At Home - Bill Bryson [171]
Linseed oil was the magical ingredient in paint, because it hardened into a tough film—essentially made paint paint. Linseed oil is squeezed from the seeds of flax, the plant from which linen comes (which is why flaxseeds are also called linseeds). Its one dramatic downside was that it is extremely combustible—a pot of linseed oil could in the right conditions burst into flame spontaneously—and so almost certainly was the source of many devastating house fires. It had to be used with special caution in the presence of open flames.
The most elementary finish of all was limewash, or whitewash, which was generally applied to more basic areas, like service rooms and servants’ quarters. Whitewash was just a simple mix of quicklime and water (sometimes mixed with tallow to enhance adhesion); it didn’t last long, but it did have the practical benefit of acting as a disinfectant. Despite the name whitewash, it was often tinted (if rather feebly) with coloring agents.
Painting was especially skillful because painters ground their own pigments and mixed their own paints—in other words created their own colors—and generally did so in great secrecy in order to maintain a commercial advantage over their rivals. (Add resins to linseed oil instead of pigment, and you get varnish. Painters made their varnishes in great secrecy, too.) Paint had to be mixed in small portions and used at once, so painters had to be able to make matching batches from day to day. They also had to apply several coats, since even the best paints had little opacity. Covering a wall usually took at least five coats, so painting was a big, disruptive, and fairly technical undertaking.
Pigments varied in price significantly. Duller colors, like off-white and stone, could be had for four or five pence a pound. Blues and yellows were two to three times as expensive, and so tended to be used only by the middle classes and above. Smalt, a shade of blue made with ground glass (which gave a glittery effect), and azurite, made from a semiprecious stone, were dearer still. The most expensive of all was verdigris, which was made by hanging copper strips over a vat of horse dung and vinegar and then scraping off the oxidized copper that resulted. It is the same process that turns copper domes and statues green—just quicker and more commercial—and it made “the delicatest Grass-green in the world,” as one eighteenth-century admirer enthused. A room painted in verdigris always produced an appreciative “ah” in visitors.
When paints became popular, people wanted them to be as vivid as they could possibly be made. The restrained colors that we associate with the Georgian period in Britain, or the colonial period in America, are a consequence of fading, not decorative restraint. In 1979, when Mount Vernon began a program of repainting the interiors in faithful colors, “people came and just yelled at us,” Dennis Pogue, the curator, told me with a grin. “They told us we were making Mount Vernon garish. They were right—we were. But that’s just because that’s the way it was. It was hard for a lot of people to accept that what we were doing was faithful restoration.
“Even now paint charts for colonial-style paints virtually always show the colors from the period as muted. In fact, colors were actually nearly always quite deep and sometimes even startling. The richer a color you could get, the more you tended to be admired. For one thing, rich colors generally denoted expense, since you needed a lot of pigment to make them. Also, you need to remember that often these colors were seen by candlelight, so they needed to be more forceful to have any kind