Synthetic colorant
[2] Synthetics are extremely attractive for industrial and aesthetic purposes as they have they often achieve higher intensity and color fastness than comparable natural pigments and dyes used since ancient times.
Market viable large scale production of dyes occurred nearly simultaneously in the early major producing countries Britain (1857), France (1858), Germany (1858), and Switzerland (1859), and expansion of associated chemical industries followed.
This stems from the invention of industrial research and development laboratories in the 1870s, and the new awareness of empirical chemical formulas as targets for synthesis by academic chemists.
[5] The important substrates of pre-industrial societies were generally naturally occurring (cotton, silk, wool, leather, paper) and therefore share similarities, since they are primarily saccharide or peptide polymers.
In addition to being multi-varied and extraordinarily intense, these new dyes were notoriously unstable, rapidly fading and turning when exposed to sunlight, washing, and other chemical or physical agents.
[7] In ancient times, through the Industrial Revolution, various inorganic pigments like Egyptian Blue were synthesized, many with toxic chemicals like arsenic and antimony.
[5] Blue, particularly ultramarine pigment made from ground lapis lazuli remained significant for depictions of the divine through the Renaissance.
Pre-industrial revolution painters in Europe used ultramarine almost exclusively for the robes of Mary because of the pigment's great expense, until the work of Jean-Baptiste Guimet and Christian Gmelin made it commercially available in larger, cheaper quantities.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the first products of the fledgling color industry were Prussian blue and Naples yellow.
Other inorganic pigments developed in the nineteenth century were cobalt blue, Scheele's green, and chrome yellow.
[15] In 1856, 18 year old William Perkin accidentally discovered a dye he called mauve while trying to make quinine from the oxidation of allyl toluene in his home lab for his academic advisor and boss August Wilhelm von Hoffman.
[17] In 1858 the German chemist Johann Peter Griess obtained a yellow dye by reacting nitrous acid with aniline.
Further work by Hoffman[18] along with the discovery of benzene’s structure (1858) and carbon’s tetravalency(1865), this science built the groundwork for modern organic chemistry.
[19] In the late 1860s many companies began offering a full spectrum of colors, and were already outcompeting many natural dyes for market share.
[3] Members of enlightened scientific societies from all over Europe competed for expertise and authority with dyers and printers in factories and workshops.
[3] Other chemical components of natural madder were identified and applied by the mid-nineteenth century, including purpurin, which produced a delicate lilac colour, and green alizarin, which was patented in Britain and famously displayed at the 1867 Paris International Exhibition.
The new azo dyes were easy to make and assumed a vast variety of incredibly intense colors based on the chosen precursors.
[3] Paul Schützenberger, in response to what he had seen at the 1878 Universal Exposition commented, "The abundance, the variety of combinations is such that we do not know whether to be more amazed by their multiplicity or by the imagination required to name them.
High purity titanium dioxide and zinc oxide were produced for the first time on an industrial scale and introduced synthetic white pigments.
Chemist Rene Bohn developed a brilliant blue vat dye, indanthrone, with excellent color fastness in 1901.
BASF(Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik), the largest manufacturer of vat dyes, sold it as Indanthren Blue RS, along with the synthetic indigo they placed on the market in 1897.
[19] Allegedly James Morton, a leader in England's textile industry, was out walking when he saw some tapestries he produced using aniline dyes had already faded, despite only recently being put on display.
[17] Synthetic dyes were now produced in Britain, Germany, France, the US, Switzerland, Russia, the Austrian Empire, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy.
[3] The scale of the chemical plants also grew, for instance the Bayer company in 1907 had a reactor to make azo dye with a capacity of 20,000 liters.
Critical reviews of Impressionists’ blues made comparisons to laundresses’ tubs, in particular the practice of laundry bluing, and to chemical waste dumped into the Seine by dye factories.
[8] One critic accused Edgar Degas, known for experiments in aquatint, pastel and oil painting as having an obsession with "chemistry," evoking a laboratory in description of his studio.
Interestingly, Degas was known to be in correspondence with chemist Marcellin Berthelot, considered the father of organic synthetic chemistry in France.
With a history dating back to the early eighteenth century, Prussian blue remains a popular artistic pigment.
It is an antidote for heavy metal poisoning, and is famed for being used to color the uniforms of the Prussian army in the eighteenth century.
A given pigment or dye molecule absorbs different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation according to its atomic structure and local chemical environment.
