color and a mellow air that modern paints really can’t match. Lead paint looks especially good on wood.
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Painting also involved many problems of demarcation. Who was allowed to do what in England was very complicated, thanks to the system of craft guilds, which meant that some practitioners could apply paint, some could apply distemper (a kind of thin paint), and some could do neither. Painters did most of the painting, as you would naturally expect, but plasterers were allowed to apply distemper to plastered walls—but only a few shades. Plumbers and glaziers, by contrast, could apply oil paints but not distemper. The reason for this is slightly uncertain, but it is probably attached to the fact that window frames were often made of lead—a material in which both plumbers and glaziers specialized.
Distemper was made from a mixture of chalk and glue. It had a softer, thinner sheen that was ideal for plastered surfaces. By the mid-eighteenth century, distempers normally covered walls and ceilings and heavier oil paints covered the woodwork. Oil paints were a more complex proposition. They consisted of a base (usually lead carbonate, or “white lead”), a pigment for color, a binder such as linseed oil to make it stick, and thickening agents like wax or soap, which is slightly surprising because eighteenth-century