Several historically important, visually striking pigments — lead white, vermilion/cinnabar and arsenic-based greens among the best documented — carried real health hazards that were not fully understood or acted on for a long time, offering a genuine cautionary counterpoint to any romanticised view of historical colour.
Lead white, the dominant white pigment in Western painting for over two thousand years, is made from a metal now well documented as a serious neurotoxin; historical exposure among painters and pigment workers is well documented in the medical literature.
Notable use · Western painting tradition · antiquity to the 20th century
Scheele's Green and Paris Green, 18th- and 19th-century arsenic-based green pigments, were later linked to widely documented 19th-century cases of illness and death connected to wallpaper, clothing dye and paint made with these pigments.
Notable use · 18th–19th century
Vermilion, made from the mercury-bearing mineral cinnabar, was prized in antiquity and later periods for its vivid red despite the mercury content, which was handled with far less protective care than modern safety standards require.
Notable use · Mediterranean and East Asia · antiquity onward
Before modern organic chemistry, the strongest opaque yellows, oranges and greens mostly came from compounds of arsenic, lead, chromium and cadmium, because those compounds absorb light intensely and cover well. Orpiment is yellow arsenic sulfide and realgar is orange arsenic sulfide. Naples yellow is lead antimonate, chrome yellow is lead chromate and chrome orange a basic lead chromate. The hazard was not an unlucky side effect of a few bad choices: it came from the same chemistry that produced the colour, which is why several of the brilliant new pigments of the 18th and 19th centuries were also new poisons. 1, 2, 3, 4
| When | Where | What happened | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| Antiquity to about the 19th century | — | Orpiment was in use as a yellow throughout; realgar, its orange relative, has been found in Roman artefacts and appears only rarely in later oil painting. | 1, 2 |
| Antiquity to about 1850 | — | Naples yellow, a lead antimonate, remained in use until roughly the middle of the 19th century. | 3 |
| 1797 | — | The French chemist Louis Vauquelin discovered the element chromium, and lead chromate was recognised as a possible pigment shortly afterwards; chrome yellow has been used since the first quarter of the 19th century. | 5 |
| About 1840 to the present | — | Cadmium pigments came into use and have stayed in use. | 6 |
| 1978 | United States | The federal government banned the sale of lead-based paint for use in homes and childcare facilities. | 7 |
| 2025 | — | A synchrotron study of emerald green in an oil painting by Ensor showed two separate routes of decay, one driven by light and one by very high humidity. | 8 |
Historical claims above are scoped to a specific period, region or culture where relevant — none are presented as a single universal fact. See methodology.