Naples yellow
A soft, opaque, slightly pinkish pale yellow — the colour of stone and sunlight rather than of a lemon. Naples yellow is the yellow that replaced lead-tin yellow, and it built the warm atmospheric skies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Origin
A lead antimonate, and one of the oldest synthetic pigments in existence: it appears in Egyptian and Mesopotamian glass and glaze from the second millennium BCE, long before it was used as a paint. Its association with Naples comes from the volcanic antimony deposits around Vesuvius and from Neapolitan ceramic production, and the pigment entered European easel painting around 1600, becoming general in the eighteenth century as lead-tin yellow fell out of use. The two changeovers are close enough in date that Naples yellow is usually described as its successor, though the mechanism of the substitution is not fully understood.
In art history
It appears in five eras here, concentrated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its natural home is landscape and architecture: it is the colour of sunlit masonry, of pale sky near the horizon, of sand and of the light itself in Mediterranean painting. Turner used it extensively in skies. It is also a standard flesh colour, since its slight warmth and opacity make it useful for the lighter planes of a face. Because it is pale, opaque and low in chroma, it does the work that a bright yellow cannot: it lightens without shouting.
In the studio
Opaque, moderately fast-drying in oil thanks to its lead content, and completely lightfast. Its historical caution is that it blackens on contact with iron — traditional advice was never to touch it with a steel palette knife, and to grind it with bone or horn tools instead. It is toxic from both lead and antimony. Its handling is soft and buttery, close to lead white, and it mixes well without the incompatibilities that plagued the sulphide yellows.
Afterlife
Genuine lead antimonate Naples yellow is still made in small quantities for conservation and for painters who want it, but most tubes bearing the name today are mixtures — usually cadmium or an azo yellow with white and a touch of red or ochre — matched to the traditional hue. The imitations are non-toxic and reasonably convincing, though they lack the particular density of the lead version, and painters who care about the difference tend to be vocal about it.
Where it appears
Every era and artist in this atlas whose palette includes this pigment.