Colour and art: A brief history of pigments

Human beings have had an inherent urge to leave their mark in the form of works of art since prehistoric times. This has driven the quest for new and better pigments with which to make paints. This paper describes the origins and composition of earliest earth pigments used by primitive man to decorate the walls of caves through to the synthetic pigments developed in more recent times. Despite modern technology, the artist's palette remains a mixture of the pigments used by cave artists, natural pigments used in the middle ages, and modern organic compounds.