Green has one of the most eventful pigment histories of any colour family — a genuinely stable, vivid green pigment was elusive for centuries, and one of the solutions that finally worked turned out to be poisonous.
No single HEX value defines this entire colour family — see individual colour profiles below for specific shades.
A genuinely stable, vivid green pigment was historically difficult to produce, which is why green was comparatively rare and expensive in painting for long periods before the 18th and 19th centuries.
before the 18th and 19th centuries
Scheele's Green and Paris Green, 18th- and 19th-century arsenic-based pigments, finally offered a vivid, stable green — but were later found responsible for documented cases of arsenic poisoning through wallpaper, clothing and paint.
18th–19th century
Green has long been associated with growth, nature and, in Western tradition, with Ireland and Irish identity specifically — distinct, region-specific associations rather than one universal meaning.
Irish
Modern 'green' branding for environmental and sustainability messaging is a 20th-century development, building on the colour's long-standing association with nature and growth.
20th century onward
For most of the history of painting there were only three kinds of green to hand, and each had a limitation. Green earth, prepared from the minerals glauconite or celadonite, has been used continuously since antiquity. Malachite, a basic copper carbonate, was used in ancient Egypt but seldom in European oil painting despite being plentiful. Verdigris, a family of copper acetates, was the most intense green of the Renaissance, but it reacts with the oils and resins it is bound in. A fourth option was to mix blue with yellow. Dependable, saturated greens arrived only when chromium chemistry did, in the 19th century, and verdigris then fell out of use. 1, 2, 3
| Name | Kind | Period | What is known | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Green earth | Pigment | antiquity to the present | A natural silicate earth. Among the pigments identified in the Wilton Diptych of the 1390s. | 1, 4 |
| Malachite | Pigment | ancient Egypt onward | Found with a little verdigris in the landscape of Tintoretto's St George and the Dragon, about 1555. | 2 |
| Verdigris | Pigment | from early times; displaced in the 19th century | Bosch built a green robe from a base of verdigris and lead-tin yellow under a verdigris glaze, about 1490–1500. | 3 |
| Emerald green | Pigment | 19th century | Copper acetoarsenite: vivid, poisonous, and prone to darken beside sulfur-containing pigments. Later displaced by viridian. | 5 |
| Viridian | Pigment | from about 1838 | A chromium oxide green. Renoir mixed it with chrome yellow and lead white for the rushes in La Yole. | 6 |
| When | Where | What happened | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| About 1505 | — | Raphael painted the green drapery of a seated figure in Saint John the Baptist Preaching in verdigris. | 3 |
| 1512 | — | For the green drapery in the upper part of the Sistine Madonna, Raphael combined malachite with orpiment, lead white and charcoal black. | 2 |
| About 1838 | Paris | Pannetier first prepared viridian; Guignet patented a process for it in 1859. | 6 |
| 1848 | Ireland | Green took one of the three bands of the new tricolour, standing for one of the two traditions the flag set out to reconcile. | 7 |
| 1971 | Vancouver, Canada | A group planning to sail against a nuclear test coined its name when one member answered a parting 'Peace' with 'Make it a green peace'; the boat left on 15 September. | 8 |
Claim: Green has always stood for nature and the environment.
Evidence: Half right. The link with plants is as old as the English word, which comes from a root meaning 'grow' and first meant the colour of living vegetation. The political meaning is recent and datable: the pun that named Greenpeace was made in 1971. In between, green was also taken up for causes that have nothing to do with ecology, such as Irish nationalism. 9, 8, 7