Lamp black
Soot, collected from a flame. Lamp black is the simplest pigment there is — pure carbon, made by burning something badly on purpose — and it is the black of cave painting, Chinese ink, printing and seventeen separate eras of this atlas.
Origin
The method has not changed in thousands of years: burn an oil, a resin or a wood in a restricted supply of air so it smokes, and collect the soot on a cold surface above it. The fuel determines the character. Oil soot gives a fine, cool, slightly blue black; pine resin gives a browner one; the Chinese distinguished dozens of grades and prized the soot of tung oil and of specific pinewoods, binding it with animal glue and pressing it into the ink sticks that are still made and still graded by the same criteria. In Europe it was a by-product of oil lamps, collected in workshops as a matter of course, and it cost almost nothing.
In art history
Carbon black is the oldest black in art — the charcoal drawings of Chauvet are around 30,000 years old — and it never went away. It is the black of Greek vase painting, of Roman wall decoration, of every printing ink from Gutenberg to the present, and of the entire tradition of East Asian brush painting, where the graded dilution of a single carbon ink substitutes for the whole of colour. In European oil painting it is the standard cool black, and its slight blue bias makes it the correct choice for a grey mixed with white, which is why so much painted architecture, armour and cloudy sky is lamp black and lead white and nothing else. Velázquez, Hals and Manet all built major passages from exactly that pair.
In the studio
Carbon is chemically inert and utterly permanent — it will outlast every other pigment in the picture and every binder around it. It is intensely staining and very fine, so it disperses into a mixture completely and a little goes a long way. Two difficulties follow from its physical structure. It is extremely slow-drying in oil, among the slowest of all pigments, so a heavy black passage may stay soft for a very long time and should not be overpainted early. And its particles are so fine and so oil-absorbent that the paint can be difficult to handle, tending to a greasy, sliding consistency. In water-based media and in ink it is faultless.
Afterlife
Industrial carbon black, made by burning natural gas or oil feedstock, is produced in millions of tonnes a year — mostly for rubber tyres, which is what makes tyres black — and artists' lamp black now comes from the same industrial stream. It remains one of the cheapest pigments available. The traditional grades survive in East Asian ink-making, where the fuel and the collection method are still specified and still make an audible difference to calligraphers.
Where it appears
Every era and artist in this atlas whose palette includes this pigment.